Posts by Automatic jack

Cops hate encryption but the NSA loves it when you use PGP

It's simple and free to set up a tunnel to any hosting account that lets you SSH. Putty can setup the tunnel and Firefox can be set to use the putty connection as a SOCKS proxy. Bye Bye ISP snooping and content restrictions.

Docker loads up $15m to push containerization into bit barns

What's new?

There's nothing particularly cutting edge about this. OpenVZ has been around for a decade, as has the upstream commercial version, Virtuozzo. Linux containers (LXC) is part of the kernel and Solaris has had containers for a long time.

OpenVZ in particular is very mature, with snapshoting and application templating built in. More importantly, most of these established alternatives are free..

Google shakes up US utility with green power tariff

Re: The next question...

Greenpeace UK use Rackspace who have a fairly extensive green energy policy.

Man says he lost $500,000 in virtual currency heist

Fiat

You could just as easily say he had a wad of paper claiming to be worth $500K

One good thing about bitcoin is that it may cause people to consider the worth of fiat currency.

Bitcoin slump follows senators’ threats

The central banks

and the Fed especially, are not democratically elected bodies, they are cartels of private individuals.

Hackers poison well of open-source FTP app

ProFTPd supports SFTP

It's one of the few FTP servers to support SFTP for virtual users rather than just Unix accounts, which in normal circumstances would be plenty secure enough (barring backdoored source code of course).

Patch Tuesday sounds death knell for Win XP SP2

Fail

Windows peaked at Windows 2000 - The first genuinely stable version of windows.

Everything since has been a naggier and increasingly crippled version of the OS.

I'm on Windows 7 64 bit now it it sucks ass - apps are unstable and even core operating system components regularly stop responding. I reckon I'll be downgrading to 32 bit XP SP3 before long. I would downgrade to Win2000 if it was still being supported and patched.

Might even be time to run Ucuntu ...

Aussies face 10 year browsing lock-up

Protect your liberty - Use crypto

As has been stated many times, there are so many ways to circumvent this kind of filtering. The reg did a great HowTo for securing your email a while back:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/14/email_encryption_how_to/

And regarding Hotmail / Gmail - they already have far to much access to their users personal information.

I use a nice (and free) combination of SSH / Putty and SOCKS to create a secure tunnel to the net via a cheap hosting account. Firefox can be configured to forward DNS requests to the remote proxy too, so my ISP has zero profile on my surfing habits.

http://thinkhole.org/wp/2006/05/10/howto-secure-firefox-and-im-with-putty/

It's not that I have anything to hide (apart from my plans to geneticly cross breed the worlds strongest chilli plant), it's entirely about having the right to individual privacy - and that is a right that we all have to exercise or it WILL be taken away from us.

"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin

As true now as it was then, if not more so.

Webhost denies poor passwords led to catastrophic hack

Really feel for Rus

I've been hosting with A2B2 for about 3 years now, after a succession of previous poor hosts. During this time I've had a competent and professional service. I think it's a real shame that Rus is losing his business over this.

Webhost hack wipes out data for 100,000 sites

Re: Real Hypervisors

@ Christopher Ahrens

HyperVM is not the hypervisor, it is a web based management tool for Xen and Virtuozzo which are both "real" virtualisation technologies.

The real culprit here is LX Labs for not delivering a secure product, despite their claims on their website:

http://lxlabs.com/software/kloxo/security/

"We take security as the most serious of the concerns and have worked hard to create a secure environment where you can be confident about the server's state."

This is clearly rubbish.

MPs to probe ISP snooping and throttling

Simple Steps to beat Phorm?

Surely only the retail ISPs would be dabbling with Phorm, so could it be bypassed by using an encrypted connection to a proxy server at a commercial datacentre?

Eg:

1) Rent a cheap linux VPS for ~ £5 a month

2) yum install squid

3) download putty and create an encrypted SSH tunnel to your new proxy

DPI my encryption bitch

Jackalope gets jaunty with Ubuntu nip and tuck

Bluetooth headset support?

The deal breaker for me with Intrepid was the lamentably poor bluetooth support. These days I use skype for all of my landline and international telephony as it saves me a fortune each month. I really hope Jaunty has got this nailed down...

Brutish SSH attacks continue to bear fruit

Simple steps

It's pretty straightforward to change the SSH port and only allow certificate based logins. We use Login Failure Daemon (LFD) to perm ban IPs that fail 5 times in a given time period. Also agee with Frumious, this is more about poor password choices than SSH weakness.