knutee

Ok, very late update!
Got hired by IBM in Dublin and moved down to Ireland in August. New job, apartment hunting and socializing filled up my entire day and I kept skipping updates on this page.
Now things have calmed down and hopefully I will get more time to write on this page again!

Due to me moving to a new apartment, the updates on this site will be a bit slow in the coming days.

Just installed Dean’s Code Highlighter v1.2 on the site, so I can post code in a more readable way. It’s currently not coloring the code as it’s supposed to, something I’ll try to sort out as soon as possible. Let me know if you have any problems getting the code boxes to show correctly.

Example

Last night I got the urge to make a strong password generator for this site. Don’t really know why, just inspiration I guess. However, it was getting quite late and I fell asleep after 3 lines of code. Luckily, the inspiration stayed with me, and today I got the grunt work done on the code.

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Tuesday a major patch was released to fix a flaw in DNS that potentially could give hackers total control of the internet. The vulnerability was found 6 months ago by Dan Kaminsky of IOActive.

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Finally finished some of the guides and project pages I’ve been writing on! Be sure to check them out.

Also, I would like to mention something Bre Pettis is working on these days; The history of the Chaos Computer Club. Check out part 1 and part 2 on his blog. I wont repeat the general presentation of the CCC here, but could not resist quoting this gem:

It became a crime to connect anything besides a telephone to the telephone network. If caught, you could go to prison for 5 years for hooking up a modem without an official seal. It was felt that having a computer answer a phone was illegal. The CCC confronted this by asking, “Would it be ok to have a cat answer the phone?” When they got a confused, but positive answer, they built a contraption made of Lego and a Fischer-Technique model sets that would lift the phone and place it on an acoustic coupler. They called it “The Cat.”

Update

Part 3

A quite common finding in firewall/gateway logs is brute-force SSH attacks. As a result, many choose to implement security systems that blacklists the source of the attack for a certain amount of time. This method however, has two considerable weakneses.
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I came across this beauty while surfing the internet;

The Texas legislature has decided that computer repair folks need a government-issued PI (Private Investigator) license when performing what the state calls “an investigation.” If a computer repair person is analyzing data on a customer’s computer, this would fall under “an investigation”, and without a PI license he or she could face up to one year in jail and a $4,000 fine. Additionally, any customer knowingly enlisting an unlicensed repair person’s help is subject to the same fines. To get the license, one needs either a criminal justice degree or complete a three-year apprenticeship under a licensed PI.

So, when Joe Average gets a spyware infection and acquires help from his local repair shop, the person performing the repair will need a criminal justice degree? I must admit I see what they are getting at, but there must be a better way to solve this privacy issue.

Link here

Today I wanted to set up a IDS solution for my Windows partition, just for fun really. I decided to go with OSSEC, which is a host-based IDS, but this still requires you to have a server running.

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Lately, I’ve been thinking about replacing all of my computer equipment with new stuff. First part of this is of course to hit the web pages and look at whats out there. However, for every single product I looked up, I ended up on HP’s web site when I found the perfect product. Why is this?

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