What is your 18-year-old kid doing?

I find network security quite interesting. When big things happen, when Sasser, Netsky or Blaster and the likes are on the loose, I usually read up on them, try to follow their progress and I laugh at everyone who gets infected. I’ve yet to be infected by any of this, except for the one time I was dumb enough to let a fresh install of Windows XP stay connected to the Internet for a whole hour without the latest security updates. That resulted in a rather nasty W32/Nachi.A infection.

Now it seems like the surge of worms exploiting various Windows security flaws might stop for a while: According to various reports the guy responsible for both Sasser and Netsky has been arrested in Germany. It turns out some 18-year-old with a little too much time on his hand and intelligence in his brain (if you can put it that way) has made both of them on his home computer. And now he is facing five years or more in prison. I’ll say. This would not have been a problem in the first place if people could just update their Windows copies! Read all about it over at Slashdot. I bet his parents regret they didn’t allow him to download pr0n. That would’ve kept his mind off coding worms.

Since I’m already in the nerdy corner and I’ve probably lost half of you already, I’ll continue in the same lane.

I’m considering adding Atom support to the site. The RSS feed is rather popular - might just be search engine bots and crawlers indexing it, but in my book a hit is a hit. The Atom specification is still just a draft, so I think I’ll wait until it’s more mature. It’s an integration I’d like to do only once, not every time the draft changes.


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