The DMZ

12:00 AM

What - I go away to drink some wine and watch a couple of episodes of Atlantic Boardwalk and everyone's over here in chat....

Jeez

And all the active questions are about hardening - is it Viagra night?

packs

12:16 AM

I wouldn't know, the ole ladie's putting the little one to bed.

Iszi

Howdy again

packs

12:37 AM

G'day

Feeds

10:33 AM

Stack Overflow Blog: Welcome Our New Trilogy Moderators for 2011!

Posted by Jeff Atwood on February 4th, 2011

The trilogy elections are now complete. I hereby declare the new election process — at least judged by the quality of the final candidates and the eventual winners — a resounding success!

Welcome to all our newly elected community moderators, who will surely be sleeping with freshly printed out copies of A Theory of Moderation under their pillows tonight. Thank you for so generously contributing your time to make your community safer, saner, and more organized!

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required) …

Iszi

11:48 AM

<self-promotion shameless=yes>

Now that the first-time password question has been reformed much more clearly, I think I've made a post that should cover all the bases.

0

A: How can I ensure that default passwords are no longer in use?

A new user is registered. In her registration pack, along with her new username, e-mail address and so on is her initial password. A couple things need to be taken into consideration here. Firstly, how are the username and password transferred to the user? Is it passed along on hardcopy, o...

</self-promotion>

Much thanks to @GrahamLee for the edit. Great job, there!

Iszi

6:19 PM

Quiet in here today.

Rory Alsop

6:43 PM

@Iszi - you now have some more privs :-)

crickets

badgers

No! Bad Rory!

:-) Evening

Or morning

packs

Afternoon

We're all UTC-5 around here

Rory Alsop

6:47 PM

When I'm over in the US at the end of next week I'll be UTC-8 I think, which will confuse me even more

packs

I never can remember if they're -8 or -9

Iszi

@RoryAlsop Thanks :-)

Rory Alsop

@Iszi - well it was a worthy answer

packs

You're handing out privs now?

Rory Alsop

it wasn't a quick 10 rep out of the goodness of my cold black heart :-)

@packs - I was the one

took Iszi from 490 to 500

get me and my magnanimous ways

packs

6:52 PM

/me needs to get some more stuff out there

Rory Alsop

you're just behind Iszi - the challenge is on :-)

packs

giggity

Iszi

@RoryAlsop Guess it would be cruel to mention that I've only been on this site half as long?

Rory Alsop

I'm staying out of this :-)

packs

I notice your question to answer ratio is rather abusive :)

Iszi

7:04 PM

@packs Eh?

Rory Alsop

13 q to 6 a

as opposed to @packs at 3 q to 9 a

packs

He has 6 answers now?

damnit

Iszi

Wouldn't call that abusive. Just means I've got more to learn than I have to teach, at this stage in my career.

Rory Alsop

hahaha - went to look at mine: 2q to 113a

I talk too much

packs

+1 for recommending CIS btw

Rory Alsop

7:05 PM

and obviously don't listen

Iszi

@RoryAlsop Know-it-all, is more like. ;-)

packs

@RoryAlsop yeah, I'm 2:111 over at SF right now

Iszi

@packs Thanks.

packs

I've tended to falling back on recommending CIS benchmarks for most projects like that

The NSA docs are nice, but tend towards being really long, whereas most admins I deal with just want to know what to do and are less interested in the why.

Plus, Nessus can audit against a lot of the CIS benchmarks. :)

Rory Alsop

@packs - totally agree

admins want to get it fixed as fast as possible with least hassle

Iszi

7:07 PM

@packs Didn't know NSA put docs out publicly for that kind of stuff.

Rory Alsop

not have to interpret or read a tome

packs

@RoryAlsop Hell..*I* don't want to do that

Most of the recommendations within the CIS docs I understand the reasons already.

@Iszi Very verbose docs

Let me find those...

nsa.gov/ia/guidance/security_configuration_guides/…

Great resource, just big

Iszi

@packs Knowing what without why is ignorance. However, I do agree that it is nice to have a document that makes it easier to get down to the "what" when that's all you need for the moment, or when you already understand the "why".

packs

By and large, admins don't really need to know the why, although it helps.

I mean, that's why we're here, right?

Iszi

@packs A bit. But ignorant admins frustrate me.

"Oh, we put them in the Administrators group because they need Remote Desktop..." umm... really?

packs

7:22 PM

If they're ignorant about their job? Then yes! Although, I would always prefer a "I don't know, but will find out." answer over something made up any day

@Iszi Yeah, that's just a poor understanding of the system.

Iszi

@packs To their credit, the system was missing the builtin "Remote Desktop Users" group, in the appropriate User Rights Assignment for some reason. Still, it didn't seem like much effort was put in to resolving the issue.

packs

Even still, it demonstrates an underlying lack of understanding of the permissions subsystem.

How did they react when they were informed otherwise?

Iszi

@packs "Umm... we'll test it and see what happens."

packs

In other news, my office is slowly filling with a burning smell. Sweet.

Iszi

@packs Popcorn?

packs

7:34 PM

I think the heating unit in one of the adjoining suites burned up and I'm just getting some of the spill. In here it smells like burning dust, over there like melted plastic. Sucks to be them

Iszi

@packs Yeah, that sucks. How's the weather up there, anyway?

packs

7:50 PM

Sweet! They had a ballast burn out. Yummy.

It's a little better now than it had been last week. Bright and sunny, low 40s

I hear tonight we'll get about an inch of snow, then a snow/rain mixture tomorrow morning.

That will be awesome.

Iszi

And my wife complains about me insisting we stay in the south...

packs

It's not so bad. We get about 4 months worth of chilly. Your sun scares me.

Graham Lee

9:17 PM

@Iszi Just doin' my job, ma'am ;)

packs

9:27 PM

@GrahamLee Hm. I always assumed Iszi was male, though in retrospect all statements could be gender neutral. This should be interesting to see (his|her) reaction.

2

Iszi

@packs Funny. Real funny.

Graham Lee

I keeed

Iszi

I suppose these days "wife" is a gender-neutral term, in respect to identifying the speaker. I know I've mentioned the XYL once or twice here.

Hmm... interesting notation here in the Wikipedia definition of PII...

Personally identifiable information

Personally Identifiable Information (PII), as used in information security, refers to information that can be used to uniquely identify, contact, or locate a single person or can be used with other sources to uniquely identify a single individual. The abbreviation PII is widely accepted, but the phrase it abbreviates has four common variants based on personal, personally, identifiable, and identifying. Not all are equivalent, and for legal purposes the effective definitions vary depending on the jurisdiction and the purposes for which the term is being used. Although the concept of PII i...

Would be nice if OneBox could handle secure Wiki pages.

Anyway, the interesting bit is the "(if not common)" attached to "Full Name".

Does that mean that the name "John Smith" is not PII, but "Kiran Jayakumar" would be?

Graham Lee

Depends whether you like in the UK or India, I suppose

*live

probably not many John Smiths in India

Iszi

@GrahamLee True. Still, there's other names which are definitely unique on a global scale.

packs

9:43 PM

It's also going to depend a lot on where you are too.

Nevermind

I translated that into Sensitive, not Personally Identifiable

/me is ready to go home

Iszi

@packs A little late to the conversation? ;-)

@packs ...and it's FRIDAY!

packs

I was having an impromptu discussion with my cohort

Iszi

Hmmm... The article says that 87% of Americans could be uniquely identified by ZIP, gender, and full DoB. (Why is the "O" normally capitalized in that acronym?)

It makes me wonder if I indeed am the only person of my gender, within the local area, who was born on that day? I suppose that would be greatly influenced by the size of the ZIP Code area, and the population density.

packs

I imagine that would uniquely identify me.

However, this is a relatively low population area.

Iszi

@packs Yeah, definitely more likely to be unique there.

Graham Lee

9:52 PM

postcodes in the UK are shared by 11 houses. Very easy to uniquely identify someone even with given name and postcode.

Iszi

@GrahamLee Wow.

Of course, if we're going by "given name and postcode" that probably applies a lot more globally than the "gender/ZIP/birthdate" combo.

(Unless you're going by the "given name" = "first name" definition.)