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ATMs and embedded machines

Thursday, April 15th, 2010

Bank of America recently discovered that one of its employees had planted malware on some ATMs and had stolen a little over $300,000. Two very obvious countermeasures come to mind – use embedded devices instead of COTS, and whitelisting. There is really no reason that arbitrary code should be run on an ATM, and therefore there’s no reason to allow it.

ping instead of nslookup

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009

Why is it that so many people use ping when they want to find out the IP address of a system? True ping does do an lookup on the name and display the results along with the ping results, but using nslookup (or host on a unix system) does the same thing with far less overhead.

 
Pi is exactly 3!