Archive for September, 2008

Network security alarm sounded by second-hand ebay sale

For less than a pound a security expert has got front-door access to a council's internal network. Andrew Mason from security firm Random Storm bought some network hardware from auction site eBay for 99p. When he switched it on and plugged it in, the device automatically connected to the internal network of Kirklees Council in West [...]

Writing Robust Bash Shell Scripts

Here's a decent writeup on how to tweak your bash scripts to be more reliable. It goes step by step and is easy to understand even for a novice. Cheers! Many people hack together shell scripts quickly to do simple tasks, but these soon take on a life of their own. Unfortunately shell scripts are full of subtle effects which result in [...]

Richard Stallman: Keep your data at home, not in the clouds

The concept of using web-based programs like Google's Gmail is "worse than stupidity", according to a leading advocate of free software. Cloud computing – where IT power is delivered over the internet as you need it, rather than drawn from a desktop computer – has gained currency in recent years. Large internet and technology [...]

Quit Bitching! LOL

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Wal-Mart shutting down DRM server, nuking your music collection

...it seems only people who pay for music risk losing it to DRM shenanigans. Ugh. Hey suckers! Did you buy DRM music from Wal*Mart instead of downloading MP3s for free from the P2P networks? Well, they're repaying your honesty by taking away your music. Unless you go through a bunch of hoops (that you may never find out about, if you've changed [...]

MySQL hacker needs $400K for his son’s bone-marrow transplant

The MySQL community, who create, maintain and support the leading free SQL database -- are raising funds for Andrii Nikitin, a MySQL support engineer in Ukraine whose little boy, Ivan, needs a $400,000 bone-barrow transplant. "My family got bad news - doctors said allogenic bone marrow transplantation is the only chance for my son Ivan."8 months [...]

ISPs: We Swear, We Won’t Watch Your Every Move

Responding to increasing Internet privacy concerns, AT&T, Verizon, and Time Warner, the country's largest ISPs, told a Senate committee during a hearing Thursday that they don't engage in online consumer tracking and want to self-regulate such practices in the future. The hearing focused on whether ISPs are tracking their customers' [...]

HOWTO: Install Linux apps 101

This Computer World article goes over installing Linux apps from source (compiling), from your distribution's package manager, and from an third party intall package. Master these 3 simple install methods and you're one step closer to being a Linux Jedi. Sooner or later, we all end up installing new software on our computers. Whether it's a new [...]

Listen to yourself!

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Clickjacking: Researchers raise alert for scary new cross-browser exploit

Researchers are beginning to raise an alarm for what looks like a scary new browser exploit/threat affecting all the major desktop platforms — Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera and Adobe Flash. The threat, called Clickjacking, was to be discussed at the OWASP NYC AppSec 2008 Conference but, at the request [...]

Iron Is Google Chrome for the “Tinfoil Hat” Crowd

Free application Iron is a slightly modified version of the Chromium source of Google Chrome that removes components of Chrome that report your usage habits to Google. In practice, that means it removes your unique user ID, doesn't send user-specific info to Google, skips crash reporting, and doesn't check with Google for updates. Some [...]

Computer Holy Wars

GNOME 2.24 Released!

Seems like a decent release. The stand-out feature is definitely the tabs in Nautilus. I'm intrigued by Ekiga. I am hopefully only using Gnome temporarily until the KDE folks get their product back in shape. I can't say I've grown to love GNOME in the last six months or so but I've grown not to dislike it as much as I once did. (more...)

Analyzing Malicious SSH Login Attempts

Introduction Malicious SSH login attempts have been appearing in some administrators' logs for several years. This article revisits the use of honeypots to analyze malicious SSH login attempts and see what can be learned about this activity. The article then offers recommendations on how to secure one's system against these attacks. Using [...]

Cuil market share drops to next to nothing

When Cuil launched just a couple of months back on the 28th July, it jumped right in there with the ridiculous claim that it was already the biggest search engine on the planet right from the get go. This was, apparently, based upon some clever math which ended up with Cuil indexing some 120 billion web pages, or more than three times as many as [...]

“Notorious” Movie Trailer

Completely off topic but, if you grew up in the 90s, this movie is going to be epic... and I'm using that term loosely.

Kentucky Seizes 141 Gambling Domains

The commonwealth  of Kentucky issued a seizure order on September 18, ordering  141 domains be taken from their registrants. order-of-kentucky-seizure-of-domain-names (Adobe Acrobat Reader Required) “”The Domain names shall be immediately transferred by their respective registrars to an account of the Commonwealth of [...]

Russian schools turn to free software

Linux is a piece of open source software, free online to anyone who wants it, and Russian schools are switching to it to save cash. Using pirate software is common in Russia and for schools who need word processing, the alternative is to pay Microsoft over a hundred dollars for every computer. Aleksandr Ponosov, a former headmaster in the [...]

Bill O’Reilly on Sarah Palin Yahoo email hack

Looks like Bill O'Reilly skipped the First Amendment section of Journalism 101. He thinks owners of websites (4chan is NSFW) that posted Sarah Palin's hacked emails should be prosecuted along with the hacker who broke into her account. When a Fox news anchor attempts to explain why the websites can't be prosecuted, he refuses to accept it, arguing [...]

For those disappointed with the sound quality of Metallica’s Death Magnetic album

I'm sure many of you (at least, those of you who are interested at all) have heard the new album by now, and a lot have not been happy with the sound quality...specifically the way the mix has been amped up increase the loudness at lower volume levels, at the expense of loss of dynamic range, going so far as to cause distortion and [...]