Minority Report Computer is Real
No really. Watch here.
Now they just need to finish up Jarvis from the Iron Man movie and we’re all set for RL to become obsolete.
Free OSX Tools I Use Everyday
Since a lot of my friends have been “converting” over to Apple machines, they often ask about programs I have running that they don’t recognize. Here’s a (fully linked) partial list of applications I use daily either at work or when at home:
- Firefox
- Adium
- Chicken of the VNC
- Remote Desktop Connection
- Smultron
- Visual NetTools
- iStumbler
- iTool
- Skitch
- TrueCrypt
- TinyAlarm
- Carbon Copy Cloner
- 7Zip
- AppTrap
- Growl
- VLC
- GeekTool
- iStat Menus
- MacLoc
Now I know I said free software, but I had to include the following paid software I couldn’t live without:
Update: Want more? Here’s one list and another list.
What did I miss? Comments.
Spam is unpredictable
Does anyone remember when the FBI busted a major spam ring? Bravo to those boys for what must have been a tough job.
Here’s a pic of what a huge difference it made according to submissions to spamcop.net:
Hmmm, not much to see here.
Today I saw an article in the Washington Post talking about how Web Host McColo was shutdown after being accused with spam activity. Here’s this week’s spamcop.net pic:
I leave it up to you the reader to determine which day and at what time McColo was voted off the island.
alltop
My RSS reader constantly has 1000+ entries left to read. My average day doesn’t budget enough time to get through them faster than they arrive.
Time to reduce, reus– err, prioritize!
Many of my favorite blogs are part of the gawker media network, which features a “top posts tag.” This is perfect. I can now let other people do the dirty work of weeding out the less interesting posts and leave only the cream of each day’s crop. Great, but what if I want to read / stumble new websites?
alltop‘s got you covered.
Thousands of Sacrificial Lambs
Problem:
- So you say ‘hackers’ are constantly knocking on the perimeter door to your network.
- You claim that they are trying to ‘map’ your network.
- You insist that they will cherry pick targets based on fingerprint data, wins/dns name, or other factors.
Proposition:
- Fill up a virtual machine host with hundreds to thousands of fake hosts that each have random fingerprint appearance and different name. They don’t need to do anything except listen on a few ports (on a set of believable ports, to mimic a real OS), and maybe send a fake packet or two around (you know, like M$ boxes like to do because they get lonely.) A full blown app like vmware is overkill for this purpose. A perl script on five tiny embedded systems would suffice.
Just think of the possibilities.
- Each would dilute any reconnaissance tool with bogus hosts
- Each is indistinguishable from real hosts without attempting to check the function of each service for each address.
- Each could also be setup to send alerts to your InfoSec dept when anyone attempts to connect to them; (only two categories of connectors: 1) misconfigured friendlies, and 2) bad guys.)
- Every second the scanner spends poking around in these fake hosts, your real ones aren’t touched.
- You can brag about how many ‘hosts’ are on the network you manage.
- If ‘fancy’ is your middle name, you could write a script that would forward connection attempts to a honeypot and attempt to grab a fresh piece of badware.
Thoughts?
P.S. I admit I partly stole this idea from Tom Liston’s LaBrea tarpit.
Snap `Em Good
After trying out a window manager that forces windows to always be tiled (thus preventing any window from getting covered up by another) I realized how silly this idea is. The whole point of a windows based GUI system is to hide inactive panes and prominently display those in use.
But the seed was planted. The ability to line up windows with no gaps was beneficial in certain situations. Thanks to Steve Gibson of Security Now! for pointing out Allsnap.
