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We returned to record on second episode on Sunday March 20, 2016.

Interesting News and Events

• Dominik came across an interesting story on ZDNet by Larry Seltzer title, “Is paying for antivirus a waste of money?” Larry is essentially proposing that since Microsoft’s Anti-Virus/Anti-Malware solution for Windows 10 is a big improvement over previous versions (credit AVTest), then perhaps you don’t need a commercial solution. In the closing paragraph he makes this statement:

It’s like a motorcycle helmet. Lots of people don’t wear them and never have a problem. Some people wear them and still get in fatal accidents. But it can make a big difference. If a real threat comes my way and the anti-malware stops it then it has definitely paid for itself.

• Dominik also came across a post from BigThink by Frank Jacobs entitled, “Tokelau, the World’s Online Superpower“. In surprising fashion the country/territory with the largest number of unique domain names isn’t any of the current super powers. Instead it’s a small New Zealand territory with a population of approximately 1,400 people. Yet the .tk domain has more than 31,311,498 registered domains.
• Several of new vulnerabilities were recently found in Palo Alto firewalls by Felix Wilhelm @ Troopers Conference in Heidelberg Germany.

Palo Alto patched a couple of bugs I reported to them: https://t.co/3k4e7ARfH6. The VPN buffer overflow is quite serious.

— Felix Wilhelm (@_fel1x) February 25, 2016

• Pwn2Own which was held last week at the CanSecWest security conference awarded some $460,000 to multiple teams for vulnerabilities discovered in Windows, Apple OS X, Adobe Flash, Apple Safari, Microsoft Edge and Google’s Chrome.

Roundtable Discussion

Dominik recently posted an article entitled, “FastDeployment vs Planing” discussing the pitfalls that can befall people that don’t take the time to properly plan and think out all the associated challenges and issues of making a change to a production system. Sometimes this isn’t necessarily the engineer’s fault, it’s the responsibility of the management team to provide the time and resources for that engineer to be successful in his or her’s endeavors.

We also briefly touched on automation, and I recalled a post from Lindsay Hill titled, “Help! My Boss is Scared of Automation!!!“.  I would highly recommend you check out Lindsay’s post.

What tools are you using?

USB to Serial Adapters – Dominik has done one better using Airconsole by get console. Dominik posted his own thoughts about Airconsole back in January 2015. In short the Airconsole allows Bluetooth or WiFi connectivity to the serial port of your choice with good support and battery life.

I’ve run into all sorts of problems with Prolific chip based adapters, where the laptop would either blue screen or the serial port would just stop working until the laptop is physically restarted. I just recently purchased a number of FTDI chip based adapters and so far they seem to work much better in Windows 8 and Windows 10 – time will tell.

Cheers!