July 25, 2010

There were 4 posts published on July 25, 2010 (this is page 1 of 1).

How Skype gets around firewalls


Here’s a fascinating description of how the Skype VoIP application can poke holes through firewalls – bypassing your network security. What’s even more eye-opening is that there is little that can be done to block it.

Anyone who has used the popular Internet telephony software Skype knows that it works as smoothly behind a NAT firewall as it does if the PC is connected directly to the Internet. The reason for this is that the inventors of Skype and similar software have come up with a solution.

Naturally every firewall must also let packets through into the local network – after all the user wants to view websites, read e-mails, etc. The firewall must therefore forward the relevant data packets from outside, to the workstation computer on the LAN. However it only does so, when it is convinced that a packet represents the response to an outgoing data packet. A NAT router therefore keeps tables of which internal computer has communicated with which external computer and which ports the two have used.
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Alberto Contador has no class

Here’s a good writeup explaining why the Spaniard Alberto Contador might be the winner of this year’s Tour De France, but he will never be the champion.

Alberto Contador was being dropped again by Andy Schleck just as the mechanical happened. There is no doubt that Contador is strong and perhaps would have closed the gap to Schleck had the mechanical not happened, but to see the Spaniard rise out of the saddle and accelerate just as Schleck was experienceing his equipment malfunction was hard to watch . . . and it cheapens Contador’s lead in the race. Should the Spaniard win this year’s race by less than a minute, those who watched will remember that he is not truly the winner of the 2010 Tour.

Read the rest here.

Metal Method with Sledge

Back in the 1990s this show, “Metal Method with Sledge,” was the rage on Raleigh’s public access channel. Fortunately it lives on thanks to YouTube. Rock on!

The Libya Investment Firm and the release of the Lockerbie bomber

The Telegraph has more dirt on the Libya-BP terrorist-for-oil deal. There’s certainly lots of smoke here. Could fire be far behind?

The name reads Dalia Advisory Limited, a company established by Libyan businessmen just a week after the country’s officials were told the Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was being considered for release on compassionate grounds.

Dalia Advisory is in fact a “front” for the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA), a sovereign wealth fund with £80 billion, to invest in Britain and beyond. The Georgian town house, bought for £6 million, is, ironically, only a few yards from the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square.

Senior business sources have told The Sunday Telegraph that had Megrahi died in a British jail, the LIA would have taken its vast sums elsewhere. “If Megrahi had perished in Scotland, we would have become a pariah state as far as the Libyans were concerned,” said one source.

via Special report: the Libya investment firm and the release of the Lockerbie bomber – Telegraph.