The Linux Ninja

The Dutch  branch of Tele2 has apparently been assigning the same default password to all users according to SC Magazine.  From the article:

The Dutch branch of Tele2 claimed that when a new subscriber signs up, they can choose a login or are assigned one and they are then sent a letter by Tele2 with their login name, password and the date their new DSL connection will be activated.

As the password is changed monthly instead of being generated randomly, all subscribers that signed up in the same month will have the same password.

Writing on the securityandthe.net blog, author Martin claimed that the letter does not even mention the need to change this password anywhere, and with the correct login and password, you can, amongst others, view and change the customer’s contact details and view their billing history.

I wonder if they store the passwords in plaintext too? It’s extremely simple to write something to generate a random password and insert that in place of “password=’lame’” in the codebase so they really have no excuse for this. Even making the the change mandatory doesn’t fix the problem because  I would still be able to get into your account if you haven’t logged in yet. This is almost as bad as AT&T leaving just about every iPhone user’s voicemail unprotected by a password and not telling them or giving them an easy option on the phone itself to setup a password.

I was reminded that on this day in 1991 Linus posted his Usenet message announcing his creation of a new hobby OS that he had been working on and looking for feedback. I know that I would not be where I am today if it were not for Linux and all the wonderful software distributions that use its kernel.

So a big “Thank You!” goes out to Linus and a “Happy 18th Birthday!” to Linux.

Patrick Michaud posted a journal entry on his use Perl; page that says

We will make an “official”, intermediate, useful and usable release of Perl 6 (an appropriate subset) by Spring 2010.

in reference to the Rakudo implementation of Perl6 on Parrot. This is definitely exciting news for all Perl programmers out there. While this is only intended to be an intermediate release and the feature set is still being ironed out, I’m definitely excited by this milestone release of Perl 6. I first heard Larry Wall talk about Perl6 during his keynote at the USENIX LISA conference in 2002. I was fascinated by many of the new features and couldn’t wait to get my hands on it. Over the years the lack of usable Perl6 implementations being included by different distros has cooled my excitement. I messed around with a few of the different implementations (such as Pugs) and parrot here and there, but never took it too seriously because things were changing in them so quickly.

I still use Perl for alot of the scripts I write, but I have also begun implementing some of my scripts in Python and more recently even a few in Ruby (due to its easy extension of base classes, not due to the speed ). This is definitely exciting news and I hope to hear plans for integration by the major Linux distros soon so I can start taking advantage of all the awesome new features.

Further Perl6 Reading:

• Larry Wall’s Perl6 Apocalypses
• Perl 6 FAQ