Rupert Goodwins' Diary

Monday 27/08/2001

Bank Holiday Monday, and the weather recovers somewhat from the wetness of the weekend. Goodwins Minor is staying over, which means the usual good-natured parental battle to keep the worst excesses of teenage Internet usage off my poor innocent network. Simultaneously, one tries to keep the worst excesses of grown-up Internet usage off his poor innocent eyeballs: he may or may not have any interest in the contents of my various mailboxes, but... no, the thought is too horrific. In practice, this means a wary truce: I keep a worried eye on the router's session tables in an attempt to spot any infestation, back-door nonsense or massive hack attempts, while learning a lot about just how incontinent and mysterious legitimate Windows network applications can be.

What the world needs, and badly, is a really good personal security analysis and reporting tool. A smart Nethead armed with a decent protocol analyser and a suitably hairy machine can spot most unpleasantness in short order, but some of that expertise should be packaged into a wary watchdog of a program that doesn't give your basic user the willies. I'm loath to mention this to some Netheads of my acquaintance, who seem to feel that it is their inalienable right to resist this sort of mechanisation of a skilled trade, but hey -- this is the post-industrial society.

After all this fun, the lad and I pootle off to see and thoroughly enjoy A Knight's Tale, which proves you can do high medieval silliness without Monty Python.