fak3r

Stream the new David Byrne / Brian Eno disk, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today below, it’s their follow-up to the cult classic In The Bush Of Ghosts from 198-. Both are recommended listening.

Ok, I’ve read this a few times, but I still cannot believe it. Yesterday the Department of Homeland Security disclosed that traveler’s laptop computers “or other electronic devices” can be confiscated, without any suspicion of a crime! Better yet, they can make and share copies of your data, have the data translated, unencrypted, etc. This is especially topical for me since I’ll be leaving the country on Sunday with the laptop that I’m typing this on. “Federal agents may take a traveler’s laptop computer or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed. Also, officials may share copies of the laptop’s contents with other agencies and private entities for language translation, data decryption or other reasons, according to the policies, dated July 16 and issued by two DHS agencies, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.” Now I ask you, how fucked is that? “”The policies . . . are truly alarming,” said Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), who is probing the government’s border search practices. He said he intends to introduce legislation soon that would require reasonable suspicion for border searches, as well as prohibit profiling on race, religion or national origin.” So while congress is now looking at it, the article points out that these procedures have been in place for a long time, but only revealed last month, “…because of public interest in this matter.” So this makes me ask, what else should we be interested in that our government is doing so we can discover other ways our rights are being shoved aside? These tactics are excessive and a violation of individual rights, could at least can cause an interruption of business, but at most are a direct invastion of privacy and a violation of civil rights. And if they can do this, I think the next obvious step would be for them to check on incoming data into the country, why not? What’s the difference if I carry a laptop with data on it into the country versus emailing it into the country? I don’t think it would be that big of a leap; we need to keep up the ‘public interest’ in this matter else we lose more freedoms we didn’t know we had. Go to EFF today to learn what they’re doing to fight for our digitial rights and privacy, because the laws are being (re)written NOW!

This is great, Defcon16 is a mere few days away, but already, the drama has started! Of course there’s the excitement about security guru/celebrity Dan Kaminsky discovering the DNS flaw a few months back that will be revealed this week (so that folks won’t be able to reverse-engineer them to exploit the vulnerability…ahead of time at least), but now there’s a reneg by Apple that’s sure to raise a few feathers, as well as highlight how they weren’t the most forthcoming with their DNS fix (which hasn’t hit yet even though all other vendors have released patches). In an interview, Kaminsky talks about the ‘bug’ he found in DNS, “We got lucky in this particular bug, because it’s a design flaw,” Kaminsky said in an interview. “It shows up in everyone’s network, but the fix is a design fix that doesn’t point directly at what we’re improving.” After peer review it was deemed this was indeed a huge deal, and even the original developer of BIND (the dns software in question) urged everyone to patch. “It took a couple of hours to find the bug,” said Kaminsky, “and a couple of months to fix it.” Kaminsky said he stumbled across the hole in the so-called DNS system for steering people to the websites they are seeking “by complete and total accident.” Smaller DNS flaws have been used before to “poison” the servers that send people to the numerical address of the website name they enter. [...] “This is about the integrity of the Web, this is about the integrity of e-mail,” Kaminsky said. “It’s more, but I can’t talk about how much more.” So learning more about that exploit will be very interesting, and should lead to more people investigating and deploying DNSSEC, a DNS option built with security in mind from the ground up. So there’s that, but now there’s something even more fun because it deals with a companies lack of openness in regards to their security methods. A talk at Black Hat yesterday was scrubbed at the last minute by folks over in marketing at Apple. It seems that they blocked the scheduled presentation that was, “…to give an inside look at the ultra-secretive company’s security response team. “Marketing got wind of it, and nobody at Apple is ever allowed to speak publicly about anything without marketing approval,” a Black Hat organizer told IDG News.” This is unfortunate for Apple, who are reeling after a week of beatings in the ‘blogosphere’ over their handling, or non-handling, of their update for the DNS flaw we mentioned above! “Apple’s policy of saying next to nothing about how it goes about protecting its users from escalating threats is, to say the least, unfortunate. Just last week, the company said it had patched its software from a serious flaw in the net’s address lookup system. Three days after two separate researchers warned Mac clients are still vulnerable to the flaw, Apple hasn’t uttered a word, an omission that generates confusion and doubt in those who depend on the vendor. Apple’s tight-lipped policy.” Come on Apple, you preach about how you’re ‘Open Source’, but then continue along the path of the old school hide and seek ways. Hell, people are already pointing out how their methods are less open than Microsoft’s in releasing information about security. What are they so afraid of? Ah, but we’ll learn more come Thursday, I’ll be in Vegas for my third Defcon and can’t wait. Watch for updates here, or more timely ones over at our Twitter profile.

What’s wrong with this picture? Can you say debt? Good, how about recession?  Notice the gray areas, those are recession periods, we’ll wait for ours to appear here.  Who thought it could get this bad this quickly?  Here’s the graph at the Federal Reserve for you to research.  Enjoy

Found this mashup of a script that searches +5000 mp3blogs for tunes. Just type something in and see what you can find. I still contend that MP3s are the best way to discover new music - and having something so open like this allows you to hear any band you can think of. Put quotes around multi-word entries to narrow things down. (ie- “The Smoking Popes”)

This was a gadget/script someone wrote so you get directed to his page, I want to look into making my own search like this, but have it be a stand-alone, down loadable script, maybe in PHP.

I have some AVIs that I needed to get into the VOB format so I could burn them to DVD. I knew I could do this in Linux, but didn’t know how. Here is how I did it with Debian GNU/Linux (testing - Lenny). First I installed the GTK+ app, Avidemux (don’t worry, we’ll get back to the commandline soon). The I opened the AVI in Avidemux - after it imported it I clicked on FILE -> SAVE -> SAVE VIDEO - then choose where to save the file. I saved it as movie.mpg so it would work with my next step. This took some time for me, even with my duo-core 1.6Mhz 1Gig RAM laptop, but once it was complete I could play the mpg file in multimedia apps, so it worked. Now we need to make it into the format that you can burn to DVD. These are the weird looking folders named VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS that you’ll burn to the root of the DVD. To build this from an mpg is pretty easy, you need to install the commandline app dvdauthor. Once this is downloaded we need a simple XML file to tell dvdauthor what to do, so I created a base/simple one - open your text editor of choice (vim ftw!) and create a new file:

vi dvdauthor.xml

with the contents (NOTE: change all ( and )s to brackets, apparently neither the pre or code tag accepts brackets in them in wordpress - reminder to self, fix this):

(dvdauthor dest="DVD")
  (vmgm /)
   (titleset)
     (titles)
       (pgc)
         (vob file="movie.mpg" chapters="0,15:00,30:00,45:00,1:00:00"/)
       (/pgc)
      (/titles)
   (/titleset) 

Now run dvdauthor referring to new XML file:

dvdauthor -x dvdauthor.xml

When it’s done you’ll have a new directory called DVD, with the contents VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS. Open your favorite DVD burning app (I recommend GnomeBaker) and place those two direcotries in the root of the DVD and burn. Notice that in the XML file we called out chapters as 0, 15, 30, 45, 1 hour - obviously these can be further tweaked to be ‘real’ chapters, or left out all together. I’m sure there’s a GUI DVD authoring app that helps you do this, if you figure it out post below and let me know. HTH!

Here’s a cool idea, shoot pictures through some old Blublocker sunglasses and you get Blublocker photography!  While I’ve shot through different lenses before I never thought of aiming through sunglasses, but it makes sense, it’s just another filter.  Judging by the shots he’s posted on flickr, it gives things an almost otherworldly Mars-like appearance.  Cool effect, I’d like to see this done in a low light enviroment to see what really stands out.

NOTE: at work I installed a web proxy to separate internal user traffic from external traffic hitting our production servers.  While I’m not part of the network team, they asked me to do this because of my prior experience and interest in such things.  The idea of this was to be a temporary fix until they get a new line installed providing greater bandwidth, but my argument is for the continuation of this segmentation even after the new line is installed.  Below is a slightly sanitized version of my arguments for this. Note that my thoughts and comments are driven by years of running networks, thus it is something I care about and have spent years thinking about, so it is wordy.  I’d be very happy to discuss this, or other solutions, via the comments below because I never want to stop learning.

I’d like to share my thoughts in as to why I think the network is better served with keeping internal traffic and public traffic separate.  Regardless of if you use the existing web proxy server, or another one with different network topology, I care less about the tool, and more about making the network and user experience better for both internal and external users (more…)

It’s time to start up a new feature, an outlet for my critical eye that I call things I don’t like, or TIDL for short. To kick things off I’ll start with mock turtlenecks. The online Merriam-Webster dictionary defines them this way: mock turtleneck Function: noun Date: 1966  1 : a collar that is lower and usually looser than a turtleneck and is not turned over 2 : a garment with a mock turtleneck, while a Wikipedia entry paints them with the same brush as a polo neck shirt.  So they clearly fail as a turtleneck, so what’s the point? They look lame, and I suspect most people who wear them are unaware of this fact, so please, pass it on; mock turtlenecks are on the list of things that I don’t like!