Posts by baz rowlingson 12 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Sep 2007
I think this is the firewall system used at the university I work for. Not that I use it, because to get it running on my home box requires downloading a Linux binary, and I'm not polluting my home machine with random binaries. Am now smugly justifying that decision...
So instead I ssh -J through the one unix box on campus that's open to the world. Why do we even need these firewall appliances?
I remember as a kid seeing people flying RC aircraft and thinking it looked cool, and then discovering you needed a wireless radio operators license to fly them. Now any kid can zoom into your face with an out of control quadcopter. And I don't mean zoom with a camera. What happened?
I had a look through all the one-letter twitter users yesterday. Not one looks like its been taken over by spammers, and many look idle, with single-digit numbers of posts and few followings. If @N is worth $50k, surely @I [https://twitter.com/i/] is worth even more, yet whoever has it is just doing nothing. Either they are waiting for a better offer, or @N is special, or the $50k offers are scams, or twitter usernames aren't worth $50k.
I do have a four-digit slashdot ID I'd let you have for £10k though.
So this exploit lets you crash and possibly code-inject the X server. First, you need to have permission (via the Xauth mechanisms) to the server. So that's usually the screen of the machine you are sitting in front of, unless someone has given you their Xauthority file.
If its the machine you are sitting in front of then you have physical access and there are easier ways to get root.
This can only be a problem if your screen is on a long cable or KVM extension from a locked room or cupboard, or if the machine case is locked (although lockpicking exists) and alarmed.
If you remote login with (X11 forwarding) into another machine and try this exploit, you'll crash the Xserver on your local machine. Epic fail.
At school I remember there were two popular but similar Casio models, one with statistical functions and a cheaper one without. The cheaper one actually had the stats functions, only they weren't marked on the machine and when you went into stats mode the LCD had an 'ERROR' show rather than 'SD'. With a judicious application of ubiquitous 80s schoolboy huff-fluid of choice, Tippex, and a quick scribble and you had a free upgrade.
I had a Sharp EL506H because it could do hexadecimal, a vital tool for any programmer back in the late 80s. It went missing when someone did a sweep of the shared PhD office and probably got about 20 calculators.
Great idea. Suppose you have a big room that you want to use for computer teaching, or seminars, or with a clear floor for dance lessons. With a non-laptop form-factor its a real pain to rearrange the furniture.
Keep a bunch of thin-client (and ideally wireless) laptops charged up in a cupboard and you can just deal them out when you need them. You also get the thin-client advantage of only having to maintain four rack-mounted servers for forty workstations.
The user who thought it was a dumb idea up there wasn't thinking outside the beige box.
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