It's interesting that what Owen recommends is currently part of the SANS 20 Critical Controls for Effective Cyber Defense. Critical Control #2 is Inventory of Authorized and Unauthorized Software. Wrapping this back around to complexity - Alan Paller and the SANS crowd frequently claim that implementing just the first four controls is enough to see a significant change in the state of a defended computer network system. I'm curious if there has ever been any work to show that seemingly simple security actions can have such a great effect.
Ray Parks Consilient Heuristician/IDART Program Manager V: 505-844-4024 M: 505-238-9359 P: 505-951-6084 NIPR: rcpa...@sandia.gov<mailto:rcpa...@sandia.gov> SIPR: rcpar...@sandia.doe.sgov.gov<mailto:rcpar...@sandia.doe.sgov.gov> (send NIPR reminder) JWICS: dopa...@doe.ic.gov<mailto:dopa...@doe.ic.gov> (send NIPR reminder) On Feb 7, 2013, at 8:29 PM, Owen Densmore wrote: Just an observation: Things are Getting More Complicated .. when it comes to computing. I have two friends, both quite bright in terms of computing. One a PC, the other a Mac user. Both have what I call Rotten System Syndrom (RSS). It is NOT a PC vs Mac issue. Its just that things are getting way too complex. The cloud, backups, sluggish systems, how to uninstall apps, knowing what's on the computer, knowing whether or not there is a problem. It goes on and on. The same for Linux, Mac, Windows. I'd love to say: Oh, just get a Mac. Or Ubuntu. Or Windows 8. Nope. It all boils down to systems being so complicated that even experts have problems. My solution has been along the lines I mentioned to Nick earlier: in a phrase -- System Hygiene. So how do you keep your system clean and nice .. and not even need to do a clean install? There are several things that contribute to your system being healthy. The most important is: know what is on your system and being able to remove it when no longer needed. Nick hit one one right away: a system utility like the Task/System monitor he found. So rather than being a noob, Nick turned out to hit on the right issue right away. On my system, I always have the "Activity Monitor" running, and yes, as Josh mentioned, run "purge" often. So I can see visually what's up with the system. All the Big 3 have these, just look for performance monitor etc and you'll find it. Next: after understanding how your system is running, look at your disk. Again, all the Big 3 have something like Omni Disk Sweeper for the Mac: a program that lets you see, by size, where everything is on your disk. I had to scrape my Mini clean recently so that Time Machine (the incremental backup system) wouldn't fill up immediately. I found over (blush) 40GB! that I no longer needed! That's a lot of cruft. And I'm supposed to be hip. But no, cruft happens. So after (2 days believe it or not) of figuring out what needed to be done, I applied yet another tool available on all of the Big 3: an un-installer programmer. There were several available. I deleted a large amount of the 40GB blush that way. Amazing just how much TeX takes up on legacy systems. What next? Well, I still had WAY too much on my system to have a sane backup/TimeMachine strategy. DiskSweeper again. Man did I have a LOT of stuff I no longer needed. What to do? I chose a mixed strategy: - All working docs were put in the cloud. How? Dropbox for a lot of it. Music? Both Google Drive and iTunes Match. Again available for the B3. Whew, that was a lot. I had over 80GB music, and now it's all in the cloud, multiply backed up. Next photos. As mentioned earlier, Arc and Amazon storage helps there. Mail: IMAP/gmail .. that's solved (and now with 2-factor authentication). Movies? again, not too difficult. A larger dropbox might help but I decided on simply finding .torrent files, so that I can get lost movies in a few hours if needed, the rest on local storage (redundant, via a NAS, but really not needed) - Loose a lot of apps I really don't use. AppZapper was seriously busy for quite a while. And even then, I had to find out how to keep my /usr/local clean due to the mixed strategies of Linux/Unix systems for package management. So, no Nick, you are not odd having to figure out what to do. And you hit almost immediately on the important issue: how to monitor your system. What's running now and what's it doing? Check the net for what causes these odd daemons/services running. See if you can get by without that option. Find the cruft. Buy a disk or two for backup and pushing data not needed 24/7. It really is that simple: Things have gotten really complex as my two friends, Mac & PC know. Decide on a strategy. Don't worry if its the best. It just has to satisfy your requirements. Follow a plan after deciding on the strategy. Don't be in a hurry, its not easy nor obvious. Do NOT think you are odd, noob, ignorant, weird, and so on. As I say, my two friends are very intelligent yet still struggling with their two systems. My recommendation is to think out a Machine Hygiene strategy first, then a plan that implements it. You will have to haunt Best Buy for a couple of disks, and sign up for Dropbox and/or similar systems. Decide what data is really, really important, likely using a Disk Sweeper to find out just what you DO have on your system. Then just devote a taks a day for a couple of weeks and you'll be fat, dumb and happy! And not dumb at all. -- Owen On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 8:33 PM, Nicholas Thompson <nickthomp...@earthlink.net<mailto:nickthomp...@earthlink.net>> wrote: Hi, My Dell Studio (yeah, yeah, save the Mac cracks) has been cranky of late, particularly when streaming stuff, and since I am reluctant to put out a couple of hundred dollars to have it “tuned up”, I have been trying to see what I can do on my own. This has led me to the resource monitor, a truly fascinating little gizmo, a couple of levels down in the Task Manager. The help files that are attached to it are pretty lean, and I was wondering if someone knew of a “Resource Monitor for Idiots” source. One thing that I immediately learned which was STUNNING was that mac I-tunes has a chum that it loads called AppleRemoteDevicesManager.exe which grabs 25 percent of your resources off the top and doesn’t let go unless you whack it over the head with a brick. It’s purpose is to manage your relationship with your mobile devices, but relentlessly demands resources even though you don’t have any mobile devices. I think of it as essentially an Apple Trojan. (Ok, now, you can make Mac-cracks). Thanks, Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ http://www.cusf.org ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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