Computer Tips -Tech Info

There were several articles about a new “wardriving” technique that was talked about at Defcon (this topic and a bit more Defcon coverage here). In fact, this takes the driving out of the mix and involves launching a rocket. Essentially rockets were equiped with access points and launched to get a 6000+ foot view (for the largest) of the wireless landscape. Now, they didn’t turn up a LOT, but they did see an impressive range of area *(50 square miles for the largest). One of the smaller rockets made it to 2000 feet. It was a rural area where this was done, so they didn’t pick up much. Although it had a range of 4 miles, the big rocket could only find 2 networks.

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Linux.com has a great writeup on making banner images quickly and easily from the command line (or a script). The catch here is that text is the content for the image. Under linux that will require the following programs…. enscript and convert. Of course since this can be done from the command line, it can be scripted which might make an easy way to display email addresses without allowing address harvesting among other things… Anyway, here’s a summary…

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One of the real frustrations with phone tech support is translating step by step what is needed to the person on the other end. I know it sounds easy, but in reality – what if they’ve got xyz theme for their menuing and it’s not there, what if… oh you know – they’ve just got something in a different place than you expect it. The person on the other end usually has to be the eyes and that, many times doesn’t work out great. That’s one reason that I’ve worked to start doing the remote tech support because that way I can BE AT the machine and what seems like an eternity on the phone can actually become a short and quick resolution. Anyway – Newsforge today detailed a way to capture videos of actions on screen in a “how-to” format under linux with ScreenKast and share the how-to video online with captorials.com

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According to incidents.org a denial of service vulnerability has been noted in all versions of clamav prior to 0.88.4 (inclusive). At incidents last report the download for 0.88.4 was back after disappearing for a while which seemed to indicate a fix, however. I wasn’t aware 0.88.4 had been released before today (?). It looks as though http://www.clamav.net/ has perhaps a re-release of 0.88.4? that fixes it? Clamav is a popular open source antivirus scanning engine.

–UPDATED AND CORRECTED – looking at the Secunia advisory version 0.88.3 and 0.88.2 are vulnerable others may be – and I suspect that 0.88.4 is the version that will fix it – so it looks as though 0.88.4 will be the fixed version. AGAIN – it looks as though 0.88.4 FIXES the DoS vulnerability.

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There was a time when people looked to shape images for political benefit. (I mean political in most ALL senses of the word whether it’s domestic or international or issue oriented politics etc.) By this I mean, “Framing the picture” the right way, in front of a banner, cropping tight on a speaker so you don’t see wacky signs and the best “message” can be put forward. It can mean having a “photo op” in front of an impressive symbol or it can simply be the way an image of a landscape is framed that can tell an amazing story. Yes, I know this still goes on, but I have to wonder if the “organic” ways of “controlling the message” conveyed by a picture have become a thing of the past. This weekend, late Saturday night to be exact, I saw the beginnings of a blog-storm over a Reuters photograph of the aftermath of some of the activity in Lebanon.

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Backwards compatibility. It’s something that many vendors strive for and Microsoft is certainly one that has placed a value on making things backwards compatible for third party software. According to this story at Sci-Tech Today, Symantec thinks this eagerness to be backwards compatible may be a big issue for Vista’s security. They expect several “privilige escalation” vulnerabilities to be found and say that if those such vulnerabilities are discovered in the prompt for user consent…. well essentially all of the systems security precautions could be undermined. The whitepaper on the details talks about several issues that have been patched at this stage in the Vista development process, but the main question is how many are out there?

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Security Focus has a brief that refers to a WMF zero-day vulnerability that affects Windows XP SP2. I suspect this may get a bit of coverage throughout the day. It appears as though there are actually 3 issues cited.

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It looks as though VMWare is looking to test some of their software for the Mac. Unlike Parallels desktop, Vmware’s offering will be geared more towards a corporate environment.

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I use wget a LOT. Many times in working with a website I’ve got a ssh console opened to the site and if there’s a plugin that I’d like to download it doesn’t make sense to download and then upload, I want to just download it directly from xyz.com webserver to the website where it will be installed. However, many times people have set up rules to block wget downloads. Yes, I know people use wget to suck down entire websites, it uses up bandwidth, etc. etc. Well. Wget is capable of sending a different user-agent.

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In working on the post related to software updates and making sure it was easy to find the category feed JUST for that led me on a “round the world” kind of quest to find a way to put the category feeds in the footer of pages in WordPress. The first thing I tried was this this category livebookmarks plugin, which gives some options to browsers that recognize feeds in the header of the page. It’s interesting, but I may wind up uninstalling. What I HAVE found is this solution which was EXACTLY what I was looking for.

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