DCortesi . blog

In other news, I started a new site today called Startup Security. You can read the Welcome post, but I mainly created the site because I’ve come across several security issues at startups in the past few months and I want to spread awareness about integrating security into the development life-cycle early on.

In coming days and weeks, I’ll post about different vulnerabilities I’ve come across as well as things to look for if you’re a startup and aren’t familiar with security. The point I’m trying to get across is that security doesn’t have to be a $50,000 investment to be effective. Heck, I could probably spend half-a-day talking to devs and know whether or not they understand security enough to not build a reasonably secure site…

In any case, Check it out at StartupSecurity.info. I hope it becomes a useful resource.

In another I Hate series, I hate Belkin. I already posted this review on Amazon, but I figured I’d re-post it here just for the fun of the Google juice. Belkin tech support seems to think otherwise, but my assumption is that the Belkin USB Network Hub just corrupted my external hard drive.

This may very well be an isolated case, but I happily unpacked my Belkin Network USB HUB after 2 months of it sitting in the packaging. I successfully plugged in a USB scanner and did some remote scanning. Taking it to the next level of wireless, I moved my hard drive over.

I plugged it in. Everything worked (kind of) fine. I could access the disk, but playing files in iTunes resulted in some skipping. Finally frustrated with the skipping, I went to plug the external hard drive directly into my computer.

It didn’t show up.

I plugged it back into the USB Hub. It still didn’t show up. I opened Disk Utility only to have it tell me the entire drive was corrupt. I called Belkin support and after being escalated to Level 2 support, I was told that “The drive is corrupted, sorry”.

That was it. No trying to troubleshoot. No offers of goodwill to recover the data on the drive. Just a flat-out tough luck.

Like I said, this may very well be an isolated incident… But I’ll never, ever plug anything into that Belkin Network USB Hub again.

Sigh. So much for awesome wireless capabilities. Time for a beer.