Grey Panthers Savannah

Category: rant

  • What VirusTotal is not

    Since its inception VirusTotal has been used by people to compare different AV products (just in case you don’t know: VirusTotal is great free service which scans the uploaded file with 40 AV engines currently and reports back the results). The AV industry has objected to this practice because of a couple of reasons, some…

  • Why network neutrality is a big deal

    Reposted from the packetlife blog. We already pay for the bandwidth. The content providers already pay for the bandwidth. Anyone claiming anything different is either very misinformed or is straight out lying!

  • One more thing…

    So, if I started ranting on Microsoft, here is one more thing: you should never ever use Microsoft servers if you want to scale. The reasons is simple: currently the best scaling method is horizontal (ie. buy loads of cheap hardware and distribute the load between them). Using Microsoft server software would mean that for…

  • My opinion about Microsoft, software piracy and everything

    This post is a response to a blogpost on tudor g’s blog about software piracy issues in Romania, and as such it might not be of interest to you, dear international reader. If this is the case, feel free to skip this post. Disclaimer: arguments are very emotional things. As much as we would like…

  • ERR – Exponentially Expanding Rants

    I’m expanding! Not only am I ranting on my own soap box (blog), now you can read my rants on other blogs as well: fudsec just published my Knowing Walls from Speed Bumps rant. Thank you! If you are fed up with FUD in the security industry, check out the site and went away! Who…

  • The Myths of Innovation

    Some time ago I ranted about cognitive quantum leaps. Below is a presentation given at Google by Scott Berkun about the same topic. While the talk itself is two years old, the examples are still very relevant, and he presents it very eloquently. Enjoy!

  • The myth of the cognitive quantum jumps

    Update: see this presentation given by Scott Berkun at Google, which which explains my points much more eloquently. Very often media (and I’m using the word “media” here in its most comprehensive way – including things like blogs, Slashdot, etc) tells us the story of some uber-hyper-mega-cool new-unseen-until-now method of performing X. This leads many…

  • Creating a closed standard

    After reading on Graham Cluley’s blog that the IEEE came up with a new standard [PDF] for malware interchange, I had to check it out immediately. As always, being a cranky old man, I found several problems with the proposed standard: Even though the presentation has a section abou “Re-Inventing the Wheel”, it fails to…

  • Those who know, do it

    There is an old joke, which I might have referenced in the past (my memory is almost non-existing :-P), which goes something like this: Those who know how to do X, do it. Those who don’t, teach it. Those who can’t even teach it, supervise it. I assume that journalists come in somewhere in the…

  • Why can’t I see the stacktrace under Java?

    I recently had a situation where Log4j wasn’t outputting the stacktrace of the logged exceptions. While I’m not sure that the following is the actual explanation, it seems very plausible (since the program was running Java 5). Quote from the Java 5 release notes: The compiler in the server VM now provides correct stack backtraces…