Host a Super Bowl Party Legally – @ Church even on the big screen
Is your church planning a Super Bowl Party this year?
If so, be sure that your church super bowl party is legal. The NFL, in recent years, has become very protective of its copyright over all things super bowl. Fortunately, The Church Law Group has put together 3 rules for church super bowl parties (video).
3 Rules for 2010 Church Super Bowl Parties
- The game must be shown on equipment that the church regularly uses over the course of ministry. So if the church already owns a big screen and sound equipment, then the game can be shown using this equipment.
- Church can not charge admission for the party. The NFL has stated, however, that church may take up a donation to defray the cost of the event if they desire.
- To avoid any copyright infringements, churches may want to call their event a “Big Game Party” rather than a “Super Bowl Party.”
Enjoy the Super Bowl Big Game!
Power to the USB
Rarely does something come along so simple that it absolutely will make your life easier nowadays…
This perhaps might be the best $20 spent to make life easier for so many techies…
Now just to figure out how many I should get… 1 for the bedroom, for the office x2 , kitchen…
DataCenter at Home.. Yes via @Ikea
First displayed at the eth0 Winter 2010 computer conference last weekend in Wieringerwerf, the Netherlands, the ETH0 Group shows their new DataCenter Rack Solution utilizing nothing more than a simple end table from Ikea.
Pretty cool – but imho JUST DONT USE IT FOR PLACING YOUR DRINKS
Ubiquity in the Morning
Today I, along with Larry Schriver of Country Connections, owner of our WiFI Backhaul provider met with a large number of folks from the Ubiquity Networks Community at their event in Las Vegas.
Ubiquity introduced their “wifiManager” – still in Alpha stage, however when it comes primetime – it will change the wireless landscape for offices, churches, campus’ and other locations (indoor) forever.
Had the chance to spend a few minutes with the owner of Great American Broadband, Rick Harnish who I found also operates an organization called WISPA.
More to follow: . . .
US Military Weapos Inscribed with Scripture
Coded references to New Testament Bible passages about Jesus Christ are inscribed on high-powered rifle sights provided to the United States military by a Michigan company, an ABC News investigation has found.
The sights are used by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the training of Iraqi and Afghan soldiers. The maker of the sights, Trijicon, has a $660 million multi-year contract to provide up to 800,000 sights to the Marine Corps, and additional contracts to provide sights to the U.S. Army.
U.S. military rules specifically prohibit the proselytizing of any religion in Iraq or Afghanistan and were drawn up in order to prevent criticism that the U.S. was embarked on a religious “Crusade” in its war against al Qaeda and Iraqi insurgents.
One of the citations on the gun sights, 2COR4:6, is an apparent reference to Second Corinthians 4:6 of the New Testament, which reads:
“For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”
Other references include citations from the books of Revelation, Matthew and John dealing with Jesus as
“the light of the world.”
John 8:12, referred to on the gun sights as JN8:12, reads,
“Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”
Trijicon confirmed to ABCNews.com that it adds the biblical codes to the sights sold to the U.S. military. Tom Munson, director of sales and marketing for Trijicon, which is based in Wixom, Michigan, said the inscriptions “have always been there” and said there was nothing wrong or illegal with adding them.
google.cn maybe no more… Baidu to the crash i mean rescue
Google released the following on their blog…
These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.
Google is synonymous with Internet search in much of the world however they have been struggling for recognition in China. This is a huge step for the Google company as a whole, who was the brunt of many different attacks from various folks on the web for running a filtered engine for China. The same day they publically admit they are thinking of leaving the chinese market place ‘Iranian’ hackers paralyze the Chinese search engine Baidu thus showing China that they need more than one big player in the marketplace. Baidu is by far China’s most-used search engine and is responsible for more than half of China’s Internet search market
One thing is for sure – Google will take a hit moving out of the market place – just like they did moving into it.
In retrospect the hack was a very simple one, just a hijack of the dns control from Register.com – have you changed your login and password for your domain registrar lately? This is after all the same hack method used to take Twitter offline just one month ago.
How to Kill A Community
With all of the fantastic platforms popping up to increase communication with your community – including what might just be the next thing to transform the Church called ShadeTree (http://getshadetree.com/) it is important that we first understand what will Kill an online community fast. While many folks are offering solutions on how to grow your community from 100-500% … what they are not teaching is the simple rules to keep folks engaged.
So if you want to kill your online community – just follow these simple tasks to the letter.
- Don’t Moderate. If you consider everything that someone says to be sacred and worth something – then good speech has lessened worth. People hate hearing arguments online – (believe me I have been party to just a few – even instigated some…). Allowing folks to show their ignorance, stupidity, hatred, lack of a controlled tongue, etc… only will cause those who want to follow a good source of information to run quickly away from your community… But it’s okay the advertisers will continue to visit and post…
- Allow Spam Through. I love reading all the notes about a Bridge in Brooklyn I can buy, the church or ministry that does not really exist but needs my hard earned money, etc… By allowing these guys -even if they are well written spam, to sit and spend time on your site – anything you do want to have traction will not… What you are selling or offering has no value in the miry of spam … AND other spammers will take note and begin to target your site as well- after all they are happy to have a new community to go and bug – even if it’s dying.
- Force Signup. There are a ton of useful services like Gravatar, OpenID and others.. While its okay to moderate – one should never have to create an account, upload a picture, create a username, etc. After all, People love belonging… and your club is better than the rest … RIGHT?
- Random Junk from Around the Web. Go around and make sure you pounce your URL all over another persons blog, their dig posts, Delicious links -and of course – Let us not forget the holy grail of the web… SlashDot. After all it will get you more traffic…
- Design Like a highschool girls bedroom . BUTTONS BUTTONS BUTTONS, STICKERS STICKERS and… you guessed it – MORE STICKERS. Make sure you offer every single possible login system such as twitter, openID, google friend, AOL, yahoo, Facebook, and… of course MySPACE – because we all know your space is the new MySpace. eople love visiting a site where they can’t navigate … . It needs plenty of Buttons. People love options after all.
1024 is safe for now … but 768-bit RSA: Owned
Double check your SSL Certs… at minimum they should be 1024 – or even better 2048…
With the increasing computing power available to even casual users, the security-conscious have had to move on to increasingly robust encryption, lest they find their information vulnerable to brute-force attacks. The latest milestone to fall is 768-bit RSA; in a paper posted on a cryptography preprint server, academic researchers have now announced that they factored one of these keys in early December.
Most modern cryptography relies on single large numbers that are the product of two primes. If you know the numbers, it’s relatively easy to encrypt and decrypt data; if you don’t, finding the numbers by brute force is a big computational challenge. But this challenge gets easier every year as processor speed and efficiency increase, making “secure” a bit of a moving target. The paper describes how the process was done with commodity hardware, albeit lots of it.
Their first step involved sieving, or identifying appropriate integers; that took the equivalent of 1,500 years on one core of a 2.2GHz Opteron; the results occupied about 5TB. Those were then uniqued and processed into a matrix; because of all the previous work, actually using the matrix to factor the RSA value only took a cluster less than half a day. Although most people aren’t going to have access to these sorts of clusters, they represent a trivial amount of computing power for many organizations. As a result, the authors conclude, “The overall effort is sufficiently low that even for short-term protection of data of little value, 768-bit RSA moduli can no longer be recommended.” 1024-bit values should be good for a few years still.
Given that these developments are somewhat inevitable, even the authors sound a bit bored by their report. “There is nothing new to be reported for the square root step, except for the resulting factorization of RSA-768″ they write. “Nevertheless, and for the record, we present some of the details.” Still, they manage to have a little fun, in one place referencing a YouTube clip of a Tarantino film following their use of the term “bingo.”
via: http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2010/01/768-bit-rsa-cracked-1024-bit-safe-for-now.ars
doing your part to stop Denial of Service
Virtually every organization that operates a network connected to the Internet has the ability to serve as an unwitting participant in DoS (denial of Service) attacks. There are simple steps that can be taken to ensure that you are a good net citizen in fact just two will help a great deal.
- Implement Egress Filtering to Stop Spoofed IP Packets from Leaving Your Network
- Stop Your Network from Being Used as a Broadcast Amplification Site
Imagine if every datacenter, broadband and Network provider implemented the broad application of these two steps: The end result would be a significant reduction to the threat posed by DoS Attacks.
Ok – so now your convinced — but how do I implement this? - well I am glad you asked.
I. Implement Egress Filtering to Stop Spoofed IP Packets from Leaving Your Network
- Stop Spoofed IP Packets @ the Edge: The purpose to implement Egress Filtering to Stop Spoofed IP Packets from Leaving Your Network is so that you can prevent forged communications leaving your network. These are often used in DoS attacks. This is a simple process – just ensure that your routers and firewalls are configured to only forward packets if those packets have the correct Source IP address local to your network. These of course would be IP’s that are in your BGP and or ARIN (or ISP) assigned network. While it is important to do this throughout your network, the network edge connection(s) are essential to have this protection, if you are going to be a good net-citizen.
- : Deny Invalid Source IP Addresses: Imagine if all organizations only allowed the traffic leaving their network if it had a valid Source IP address that belonged to that network. While this is not a full-proof way of stopping DoS – it would make finding the organization responsible much easier. This is a simple process – just permit all valid IP addresses access to the Internet via your firewall, gateway and routers – and Deny all other source addresses including private and Reserved Source IP Addresses. Keep in mind if your using NAT you want to do this on your NAT device as well.
-
- 0.0.0.0/8 – Historical Broadcast
- 10.0.0.0/8 – RFC 1918 Private Network
- 127.0.0.0/8 – Loopback
- 169.254.0.0/16 – Link Local Networks
- 172.16.0.0/12 – RFC 1918 Private Network
- 192.0.2.0/24 – TEST-NET
- 192.168.0.0/16 – RFC 1918 Private Network
- 224.0.0.0/4 – Class D Multicast
- 240.0.0.0/5 – Class E Reserved
- 248.0.0.0/5 – Unallocated
- 255.255.255.255/32 – Broadcast
II. Stop Your Network from Being Used as a Broadcast Amplification Site
- Configuring all of your systems – (from your routers, servers, workstations, etc…) so that they do not receive or forward directed broadcast traffic will assist in making sure your network is not used as a broadcast application site. Craig Huegen has a number of papers written on this topic you may find them here.
- Test your network to determine if it is an amplification site. This is as easy as using the “ping” command to send an ICMP echo request packet to the Network Base IP address of your network(s) as well as the broadcast IP address of your network(s). I suggest that you do this not only from your own network but from an independent 3rd party such as www.DNSStuff.com – Note the basic DNS Stuff is free.
- The HostMedic agency refuses to purchase hardware from any vendor that does not disable IP Directed Broadcast by Default as outlined in RFC 2644. In fact – we suggest using PFSense @ the Edge of your network if you are unsure of how to complete all of these tasks. PFSense is FREE and offers low cost support as well as FREE Community based support.
