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Websites Conducting Port Scans : Security researcher Charlie Belmer is reporting that commercial websites such as eBay are conducting port scans of their visitors. Looking at the list of ports they are scanning, they are looking for VNC services being run on the host, which is the same thing that was reported for bank sites. I marked out the ports and what they are known for (with a few blanks for ones I am unfamiliar with): 5900: VNC 5901: VNC port 2 5902: VNC port 3 5903: VNC port 4 5279: 3389: Windows remote desktop / RDP 5931: Ammy Admin remote desktop 5939: 5944: 5950: WinVNC 6039: X window system 6040: X window system 63333: TrippLite power alert UPS 7070: RealAudio No one seems to know why : I could not believe my eyes, but it was quickly reproduced by me (see below for my observation). I surfed around to several sites, and found one more that does this (the citibank site, see below for my observation) I further see, at least across ebay.com and citi...

Learn Chess Opening Principles : How should you start out a chess game? In this lesson and video series for beginners, NM Dane Mattson demonstrates the key principles that will help you get a good position early in each game! Not what you're looking for?  Go back to the video guide . Control The Center:  Put your pieces in the ideal position to control the most important part of the board—the center. Try to attack those squares, e4, d4, e5 and d5 early in the game. If you can control those squares, your opponent won't be able to find good squares for his or her pieces. Develop Your Pieces:  Take control of the game by developing your pieces rapidly to squares where they control the center. You want to develop your knights and bishops and castle quickly. Once you've done that, it's time to move the queen and connect the rooks. This is a great goal for the opening. Protect Your King: King safety is the most important positional factor in chess. Usually, the best way...

Comic for May 18, 2020 : Dilbert readers - Please visit Dilbert.com to read this feature. Due to changes with our feeds, we are now making this RSS feed a link to Dilbert.com.

Bluetooth Vulnerability: BIAS : This is new research on a Bluetooth vulnerability (called BIAS) that allows someone to impersonate a trusted device: Abstract: Bluetooth (BR/EDR) is a pervasive technology for wireless communication used by billions of devices. The Bluetooth standard includes a legacy authentication procedure and a secure authentication procedure, allowing devices to authenticate to each other using a long term key. Those procedures are used during pairing and secure connection establishment to prevent impersonation attacks. In this paper, we show that the Bluetooth specification contains vulnerabilities enabling to perform impersonation attacks during secure connection establishment. Such vulnerabilities include the lack of mandatory mutual authentication, overly permissive role switching, and an authentication procedure downgrade. We describe each vulnerability in detail, and we exploit them to design, implement, and evaluate master and slave impersonation attacks o...

I Just listened to this talk (see below), and I have actually found this to be true. On my own I figured this out a few years ago. My wife and I had slowly drifted apart. I am happy watching sports, going on hikes, being outdoors. She is happy watching TV. I read the book on love languages and figured that I had better change to try and get our marriage on the right track. It took some time for me to figure out that I was just as much of the problem as I had blamed her for. It was not easy, I spent time trying to work out what was her love language. I figured if I could speak her love language, then she would be filled with love and start speaking mine back to me. I was wrong. First off my wife is complicated and it took way to long for me to figure that out as well as her love language is a multiple of things and they change in priority at different times. Good grief. The most disheartening thing I learned was that one of her top love languages was gift giving (or receiving ...

2020 Google Trends : Image caption: As the 'exotic animals in homemade aprons hosting baking shows' YouTube craze reached its peak in March 2020, Andrew Cuomo announced he was replacing the Statue of Liberty with a bronze pangolin in a chef's hat.