Applied Trust has been producing The Barking Seal for our clients, supporters, and friends since 2003.
One of the greatest features of being consulting IT infrastructure engineers is that we have the opportunity to see, touch, and experience a wide variety of technologies and their successful (and sometimes, not so successful) application. We have the opportunity to solve problems that have never been solved before. And, every once in awhile, we make mistakes that provide good lessons. It's our hope that sharing some of these experiences will better our community as a whole. We hope you enjoy it!!
Dec 08, 2011
So you’ve been tasked with building a report or a module that requires the output to be in multiple formats: HTML, so the casual observer can view it, CSV for that hardcore number cruncher, and let’s pretend that we want a system monitor to monitor the data and that the monitor only reads JSON, so we will...
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Nov 29, 2011
If you've ever been to an AppliedTrust event you know that we REALLY enjoy our beer. In fact, we even have a few in-house homebrewers. As part of the MyATE program, last year a group of us beer enthusiasts decided we wanted an easier way to share some of those homebrews, as well as our favorite local microbrews, with...
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Nov 28, 2011
AppliedTrust is pleased to offer a free local viewing of the upcoming TedxWomen event! This event will be held on December 1, 2011, and continues the conversation that began last year at the first-ever TedWomen Conference. This year, we will hear from several outstanding speakers, including:
Barbara Walters...
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Nov 20, 2011
Often, it takes an incident for folks to wake up and realize that they're missing a few things in the security of their environment. This weekend started with a flurry of stories sparked by control systems security expert Joe Weiss' post about a water plant in Springfield, Illinois, being compromised by Russian...
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Nov 18, 2011
The PCI Council released the results of the PCI Special Interest Group initiatives vote for 2012 on Monday. This is the first year the Council has put the topics of the initiatives to a vote. PCI SSC members were able to vote on seven topics, with three selected to be initiatives in the coming year. The initiatives...
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Nov 15, 2011
While jumping into several sketchy Internet cafes during a recent trip abroad, I thought about the security issues involved with using such places. Here is my short list of what to do and what not do while using public kiosks, Internet cafes and wifi in coffee shops.
DOs:
Do assume that there are key loggers...
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Nov 08, 2011
In some cases, SSL certificates signed by a certificate authority that's part of an internally managed PKI make sense. These might be SSL certificates for your domain controllers to facilitate secure LDAP, or certificates for webservers that are only ever used internally. Those certificates have expiration dates just...
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Nov 05, 2011
Just like your house, every business and office has systems and moving parts that need a little TLC every now and then. As we say goodbye to the heat of summer, now is a great time to plan just a few hours to prepare your infrastructure for the year ahead with a scheduled Preventative Maintenance day.
AppliedTrust's...
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Nov 02, 2011
Today is the 20th anniversary for Vim, which is the improved and more feature-full version of the command line editor vi. In the Unix world there are two main editors -- vi and emacs. The debate over which is superior is considered one of the greatest "religious" wars in the history of computing, and to this day it...
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Sep 20, 2011
Image courtesy of marfis75 at Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
I visited a client to discuss SSL/TLS this week, as well as the many associated elements that make the whole system work; PKIs, cryptography and so on. Coincidentally, when I arrived home that same day I noticed an article over at The Register that suggested that...
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