Security is Happiness

No seriously, I attended an Internet Security Systems demo/seminar this morning and they gave away t-shirts with big smiley faces and “Security is Happiness” printed under them. They’re pretty silly looking, I’ll try and webcam it tonight so you can see what I’m talking about. The seminar was decent, it’s always humorous when you setup a wireless access point to demonstrate how insecure they are and in the process of searching out the access point to do a demo hack, you find the access points for the hotel you’re holding the seminar in. “Um ignore those 2 access points, and pay attention to the one we setup for this. This is for educational pruposes only.” *L* They were using a program called Netstumbler to find insecure access points. It looks like a good security utility to find vulnerabilities in your own wireless network.

A bit more about StatcounteX. I had already thought about doing exactly what was suggested in the last post’s comments; keeping an empty copy of the database around and downloading the current database when it got too big and replacing it with the empty one. I’m not worried for now, the download site said it was getting to be a problem for them, but they get 4000 hits a day, my 100 or so isn’t any threat to get too big anytime soon. There is one thing that I like about the Bravenet counter though, it has one click access to resolve the last 50 IP addresses of visitors to their hostnames. I may keep the counter on here just for that ability. Other than that, the new stats work great, I get page hits, referrers, seperate internal and external referrer lists, OS, browser, and the ability to look at stats per day, week, month or year. I need to tweak the code to add the ability to determine Windows XP systems, it seems the code was finished before XP was out, but it shouldn’t be too hard to do. (again a benefit of Open Source, I can tweak it at will) It also doesn’t determine Opera browsers, but that’s no big deal. Since Opera gives users the ability to run in IE compatbile mode, I think, it would be hard to really tell if it was being used anyway. Besides, I’m not doing anything too intense on the site that would have some browser not be able to render it, which would be my reason for tracking it to begin with. (Or are there browsers that render it all fudged?)

One final cool thing about it, you can use any image as the counter. I could have used the MMOnline logo that appears on all the non-blog pages of this site, or I could have used an invisible image (height=0 width=0), so that there was no “advertising-like” image at the botom of the page. I might still do that, but for now I like it so much I wanted to give the project some exposure.

Follow these topics: Uncategorized