Interrupt-Driven

Whooohaa! Contrary to my normal habits i’ve actually managed to finish one of my hobby projects.

I’ve participated on this month honeynet challenge. The goal of honeynet.org is to study “the tools, tactics, and motives of the blackhat community”. The task of challenge 31 was to analyse the log file of a web server which was configured as an “open proxy”. Such “open proxies” are often misused to obscure all kinds of mischief.

My analysis shows that the proxy was used amongst other things for:

• brute force password guessing
• scanning for vulnerable CGIs
• sending spam
• defrauding so-called advertisment networks
• tunneling SSL/TLS connections

I’ll post the full analysis as soon as the results are out. Let’s see if i can make it to the top20 (everything else isn’t ranked).

Recently i’ve had to create some slides for a presentation. Not being a WYSIWYG guy i use latex not only for documents but also to create my slides. Earlier i’ve used the seminar package for this task. Seminar is quiet usable but the resulting slides aren’t very glamous (which ofcourse can be blamed on my scant latex skills).

While searching for some fancy templates for use with seminar i’ve stumbled upon another interresting latex package. It’s called prosper. It builds on seminar and pstricks to make it real easy to generate good
looking slides. And best of all it also has a whole bunch of templates out of the box.

A tutorial on prosper can be found here.

After some musing i finally found a suitable name for my web log — Interrupt-Driven. This was the title of an
article published in 1994 by the wired magazin. It describes the phenomenon that a rising number of adults has something called “Attention Deficit Disorder”.

The author Evan I. Schwartz states:

Adult ADD is marked not only by a short attention span but also by a multitasking mind. Anxious to avoid boredom, those afflicted are constantly scanning their environment, searching for all things captivating. They may read lots of books, but they finish few. They misplace things and require constant reminders. They are risk takers, thrill seekers, and, often, caffeine addicts. They are news junkies and channel-clicker/cable-surfers. In conversation, they often detour into parenthetical tangents, never returning to the main point. On the Net, they can’t help getting lost in cyberspace for hours. Back on planet Earth, they interrupt people. They can’t stand waiting in lines. They juggle too many projects and are chronically late.

But when something grabs their full attention, they can launch into hyperfocus marathons that last well into the night. It’s not so much that they lack the ability to pay attention. It’s more that they cannot control what they pay attention to and how long their attention lasts.

I don’t really think i’m suffering from ADD, but i realized that some aspects do apply (my mozilla has over twenty tabs open, i’m working on three hobby projects simultaniusly, i’m reading three books, …). Or is this just the common side effect of an internet lifestyle?

What ever it is i think “Interrupt-Driven” is a fitting name for my personal weblog. So i hereby baptize it “Interrupt-Driven”.