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. Read the rest of this entry »
A lawsuit has been filed against Best Buy for price match fraud. You know how they tout on their commercials that if you find a better deal somewhere else, they will match the price? Well, I guess that doesn’t count their own web site.
The Consumerist reports the details of the lawsuit and how the shenanigans occur:
1. You walk into a Best Buy to purchase a sale item you saw on their site.
2. The employee tells you that the item is no longer on sale, and shows you what looks to be Best Buy’s website, but it’s really a secret intranet that Best Buy’s corporate office denies exists. The price on the website shows that the sale is over.
3. You cry and leave, then at home you see that the sale isn’t over at all. What happened?
I have acquired a growing distaste for Best Buy and will only go there when dire circumstances require it, such as needing a new wireless router at 8PM on a Friday night. (heh)
Now I’ll definitely think about staying away at all costs.
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.
I'm providing the original text file for ease of use Grab it here - ClamAV.on.Fedora
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Background:
This guide will use the ClamAV CLI scanner and the ClamAV-Update script (freshclam).
I wrote this to help all the Home\SOHO users (servers or desktops).
ClamAV has various tools/packages/plugins for email servers etc. but that’s another story.
If you wish to learn more visit their home site: http://www.clamav.net/
Obviously, you can change anything you want, but this should get you going.
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!
! WARNING ! – DO NOT VISIT THE SITES BELOW – ! WARNING !
I noticed some Pakistan site had pingbacks for some articles we wrote, but no comments from the person that copy and pasted them (verbatim) on their site.
Well, being the person that I am, I fired up “Wireshark” on my Linux box (of course) to investigate their site further.
I noticed they had various other sites tied to the same domain, so I visited another one (other than the blog) and low and behold something was a little fishy.
Their “photo” site tried to launch a little gift for me……an “IFrame exploit” and if you’re running Windows you get a special prize for the visit…..a worm. ;0)
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:
$> yum clean all
Run that, and it refreshes your local repository. The next time you go to update packages your server will refresh everything with the Red Hat respository, and all will be good!
Have you ever been in a rush or just had a complete brain freeze with your MySQL passwords?
Well…..I have. 
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Step # 1 : Stop mysql service
SHELL> /etc/init.d/mysql stop
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Step # 2: Start to MySQL server w/o password:
SHELL> mysqld_safe --skip-grant-tables &
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Step # 3: Connect to mysql server using mysql client and setup the new root password:
SHELL> mysql -u rootmysql> use mysql; mysql> update user set password=PASSWORD("$PASSWORD") where User='root'; mysql> flush privileges; mysql> quit
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Step #4: Stop and Restart MySQL Server: (try your new $PASSWORD)
SHELL> /etc/init.d/mysql stop SHELL> /etc/init.d/mysql start SHELL> mysql -u root -p
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Note: There are other ways to reset the password, but I like this one.
Over the past few years several people on the VMware communities forums have released patches to fix the vmware modules for the next “fresh” release of the Linux Kernel / Distro. I’ve used them in the past with much success, but I generally like waiting for the official VMware support. However, I’m pretty excited about Fedora 11 (just to many new goodies not to play) and I noticed there’s a new updated patch for 2.6.29 and even 2.6.30 Kernels!
VMware Workstation 6.5.2 module patches/discussion: 2.6.29
VMware Workstation 6.5.2 module patches/discussion: 2.6.30
Sun has official Fedora 11 support (and now 2.6.31) with VirtualBox: VirtualBox 3.0.0 (if that’s your cup of tea)
Note: Obviously Fedora is the test bed for the QEMU/KVM merger so you can go that route as well, but I love VMware. ;0)
Here is a great article to get you moving on the QEMU/KVM way of life: Clik Me
HTH
Starting in Fedora 10 (but disabled by default) Red Hat Fedora started providing the KMS Framework.
Fedora – KMS page: Click Me
X.Org – KMS page : Click Me
Now if you’ve upgraded/installed the new Fedora 11 (or even Ubuntu 9.x etc.) KMS is enabled by default and you may have noticed there are new/still some regressions in the kernel and certain Intel and ATI cards may have issues.
If you’re having some crazy issues, fear not, you may have an answer here.
Intel Video Issues: Click Me
Ati/AMD Video Issues: Click Me
Note: This isn’t Fedora specific, you may have noticed you cant even enable desktop effects in Ubuntu 9.0.4 under certain cards (without de-blacklisting)
This is just the natural progression of trying to make things better and part of the growing pains that going with non-enterprise distros of Linux can give it’s users……but end the end, it will be worth it.
HTH.