With his children asleep in bed, Hans Reiser stole away from his home two nights in a row to dig his wife’s grave, while her body sat in a duffel bag in his car.
That’s one of the details to emerge in this grisly 34-page transcript (.pdf) of Reiser’s belated August 21 confession to prosecutor Paul [...]

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Although losing your cellphone is never an enjoyable experience, it’s a much worse feeling when your mobile device is carrying more than just contacts. If you’re carrying things you don’t want anyone else to have access to—whether it’s personal information or company secrets—on your Windows Mobile device, it’s a worthwhile investment of time to take [...]

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When Andrew Chapman bought a PC on eBay for about $150, he didn’t expect the added bonus — the personal records of millions of customers of a major international bank.
Chapman says he found “several million” personal records on the PC. The records, which belonged to the National Bank of Scotland, its NatWest subsidiary, and American [...]

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A 4channer had Soulja Boy’s Myspace account held ransom for $2500 earlier today (perhaps last night too). This could have been epic but Soulja Boy contacted Myspace and got the account back. Now he’s offering $10,000 for the name of the “hacker” to anyone willing to snitch.
What was his password you ask?
SupermanDatHo
Soulja Boy and his [...]

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“Wait a sec,” the Edutron Systems rep interrupted, cutting off the principal of River City High, “your students still use pencils and paper to take exams!?” The rep insincerely chuckled, adding “don’t tell me you’re still using slide rules to teach arithmetic!”
As shifty as the sales rep was, he did have a good point. It [...]

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Attacks in the wild are under way against Linux systems with compromised SSH keys, the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team is warning.
The attacks appear to use stolen SSH keys to take hold of a targeted machine and then gain root access by exploiting weaknesses in the kernel. The attacks then install a rootkit known as [...]

Filed under: hax, security | 1 Comment »

Part 2…

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When Windows Vista was first introduced, it came with a powerful defense against pirating. In fact, it was so powerful that paying customers complained when it malfunctioned, and Microsoft wound up making some big changes.
Unless Vista was properly activated, it would drop into “reduced functionality mode”, in which the only thing you could do with [...]

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The default shell on most Linux operating systems is called Bash. There are a couple of important hot keys that you should get familiar with if you plan to spend a lot of time at the command line. These shortcuts will save you a ton of time if you learn them…

Ctrl+A
Go to the beginning of [...]

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This is cute…

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Frontier Foundation designer Hugh D’Andrade sez, “I did a ‘live-painting’ last Friday at a gallery — a mural-sized cartoon depicting the goings-on inside the “secret room” at AT&T’s Folsom Street facility. My EFF co-workers created a time-lapse video with a decent ska soundtrack!”

Source

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So-called porn mode tools to debut in IE8 Beta 2 this month.

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Also to clear up /bin vs /sbin:

/sbin – Files needed for bootup/recovery that are only used by superuser (e.g., fsck)
/bin – Files needed for bootup/recovery that are used by all users (e.g., bash)
/usr/sbin – Files used only by superuser that aren’t required for recovery/bootup (generally dynamically linked) (e.g., ntpdate)
/usr/bin – Files [...]

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It’s said that if you want to be happy, be a gardener. What about IT security professionals? Having worked as an IT security consultant for several years, I now wonder if my job has a negative influence on my happiness, because it constantly teaches me to focus on the negative side of life: I always [...]

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Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch (Oct. 23, 1960 – July 25, 2008) gave his last lecture at the university Sept. 18, 2007, before a packed McConomy Auditorium. In his moving presentation, “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” Pausch talked about his lessons learned and gave advice to students on how to achieve their own career and [...]

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The Democratic Party is pro-regulation. Why does this come as a surprise?
By choosing Joe Biden as their vice presidential candidate, the Democrats have selected a politician with a mixed record on technology who has spent most of his Senate career allied with the FBI and copyright holders, who ranks toward the bottom of CNET’s [...]

Filed under: politics, privacy | 1 Comment »

The old 701-900 EeePC used the Atheros WiFi driver, and now the newrest EeePC 901/1000 uses the RaLink WiFi. Took me a minute to figure out they changed it. Here is the output from my lspci:
01:00.0 Network controller: RaLink Unknown device 0781
03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Attansic Technology Corp. Unknown device 1026 (rev b0)
First, to install the [...]

Filed under: asus | 3 Comments »

If you are trying to work at a command line in pretty much any Operating System, no matter if it is a GNU/Linux brand such as Ubuntu or Fedora Core, another UNIX-like system like Mac OS X or FreeBSD or even Microsoft Windows, you will most definitely need a text editor sooner or later. If [...]

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“Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can [...]

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If you have ever had a hard drive fail on a remote server you may remember the feeling you had after trying to issue command like:
# reboot
bash: /sbin/reboot: Input/output error
# shutdown -r now
bash: /sbin/shutdown: Input/output error
Obviously, there is a problem with your drive. These commands are failing because the kernel is unable to load [...]

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