Iraqi crypto broken
Posted by creining | Filed under Security
Iraqi crypto broken. It appears that the unconfirmed assassination of Saddam was due in part to the interception and decryption of the radio system he was using to communicate with his commanders. The alleged radio system was a Jaguar V, sold to Iraq by the British in 1985. It is common knowledge that first world countries don’t export encryption to other countries that they can’t already break at that time; in this case it’s *20* year old technology.
Pathetic and futile war on drugs
Posted by creining | Filed under Uncategorized
I find it pathetic that the futile and unrealistic War on Drugs in the U.S. now includes busting web sites selling bongs. Approximately $50 billion a year is spent on the War on Drugs, of which $10 billion is earmarked to combat marijuana usage (where is the media on *this* one?) I think the first step in drug policy reform is marijuana decriminalization along with more money being devoted to help “hard” drug users that want to kick their habit. Drugs are here to stay and the government is fighting this battle without logic, common sense, justice, and morality by focusing on prohibition-style incarceration rather than emphasizing treatment.
Google search fun
Posted by creining | Filed under Security
I like Google. Google is fun. Google doesn’t discriminate. I know a few Google tricks if you may.
Be a good pirate: index apache mp3 $bandname Outlook Express email backups: index apache inbox .dbx Nagios: "host status totals", "service details for all hosts", "view notifications for all hosts" Ntop: allinurl: ":3000/trafficStats.html" ACID: allinurl: acid_main.php Social Security numbers? +ssn +filetype:xls
MIT card counting
Posted by creining | Filed under Travel
I was in Vegas a couple weeks ago. Played some $10 blackjack which was entertaining. I was up around $100 at one point but ended up leaving Vegas about $100 poorer. No big deal. I mention this because there’s a fascinating story about the MIT card counting team that allegedly bagged millions from casinos across the US. I think I’ll just stick to a simple table though.
Mozilla roadmap
Posted by creining | Filed under Uncategorized
Major news about the new mozilla.org roadmap. In short, out with the monolithic Mozilla and in with the lightweight Phoenix while spinning off the application suite. The excessive modularisation, bloat, and design decisions made Mozilla fall out of favor with me a long time ago. The rearchitecting of the Gecko engine can only be an improvement although Phoenix has shown it is a capable rendering engine. I think it speaks volumes that some of the major Mozilla developers, such as David Hyatt and Don Melton, were hired to design Apple’s Safari browser from the ground up and chose Konqueror’s KHTML rendering engine over Gecko. Another newsworthy mention is that Phoenix will now be officially supported on Mac OSX, providing an additional fast/lightweight browser to the pre-existing Camino and Safari.
How military radio communications are intercepted
Posted by creining | Filed under Security
How military radio communications are intercepted
Setting up a local CVS repository
Posted by creining | Filed under Linux/BSD
I started using CVS as a local repository for this site in order to better manage it. Also, I wanted to start blogging and wrestled with blogger and my template for awhile but finally won. This site conforms to XHTML 1.1 Strict. Woot. Here’s how I set up the local respository:
First we need to create the initial directory structure.
$ cd $ mkdir www $ cd www $ mkdir cvs-rep
Next we will create the initial CVS repository.
$ cvs -d ~/www/cvs-rep init
Of course we will want to take advantage of the CVSROOT environment variable.
$ CVSROOT=~/www/cvs-rep;export CVSROOT
Next we want to create the website directory in ~/www.
wget -k -m http://www.packetfu.org
We will import all the files into the repository with a release name, start.
$ cd www.packetfu.org $ cvs import www.packetfu.org creining start
Then remove the www.packetfu.org directory and instruct CVS to checkout a copy.
$ rm -rf www.packetfu.org $ cvs checkout www.packetfu.org
Now we can edit and commit files into CVS.
$ cd www.packetfu.org $ vi index.html $ cvs commit index.html
When we are done we can delete the work area, www.packetfu.org, until we want
to check it out of CVS again.
$ cvs release -d www.packetfu.org
When publishing to the web we do not want to include the CVS directories, so
we use export.
$ cvs export -r HEAD www.packetfu.org