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I’ve been using PowerBook G4 as my production laptop for about a month. There had been some odd moments but overall it’s been a wonderful experience and definitely there’s no looking back. I’m glad that I’ve switched. Now my laptop boots faster, everything looks more beautiful, I can do everything I’d been doing and I know for sure it’s much more secure.

One of the leading security firm Sophos has released a Security Report, where it finds Trojans have dominated the first half of 2006. This is what they had to say:

Most interestingly, new Trojans now outweigh viruses and worms by 4:1, compared to 2:1 in the first half of 2005. In addition, the continued dominance of Windows-based threats has prompted Sophos to suggest that many home users should consider switching to Apple Macs, to shield themselves from the malware onslaught.

BBC has a story about the same report and switch advice, Threat prompt Mac switch advice, which brought a lot of attention in slashdot and backslash. I totally agree with Sophos. Specially for the home users who don’t know much about the threats that Windows PCs are exposed to. Macs are sleek, they work out of the box, they can do everything a home user needs to do and most importantly they’re much more secure than Windows. So if you’re planning to buy a new computer, you should seriously consider buying a Mac. After all if you find that OS X really sucks, which I can guarantee will not. You can still install windows in intel Macs.

Basic journey of a packet is an excellent article for anyone who’s curious about how things actually work in the Internet, specially for new network and system admins. The author has done a very good job in explaining how a packet travels across the Internet. He provides a simple example of what happens when a user opens a browser (Firefox) to check his favorite web page. From packet creation on the your desktop to passing through switches, routers, and firewalls. Along the way he mentions about some complexities of Networking such transport protocols (TCP/UDP), Fragmentation, MTU, IP Layer, Physical Layer (MAC), NATs, TTL and so on.

A very interesting list of six most common, yet unfounded, causes of death that most Americans fear of. I think the list applies to Non-Americans as well.

Just the thought of dying of airplane crashes, shark attacks or being murdered makes us anxious but we tend to ignore the actual most common causes of death like tobacco, poor diet and physical inactivity or alcohol consumption.

I know too well what the Great Firewall of China does. It blocks web sites containing banned words like “Falun Gong” and resets connections with your email servers if your email message contains similar banned words. Once I’d captured TCP packets with Ethereal and found that TCP reset packets were injected to both the server and client, forcing them to drop the connection.

Computer experts from Cambridge research group have found exactly the same thing. The researchers also found that it was possible to circumvent the Chinese firewall by ignoring the forged TCP resets injected by Chinese Firewalls (Routers). Not only that, but it is also possible to launch denial-of-service attacks against specific IP addresses within China including those of Chinese Government itself.