There are hundreds—if not thousands—of techniques used to compromise both Windows and Unix-based systems. Malicious code and new exploit scripts are released on a daily basis, and each evolution becomes more and more sophisticated. Keeping up with the myriad of systems used by hackers in the wild is a formidable task, and scrambling to patch each potential vulnerability or address each new attack one-by-one is a bit like emptying the Atlantic with paper cup. If you're a network administrator, the pressure is on you to defend your systems from attack. But short of devoting your life to becoming a security expert, what can you do to ensure the safety of your mission critical systems? Where do you start? Using the steps laid out by professional security analysts and consultants to identify and assess risks, Network Security Assessmentoffers an efficient testing model that an administrator can adopt, refine, and reuse to create proactive defensive strategies to protect their systems from the threats that are out there, as well as those still being developed. This thorough and insightful guide covers offensive technologies by grouping and analyzing them at a higher level—from both an offensive and defensive standpoint—helping administrators design and deploy networks that are immune to offensive exploits, tools, and scripts. Network administrators who need to develop and implement a security assessment program will find everything they're looking for—a proven, expert-tested methodology on which to base their own comprehensive program—in this time-saving new book.

What John McPhee's books all have in common is that they are about real people in real places. Here, at his adventurous best, he is out and about with people who work in freight transportation.

 

Over the past eight years, John McPhee has spent considerable time in the company of people who work in freight transportation. Uncommon Carriers is his sketchbook of them and of his journeys with them. He rides from Atlanta to Tacoma alongside Don Ainsworth, owner and operator of a sixty-five-foot,

eighteen-wheel chemical tanker carrying hazmats. McPhee attends ship-handling school on a pond in the foothills of the French Alps, where, for a tuition of $15,000 a week, skippers of the largest ocean ships refine their capabilities in twenty-foot scale models. He goes up the “tight-assed” Illinois River on a

“towboat” pushing a triple string of barges, the overall vessel being “a good deal longer than the Titanic.” And he travels by canoe up the canal-and-lock commercial waterways traveled by Henry David Thoreau and his brother, John,

in a homemade skiff in 1839.

Uncommon Carriers is classic work by McPhee, in prose distinguished, as always, by its author’s warm humor, keen insight, and rich sense of human character.

This bestselling book is now the standard guide to building phone systems with Asterisk, the open source IP PBX that has traditional telephony providers running scared! Revised for the 1.4 release of the software, the new edition of Asterisk: The Future of Telephony reveals how you can save money on equipment and support, and finally be in control of your telephone system. If you've worked with telephony in the past, you're familiar with the problem: expensive and inflexible systems that are tuned to the vendor's needs, not yours. Asterisk isn't just a candle in the darkness, it's a whole fireworks show. Because Asterisk is so powerful, configuring it can seem tricky and difficult. This book steps you through the process of installing, configuring, and integrating Asterisk with your existing phone system. You'll learn how to write dialplans, set up applications including speech synthesis and voice recognition, how to script Asterisk, and much more — everything you need to design a simple but complete system with little or no Asterisk experience, and no more than rudimentary telecommunications knowledge. The book includes: A new chapter on managing/administering your Asterisk system A new chapter on using Asterisk with databases Coverage of features in Asterisk 1.4 A new appendix on dialplan functions A simplified installation chapter New simplified SIP configuration, including examples for several popular SIP clients (soft phones and IP telephones) Revised chapters and appendicies reviewed and updated for the latest in features, applications, trends and best-practices Asterisk is revolutionizing the telecom industry, due in large part to the way it gets along with other networkapplications. While other PBXs are fighting their inevitable absorption into the network, Asterisk embraces it. If you need to take control of your telephony systems, move to Asterisk and see what the future of telecommunications looks like.

When Transforming Words Into Print Becomes a Passion

Color'em, distort'em, move'em: changing fonts on a computer screen is almost as easy and fun as playing with a set of rubber stamps. And yet, creating and choosing type is an art that not only requires artistic skills, but a deep understanding of the many ways type is rooted in the communication patterns of our times. In "Texts on Type: Critical Writings on Typography," acclaimed design authors Steven Heller and Philip B. Meggs open a window into the secret universe of present and past typography.

"Texts on Type" is an unprecedented opportunity to discover some of the most brilliant and sparkling minds of 20th century type design and typography. In fifty thought-provoking essays, readers encounter the evangelists and critics of a craft whose aesthetic frontiers have always been negotiated with unsurpassed fervor, from W.A. Dwiggins, Herman Zapf, and Paul Rand to the front-runners of contemporary typography. Practitioners of type and typophiles will perceive this craft with new eyes as they learn about the groundbreaking technological, aesthetic, and cultural changes that have propelled typography from a rarified, secluded craft into a dynamic activity practiced by millions.

The fifty essays cover topics such as

* Principals of designing and choosing the right typeface
* The Modernism versus Tradition debate
* The relationship between type form and expression
* The anatomy of typefaces across the 20th century
* Aesthetical reflections from classics to electronic and dynamic typography

If past is prologue, then The Metaphysical Clubby Louis Menand may suggest an intellectual course for the United States in the 21st century. At least Menand, a frequent contributor to The New Yorkerand The New York Review of Books, thinks so. This enthralling study of Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey shows how these four men developed a philosophy of pragmatism following the Civil War, a period Menand likens to post-cold-war times. Together, "they were more responsible than any other group for moving American thought into the modern world."

Despite this potentially forbidding theme, The Metaphysical Clubis not a dry tome for academics. Instead, it is a quadruple biography, a wonderfully told story of ideas that advances by turning these thinkers into characters and bringing them to life. Menand links them through the Metaphysical Club, a conversational club formed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1872. It lasted but a few months, and references to it appear only in Peirce's writings (its real significance seems rather limited), though Holmes and James were both members. (Dewey was much younger than these three, and more an heir than a contemporary.) It is difficult to describe in a sentence or two what they accomplished, though Menand takes a stab at it: "They helped put an end to the idea that the universe is an idea, that beyond the mundane business of making our way as best we can in a world shot through with contingency, there exists some order, invisible to us, whose logic we transgress at our peril." Academic freedom and cultural pluralism are just two of their legacies, and they are linchpins of democracy in a nonideological age, says Menand.

A book like this is necessarily idiosyncratic, yet at the same time this one is sweeping. It presents an accessible survey of intellectual life from roughly the end of the Civil War to the start of the cold war. Dozens of figures receive fascinating thumbnail sketches, from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Charles Darwin to Jane Addams and Eugene Debs. The result is a grand portrait of an age that will appeal to anyone with even a modest interest in the history of philosophy and ideas. —John Miller

No one ever argued more forcefully or with such acerbic wit against the foolish aspects of religion as H.L. Mencken. As a journalist, he gained national prominence through his newspaper columns describing the famous 1925 Scopes trial, which pitted religious fundamentalists against a public school teacher who dared to teach evolution. But both before and after the Scopes trial, Mencken spent much of his career as a columnist and book reviewer lampooning the ignorant piety of gullible Americans.

S.T. Joshi has brought together and organized many of Mencken's writings on religion in this provocative and entertaining collection. The articles presented here include satirical accounts of a range of the religious phenomena of his time. On a more serious note are his discussions of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and the scientific worldview as a rival to religious belief. Also included are poignant autobiographical accounts of Mencken's own upbringing and his core beliefs on religion, ethics, and politics.

H.L. Mencken knew that satire, wit, and clever jesting were the most effective ways to battle religious folly, and he used these weapons to their fullest extent in writings spanning almost three decades.

The anthology that spans an entire lifetime of writing by America's greatest curmudgeon, with a "flick of mischief on nearly every page."