Can you trust your computer?

Who should your computer take its orders from? Most people think their computers should obey them, not obey someone else. With a plan they call "trusted computing", large media corporations (including the movie companies and record companies), together with computer companies such as Microsoft and Intel, are planning to make your computer obey them instead of you. (Microsoft's version of this scheme is called "Palladium".) Proprietary programs have included malicious features before, but this plan would make it universal.

 

Qmail Anti-Spam HOW-TO

Some information about qmail and relaying.

Gmail has POP

Google's new toolbar: Now more evil than ever

As if that wasn't enough, the toolbar updates automatically, without asking. Once installed, this happens no matter how restrictive your Explorer security settings might be, and regardless of whether you have ZoneAlarm or some other firewall installed. Basically, this means that Google potentially can install anything at all on your hard drive, at any time that you connect to them. If you have broadband, it happens so fast that you won't even notice. One day you may see some new features on your toolbar, and then you'll realize that something happened.

 

SysInternals Releases RootkitRevealer

Just some notes on how to configure a network interface in Redhat Linux with multiple IPs.

First configure the card as you would normally. This should create a file called ifcfg-eth0 which is located in:

/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts

It would look something like the following:

DEVICE=eth0
BOOTPROTO=static
HWADDR=00:C0:4F:20:60:E9
ONBOOT=yes
TYPE=Ethernet
IPADDR=172.16.1.31
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
GATEWAY=172.16.0.1


Now to assign a second ip address, copy over ifcfg-eth0 to ifcfg-eth0:1

The contents of this file will look something like this:

DEVICE=eth0:1
BOOTPROTO=static
HWADDR=00:C0:4F:20:60:E9
ONBOOT=yes
TYPE=Ethernet
IPADDR=172.16.1.30
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
GATEWAY=172.16.0.1


Restart networking, /etc/init.d/network restart
Now if you run ifconfig the output should list eth0, and eth0:1, and you should be able to ping both interfaces.

Google Wants to Play Tag

Autolink edits Web pages, making subtle inline changes to text while presenting them at their original URLs, which implies the original author created the transformed work.

Even if you accept the legality of these edits, there should be more regard for the notion that something presented under your name is actually your work.

 

This is a bet the company decision.

Been busy... I'm just itching to log on here.

Playing around with Quicksilver

Some Webcam reviews.

I think I'm going to look at getting a digital camera instead of a webcam. Much more practical.

Great... everything happens at the same time.

My car is dead! (probably the battery)

Yeah it was the battery...

To take the screenshot for the whole desktop in OS X the key is:
Cmd-Shift-3

To take the screen shot of a selected space it is:
Cmd-Shift-4

I finally got a chance to upgrade the RAM on the Powerbook from the measily 256 it came with, to 768 MB. The difference in speed on the system is amazing. Definitely worth it. The 1 GB chip was about 250 dollars, while the 512 MB was for 90 dollars, at my local Frys. I went with the 512 obviously. I could have bought the 1 gig chip for cheaper online, but I wanted a branded RAM chip, and I wanted it in my hands.

World of Warcraft runs a whole lot better. :)

Also, I've spent all of saturday night, and sunday trying to figure out how one of our servers got hacked! Finally have all the relevant information, it does not look like they got into the complete system, just the webdir. Oh well, I had'nt taken over this server yet, and it hence it took this long to figure out what was installed, with what config, and so forth. I'm so tired of looking at logs! :(

Popup blocker no longer working: Not just Safari, 10.3.8 or Mac

I noticed this in safari as well, and just thought it might be safari. I guess I was wrong.

Want Tabbed Browsing in Internet Explorer? Build It Yourself with WinForms

IE7

It was largely perceived to mean the browser was now only going to see an update when the operating system did, and given Longhorn�s continual slip date, this could only mean the reign of IE6 would continue for many years to come.

....

There are so many compelling reasons to stop using IE6 now, but the market has done next to nothing about it. Even if IE7 is perfect, we�ll be supporting IE6 for a long time yet.

What the hell is this guy talking about? The market has done something about it, its called Firefox. In terms of rendering, the market has something called Gecko (Mozilla's rendering engine) or KHTML (Konqueror/Safari) or Operas engine. Thats why IE6 market share is slipping. That is why there is now an IE7 for Windows XP (despite Microsoft saying there wont be earlier). Microsoft could not afford to leave the new version of the browser only on Longhorn as their strangle hold on the market is being lost to Firefox.

Unix Signal Handling through Python

I have a script that I need to have reset every few hours. To do this I am using some signal handling stuff.

First import the signal handling stuff
import signal

Then in the main function which traps the signal you would have:
signal.signal(signal.SIGUSR1, sighandler)

when the USR1 signal is issued the sighandler function is called. This function would look something like this:

def sighandler(signum, frame):
   print "Your resetting code here"

Now in the crontab you can put in code where you issue a
kill -USR1 pidofapp

Obviously you will have to save the processes PID to a file, so you can use it later.

IE 7 announced

At the conference Mr. Gates also showed a system called Spynet, which makes it possible for Microsoft to collect data needed to counter attacks.

Hmm... they should probably change the name of that, reminds of the SkyNet in the Terminator series of movies. And spynet itself is scary enough.

My most used app so far on the Powerbook is Terminal.app, followed by Safari (Web browser), followed by World of Warcraft.

I installed OpenOffice and was sad to see that it is not a native app, but runs under X11. I wish they would release a natively compiled version of OpenOffice. Mail.app is cool and comparable to most email clients so far. I havent really tested it, or setup rules or anything yet. Will get to it soon enough.

Going to the end of a line, or the start of a line is a little different from other systems. You have to use command (the key with the apple on it) and right and left arrows. Option and right/left arrows work on some kind of Unit or something, but basically instead of moving a character at a time you move a word at a time. F9 is expose, F10 shows all applications windows open in an active application, and F11 clears the desktop so that you can access files on your desktop. I never liked having a cluttered desktop, but with the above keys, it is just not a problem anymore.

Since on Linux (my old primary OS) Windowmaker was my Window Manager of choice, and the interface in Mac OS X with its version of the dock makes me feel at home. The OS X dock is a lot better looking though! :)

Once you have fink installed, you have functionality similar to that provided by debians apt-get. Finding out if a package is available is as easy as

fink list package-name

[172 09:41 AM Wed Feb 16] [Session: ttyp3 adnan]
==> fink list quanta
Information about 1736 packages read in 4 seconds.
quanta 3.1.4-21 KDE - HTML editor


Go get the X11 install from the Mac site, and you have all your X11 apps you need.
Once you have those installed if you want to run an X11 app in a window of its own, without having the whole Xwindows stuff just type

open-x11 app-name

So for instance, if you want to run the usenet news reader pan, you would type

open-x11 pan

If you want to run any other known filetype its

open filename

For instance to open a txt file in textedit you would type

open filename.txt

or to open a folder in a finder window

open foldername

 

Was a 2 GB limit on snort v1.9.1 logs a real problem with that version of snort, or is it a limit imposed because of something else on the system? Its not related to the kernel, since its a 2.4.x kernel which had big file size enabled by default. So it has to be something else. I've been searching on google/groups.google but havent come up with anytthing concrete yet. More searching to commence later.

In either case, I should update to the latest version of snort, and I would have done that a long time ago, if only the snort 1.9.1 had not been highly modified by the last sys admin. Now I have to slowly make the same modifications to snort v2.3.0 before I can start using it, with an upgraded version of Linux. Further the system is generating humungous log files, 2 gigs or so each hour. Have to rotate it every 55 minutes. More detailed analysis later.... I first have to finish my other unfinished tutorials ! :)

I've been too busy enjoying World of Warcraft on the G4 at the moment.

Bink.nu | IE Core Development Team: IE7 is comming!

Bink.nu | IE Core Development Team: IE7 is comming!

Look what Firefox has done!

First, some basics: we�re committing to deliver a new version of Internet Explorer for Windows XP customers. Betas of IE7 will be available this summer. This new release will build on the work we did in Windows XP SP2 and (among other things) go further to defend users from phishing as well as deceptive or malicious software.

The counter on the number of posts in this blog on the blogger dashboard is stuck at 719 posts. How do I fix it?

I think the worst part of a sysadmin job is taking over legacy systems that have been in operation for years. Especially if the server has some customized code running on it, plus you cant afford downtime on the system. I have to patch a similar system that is used for IDS purposes and firewall purposes. Especially if the person who set it up is no longer around, and he never bothered to comment his code!

Russell Beattie's review of the first piece of software I installed on my PowerBook G4.

http://www.russellbeattie.com/notebook/1008308.html

Power Book G4

I bought myself a Power Book G4 over the weekend. This machine is wicked. I started out looking for a Mac Mini to replace my now aged, and dying laptop, that took a fall for the worst this weekend. They were all out of stock, and I figured why not indulge a little and buy the machine I've been dreaming about :)

Got it from Frys. Did not want to order online simply because I wanted a machine in my hands right now !

SecurityFocus HOME Columnists: Unexpected Attack Vectors

SecurityFocus HOME Columnists: Unexpected Attack Vectors:

"You're not really at Paypal's web site; instead, you're viewing content served up by the Shmoos or Secunia. In the case of Shmoo, you're really at a site owned by Shmoo, with the domain name of www.pàypal.com - it's just that Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, Konqueror, and Safari don't display the real URL. [Editor's note: as of January 2005, SecurityFocus readers using Firefox (46%) eclipsed Internet Explorer users (44%) in our traffic logs for the first time ever.] Due to vagaries in the way that certain browsers use punycode to display URLs using homographs - letters from one character set that resemble letters in another) - it's incredibly easy to fool people into thinking they're at one site when they're actually at another. A new vector for phishing attacks! Wonderful! (And by the way - IE doesn't support the IDN spec yet, so it isn't vulnerable ... unless you installed the Verisign IDN plugin, which fortunately has an auto-update feature that we can hope will deliver a patch soon.)"

 

? Gartner pitches browser coexistence | Datapoint: IT Research That Matters on ZDNet

? Gartner pitches browser coexistence | Datapoint: IT Research That Matters on ZDNet:

"Microsoft must deliver an improved version of its browser in Longhorn if it is to 'determine the outcome' of the browser war."

The Microsoft browser must also work with older versions of Windows. As we all know, its highly unlikely that a whole bunch of people will be upgrading their systems when Longhorn is released. In that case, the browser must work with older versions of Windows.

The cranky user: Performance anxiety

The cranky user: Performance anxiety:

"What's fascinating is that, for most users, performance isn't noticeably any better today than it was 15 years ago. What's the computer doing with all this processing time? One Usenet poster, commenting on OS X's animated rainbow beachball cursor, hypothesized that the processor, like the user, is busy watching the hypnotic spinning beachball."

I've got a couple of Gmail accounts to give out. If you want em... leave me your email address in the comments, and I'll send you an invite. First come first serve.

Why Does Windows Still Suck? / Why do PC users put up with so many viruses and worms? Why isn't everyone on a Mac?

Why Does Windows Still Suck? / Why do PC users put up with so many viruses and worms? Why isn't everyone on a Mac?:

"My SO, she is not alone. This exact same scenario, with only slight variation, is happening throughout the nation, right now. Are you using a PC? You probably have spyware. The McAfee site claims a whopping 91 percent of PCs are infected. As every Windows user knows, PCs are ever waging a losing battle with a stunningly vicious array of malware and worms and viruses, all aimed at exploiting one of about ten thousand security flaws and holes in Microsoft Windows."

I hate the fact that the article says that if you have a PC you can do nothing. It leaves the impression that on the PC there is no alternative other than Windows. There are alternatives, and they are called FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Redhat, SuSE, Mandrake, Debian, Gentoo..... on and on and on. Linux is my primary OS. Only Windows for games.

Had to do some serious hacking for our internal python disk quota module (written in C) to get it to work with the new disk quota system. There are so many iterations of this subsystem in Linux it was crazy. After a lot of hair pulling I've got it working, and I might slowly document it below.

This is on a SuSE 9.1 system running the 2.6.5 linux kernel. I'm using Python 1.5.2 just because the python module uses the old python API, and we dont want to update that for now (I would love to, but no time at the moment).

First of you have to enable the disk quota system on your system.
The file system that I had to set the disk quota on was /usr (/dev/hda1).
To do that I had to edit the /etc/fstab file so that the /usr partition entry had the additional values of usrquota,grpquota.

/dev/hda1 /usr ext3 acl,user_xattr,usrquota,grpquota 1 1

Then I ran quotacheck.

Once the quota system is on, you have to edit the user or group quota settings. In this case, I setup the user quota settings.

edquota adnanw

This will open up quota file in an editor where you can edit the hardlimit and softlimits etc.

Running "quota adnanw" will give the following:

Disk quotas for user adnanw (uid 201):
Filesystem blocks quota limit grace files quota limit grace
/dev/hda1 49340 250000 0 49 0 0

After this step I compiled the perl disk quota module. I was planning to study it to see what changes I have to make to the python module. Running a make test on the perl module caused the system to not find any quota settings for the user adnanw. That was weird so after some googling I found that you have to specifically do a quotaon to get the perl module to work.

quotaon -v -a

Now the perl module worked.

linux:/home/adnan/Quota-1.5.0 # make test
PERL_DL_NONLAZY=1 /usr/bin/perl "-Iblib/lib" "-Iblib/arch" test.pl

Enter path to get quota for (NFS possible; default '.'): /usr
Using device/argument "/dev/hda1"
Quotas are present on this filesystem (sync ok)

Query this fs with default uid (which is real uid) 0
Your usage and limits are 3666984 (0,0,0) 176974 (0,0,0)

Enter a uid to get quota for: 201
Usage and limits for 201 are 49340 (250000,0,0) 49 (0,0,0)

Now come the changes I had to make to the old quota.c so that it would work with the new Linux kernel.

Christie's - Exceptional Motor Cars Including Automobilia from a Private Collection

Christie's - Exceptional Motor Cars Including Automobilia from a Private Collection

Maserati Boomerang
Estimate: �700,000-900,000 (US$920,000-1,000,000)

Link from Autoblog

Flu time for me! Sniff! Cough! Cough! :(