Midway through December of 2014 Windbringer suffered a catastrophic hardware failure following several months of what I've come to term the Dell Death Spiral (nontrivial CPU overheating even while in single user mode, flaky wireless, USB3 ports fail, USB2 ports fail, complete system collapse). Consequently I was in a bit of a scramble to get new hardware, and after researching my options (as much as I love my Inspiron at work they don't let you finance purchases) I spec'd out a brand new Dell XPS 15.
Behind the cut I'll list Windbringer's new hardware specs and everything I did to …
If you're in the process of moving to California you have to get your car registered before your existing license plates and car registration expire. It also would behoove you to get your car registered as fast as possible because the longer you wait, the more you'll have to pay to get it done. It could easily run you $700us if you're not careful, and I advise you to not sell internal organs to get your paperwork through if you can avoid it. The first step of the process is to get your California driver's license. To do this you …
Part of every traveler's threat model today should include the following scenario:
When you're trying to fly into or out of an airport en route to someplace else, it is entirely possible that the airport's security staff will take you aside for a more thorough search and questioning while your stuff is taken someplace out of your control and analyzed. We know that there are malware packages available today that boobytrap the boot device of laptop computers to install various forms of surveillance malware which run the next time you start your machine up and compromise the OS even though …
Kali Linux (formerly Backtrack) is a distribution of Linux designed for penetration testers and information security professionals. I'll spare you the details - that's what Wikipedia is for - but I did want to post about a problem that I've been wrestling with for a couple of hours.
Kali Linux can be installed and operated like any other distribution of Linux, which means that you get all of the nifty and handy tools that you'd expect to have, like AIDE for monitoring the file system for unauthorized changes. Unfortunately, because Kali is based upon Debian, and Debian over-engineers a lot of things …
It is, in theory, possible to configure any network service to be reachable over the Tor darknet. This includes instant messaging servers, like the XMPP server EjabberD. Conversely, it must be possible to configure your instant messaging client to connect over the Tor network. I used Pidgin as my client, and here's how I did it:
I then created a new XMPP account in my Pidgin client which connects to the XMPP domain the server was configured for (let's say it's 'xmpp-domain', though …
Long-time members of the open source community no doubt remember iBiblio.org, which is one of the first and largest online archives of open source software. It doesn't see as much love as it used to due to how many open source project hosting sites there are out there (including the venerable Sourceforge, Github, and Google Code). Also, because cheap to free personal web hosting is so common, it's trivial to upload your projects these days. In recent years, however, the iBiblio team set up Terasaur, a BitTorrent tracker which makes it much easier to distribute large projects (such as …
for i in find . -maxdepth 2 -type d -name '.git' -print | awk -F/ '{print $2}'; do echo "Updating repository $i." cd $i git pull cd .. echo "Done." done
As I mentioned a couple of days ago I had to buy a new laptop because Windbringer's old hardware became unstable due to cumulative heat damage. I drive my machines pretty hard (doubly so when programming because I test in several virtual machines) so after five years of steady use it was time to upgrade. So, I upgraded with software design in mind... I purchased a Dell Inspiron 17R (under the hood it's called the N7010) and customized it online.
To save everyone's eyes I'll put the nitty-gritty behind the cut, starting with a component inventory.
Possibly the second worst thing about pulling up roots and moving someplace new is all the paperwork: You can only accomplish so much until you brave the outermost ring of Hell and return with proof of your valor. To put it another way, until the Department of Motor Vehicles deigns to give you a new driver's license, implicitly stating that you've been accepted by the state as being a full resident you'll probably be stuck. This usually involves a two step process, the first being the acquisition of a title, or legal proof that you are the lawful owner of …
Sharp-eyed readers may have noticed that I've been playing around with the theme for my website in subtle ways (mostly so that, if I do screw something up it won't hose my entire site). This is partially due to the fact that I simply can't leave well enough alone if I can help it, and partially due to the fact that I've been forced to learn HTML by Project Byzantium. But, that's neither here nor there. A few months back, some of the agents over at Telecomix put together a side project called the Summer of Datalove to promote the …
