[Security] PCI Compliance... Securing your network or Securing your fate?

PCI compliance... What is there to say other than it sucks? Anyone who has ever wanted to accept credit cards through a merchant account has had to deal with this and feels my pain (if they are using a few specific PCI compliance venders, that is).

To qualm the PCI that ails you, here is the registry modifications that I have implemented in order to pass the newly "increased security" modifications to the PCI compliance requirements.

You can download a .txt version of the registry entries here.

Basically you have to disable all ciphers on the system but Triple DES, disable MD5 hash, PCT 1.0, and SSL2.0. The MD5 and all ciphers other than Triple DES 168/168 are the new things. The problem lies with the fact that even though last October the PCI compliance only required that you be using SSL3.0/TLS1.0, the new requirements apparently require you to not only be using SSL3.0/TLS1.0 but also have to disable the weaker ciphers supported by the protocols. By "weaker" I'm referring to anything sub-56bit. Here's the problem with that... There are also some 128bit ciphers that "trigger" this failure in PCI compliance.

So, hopefully the link above works (I've never used aDrive before, but it's free) and you'll be able to make use of it. If the link fails at some point, I guess I'll find another host for it. It's very useful.

Take care,
B

[Code] Embedding Youtube Videos Update

If you are receiving a white box with a little red "x" it's likely that the embed code you are trying to use is not fully being pasted into the blog. Below, you will find an example of the code you'd use:


[object width="425" height="344"][param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/Mg3zesVdhSY&hl=en&fs=1"][/param][param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"][/param][param width="425" height="344" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Mg3zesVdhSY&hl=en&fs=1" value="always" name="allowscriptaccess"]

Replacing the [ with <> in the above code should result in the following embedded video:


Now, inside the blog you'll see the white box with the red "x"... This is normal. It's because the html WYSIWYG editor does not render the embedded code (likley for the sake of preventing a ton of addtional bandwidth usage).

Have fun and take care!
B

[Code] Embedding Youtube Videos Into Your Webpages and Blogs

Question
"Am I allowed to post a youtube video to my blog? How do I do it? It seems like it should be really simple."

Answer
Absolutely! The process is quick and painless as Youtube has done all the work for you!

It's actually REALLY easy to post a Youtube video into your blog. If you have read my other blog (which I know the asker has), you might remember me embedding a Youtube video in order to show a video of "White Lines" from the 80s.

If you find a video that you want to include on Youtube, you will find the embedding code already provided for you (which can be customized with the little star-like icon to the right of the text field). What you will do is click into the box that contains the text next to where it says "Embed" and copy that text (either right click and choose copy or use the keyboard shortcut of Ctrl+C). This is the code to embed the video into your own page.

Once you have this code copied to your clipboard, you can create a new blog post and bring up the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get, pronounced "wiz-e-wig") editor. One of the tabs at the top right of the editor is "Compose" and the other is "Edit Html." Clicking on the "Edit Html" will show you the html markup for the blog post, where you can paste the code you have copied to your clipboard (either right click and select Paste or press Ctrl+V).

Once you see the block of code added to the html, you can then click back on the "Compose" tab and you'll see the video has been embedded into your blog. You can then edit your blog as desired and publish.

See? Quick, easy and painless. :)

Embed away and take care!
B