security

Municipal Failure

~ randyaa ~ Leave a comment

A few weeks ago I took my Father to lunch at Donnelly’s. We had some great food and beer and shared a few laughs. When we got back out to the parking lot we discovered that someone had hit Rachel’s car and had done a decent amount of damage. Nothing left for us to identify the perpetrator but the scrapes and dents.

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A phone call to the police later and we had information on a good lead. Apparently the parking lot for Donnelly’s is monitored by a fancy new $25k security system at Fairport Electric. Sweet. Only problem is nobody working that day had access to the system (or more likely knew how to work it). Good thing is it’s all digital and its kept for an undetermined amount of time. The police officer takes our information and tells us he’ll call when he gets a copy of the video.

A few days ago we got the phone call. Wouldn’t you know it, that fancy new $25k security system? Well the one video camera trained on the parking lot was broken that day. Fantastic. (Edit: more than likely, the perp? a cop or other municipal worker and the camera was fine)

I just wish people took some responsibility for their actions.

Syncing with FolderShare (part 2)

~ randyaa ~ 1 Comment

It’s taken me over a month to write this.

It should be awesome then!

Nah sorry, just more of the same old crap.

In Syncing with Foldershare part 1 I outlined what I was using FolderShare for. I’ll now outline my reactions after using the service for a while.

FolderShare advertises three main features. Sync My Folders, Share With Friends, Access My Files.

FolderShare Features

Share With Friends – This feature is completely unnecessary. There are literally thousands of ways out there to share a file with your friends. Having a directory synchronized with your friends seems like overkill. As far as the collaborative nature of the feature, collaboration itself belongs on the web. As such there are many online tools such as Google Documents or gliffy provide much better mechanisms for collaborating with others.

Access My Files – This feature scares the crap out of me and if if there is one reason I stop using FolderShare this will be it. It allows you to access every file on any of your computers that is currently connected to FolderShare. This means if someone gains access to your FolderShare account they can access everything from the web.

Surely you mean only the files or directories you’ve told FolderShare to share?

Nope sorry, Everything. A big downside to FolderShare in my mind is the fact everything is configured from their website. You can add a new computer to ‘sync’ with and add sync points right from the website if you have access to the account.

Sync My Folders – This is the only feature I find useful and frankly the only feature I want FolderShare to provide. This allows you to pick (different) folders on two (or more) different computers and sync their contents over the web. They synchronization is recursive so if you have seperate partitions for data feel free to sync the entire partition.

Lessons Learned

FireFox profiles -Firefox keeps some files in your profile locked whenever it’s running. If you have the (synchronized) profile open on more than one computer you will start to get notices that FolderShare cannot copy a certain file. Your only options are ‘retry’ or ‘exit.’ If you choose retry it will obviously fail unless you close FireFox. Choosing to close firefox means you will need to wait several minutes before resuming your work. If you choose exit FolderShare itself exits and you lose your synchronization completely. This didn’t bother me to much I just got in the habit of making sure I closed FireFox on my laptop before attempting to use it on my PC.

After a few weeks however; my PC and Laptop started to get out of sync and at some point Firefox (or Windows I’m not sure which) decided it would be a good idea to reinitialize my entire profile and I lost everything on my laptop. At this time I determined the headaches FolderShare was giving me synchronizing Firefox profiles wasn’t going to work for me. I need a new solution so if someone has one please share. Note that I’m looking for a way to synchronize everything including plug-ins not just settings and history (what Google can currently offer)

iTunes Music Library – As I don’t use iTunes all that often on my home PC this feature is working excellently. However; it suffers the same problems as the Firefox profile synchronization in that the two PCs cannot both run iTunes at the same time.

Security – FolderShare uses your normal Microsoft login. This means that if your MSN account is compromised it instantly exposes all of your personal files on your home computer. This is very scary to me. To make me a bit more at ease FolderShare needs to add some local security features.

  • Only Files and Folders shared Locally (from the PC itself) should be exposed to FolderShare
  • To add a PC should require some sort of authentication from one of the PCs already part of the synchronization

Usefulness – FolderShare seems to be incredibly useful to synchronize data. That being said it seems fundamentally flawed for synchronizing application data that needs to be used very often. The fact that FolderShare synchronizes over the internet as opposed to network connectivity is awesome. This means that even if I’m on the go, when I make a change to a file I’m synchronizing it gets backed up at home.

Some Hope In Todays World

~ randyaa ~ Leave a comment

Hoover DamSomething reminded me today of a story from when Rachel and I were at the Grand Canyon. Well, actually this particular story is from the Hoover Dam.

The parking at the Dam sucks. If you want to visit you need to park along the east side of the canyon. I’m sure you’re aware that the Dam is pretty large and as such, getting to the entrance (which happens to be on the west side of the canyon) is quite a hike from the parking lot(s).

We’d been camping in Williams Arizona for roughly a week at this point. I’d been faithfully (like the good ol’ boyscout I am) carrying my knife the whole trip. This particular day was no exception. As we walked up to the entrance there was a sign that stated, among other things:

No Knifes Allowed

Well crap. As I shuffled my way back to the walkway to take my knife back to the car, one of the many vendors setup outside the entrance called me over. She darted her eyes around to check if anyone was looking and said:

Act cool, just hand me your knife. When you come out give me 5 bucks and it’s yours again.

Thoroughly puzzled (and entirely not cool) I said “you mean you can’t just hold it for me.” After some more quick glances around she told me that this is government property and they’ll fine you if they catch you with them. She could get fined simply for holding them if they find out. “Ok, $5 is worth saving the walk” and I handed it over.

It’s a good thing I did. There are metal detectors right inside the entrance and we would have been up a creek. A gentleman got pulled aside ahead of us and shown a knife he had placed in the bucket before going through the machine. I’m not sure what happened (they were still there talking with the security guards as we left the room) but I’m sure it wasn’t good.

I paid my 5 bucks when we got out and the government was non the wiser.

Originally I was writing this thinking about the helpful actions of the woman vender. After writing it though I also realize that I’m also thankful for the actions of the security guard and their no knife policies.