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After eating lunch at a local restaurant yesterday, I noticed that when I was signing my receipt they had printed my whole credit card number on there. I hadn’t seen that happen in years, and I immediately scratched it out. I happened to be with a group of cyber security guys, and they were all in disbelief as well.
It would be very easy for a thief to pick up your receipt just after you leave, then go home and have an online shopping spree. The server or anyone else handling your receipt could do the same thing. Continue Reading
Detective Inspector Bruce van der Graaf from the Computer Crime Investigation Unit of the NSW Police says, “”If you are using the internet for a commercial transaction, use a Linux boot up disk – such as Ubuntu or some of the other flavours…It gives you an operating system which is perfectly clean and operates only in the memory of the computer and is a perfectly safe way of doing internet banking,”
Sounds like a good plan to me, but then, I’m sure most of you reading this are already in agreement. It’s just good to see this sort of thing hitting major news sites.
There are certain free apps I have come to rely upon when setting up any new installation of Windows. Some of these aid in my work, some of them just aid in a providing better Windows experience. I thought I’d create a list of my top 5 favorites. To qualify for this list, applications must be lightweight on system resources when running, preferrably open source, and free.
If you have any suggestions for apps which fit that description and make your life easier, post them in the comments.
If you find any of these tools useful, please make a donation to the author!
1. DColor is a great tool for saving space on your desktop by tweaking your icons. It allows you to resize them, and even display them in ‘list view’, as you would see a list of files in Windows Explorer. DColor will also let you recolor the icon text and background. It’s a tiny app which takes up very little system resources.
2. Color Cop is an eyedropper color picker which can sit in the foreground of all open windows. This comes in really handy when you are swapping back and forth between Photoshop and Dreamweaver, or are trying to pick colors from photographs. It allows for easy copy/paste to and from using your choice of RGB or several flavors of hex values. No installation — just launch it and use it.
3. ImgBurn is my favorite disc burning tool. You can run it from a command line or from the graphical interface, and it supports CD, DVD, HD DVD, and Blue Ray discs. ImgBurn is lightweight and sports a ton of tools and options. I have yet to run across a disc drive which it didn’t support out of the box.
4. Filezilla – I never leave home without this one. Not only is it free for Windows, but Filezilla supports Mac, Linux, BSD, and more. Providing a great interface for FTP and SFTP file transfers, it’s easy to use, lightweight, and full of options. My favorite combo of traits!
During some recent server patches on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3, I kept getting ‘depsolve’ errors on several packages. This was odd, as I had not made any changes to anything, installed anything new, or removed anything.
Turns out this is a known bug in 5.3, and luckily, the solution is simple:
$> yum clean all
Run that, and it refreshes your local repository. The next time you go to update packages your server will refresh everything with the Red Hat respository, and all will be good!
If you are a conscientious system administrator, you like to keep tabs on your server by checking root’s email at least once a day, correct? If you manage more than one server, or get tired of having to log in to check your mail, you can redirect where email for the root user gets sent.
I ran into problems on Red Hat Enterprise 5.2 doing this, so I thought I’d post the resolution here.
I wrote previously about Facebook hacking, which is something everyone needs to be aware of, but there is a more immediate Facebook danger which millions of people every day are already exploited by. Not only could it lead to insecurity, but your personal data is being exposed to advertisers every time you take one of those “What kind of hamburger are you” quizzes.
Facebook applications get access to all data of users who sign up, though users sign up for dozens of one-time use applications like these quizzes without thinking twice. There are hundreds of applications springing up every day, and Facebook’s model of implementing no technical sandboxing and policing applications when things go wrong is completely unscalable.
This applies to RedHat Enterprise 4 & 5, and by association to Fedora and CentOS. It probably works on some other distros as well, but your mileage may vary.
I am constantly having to reset user passwords, as I use the “three failures and your account is locked” schema, as well as set passwords to expire every 60 days. Continue Reading
If you live in the USA, did you know that your tax dollars are being used for some really good purposes?
You better believe it. For example, the NSA provides some great guides and tools for securing your operating system, whether your are on a Mac, or running Windows, Linux, or Solaris.
Some of the guides can get a little complex (especially the Linux and Solaris ones), but even if you do some of what they suggest, you are increasing the security of your OS and are likely to learn a few things at the same time.
There are more resources from other parts of the government as well. Continue Reading
So you have decided you need a web site. You are presented with two possible paths:
1. Build it yourself
2. Hire someone to build it for you
Both paths can present challenges, but unless you are technically inclined, have a lot of time and determination, desire to learn some coding, and are pretty handy with graphics, you are likely to be doing yourself (and your business) a disservice by trying to do it accomplish this on your own. There are many places online and application syou can buy which promise the allure of “building your own web site”, but in this business, you tend to get what you pay for. Continue Reading