Truth Happens

An interesting Ad by RedHat for the GNU/Linux operating system.

I decided to post it as in the comming days I'll be compiling a list of my top must-have recommended Firefox extentions, which I believe combine to make Firefox the best browser for the internet hands-down. Firefox is closely related to the Open Source software movement that GNU/Linux is, meaning anyone can contribute to improve upon it, and ensure it remains free of cost, and free of restrictions.

Saving videos from YouTube

Thanks to the efforts of Ricardo Garcia Gonzalez, the creator and maintainer of youtube-dl you can download YouTube videos to your computer to view offline.

This script is for GNU/Linux platforms only, and will save the video as it's ID string .flv.

1. Get youtube-install script
2. run the script as super user to install globally
3. once you see "Youtube installed" you can then run youtube-dl to download the movie that link points to.
   

If you ever want to see what the video's YouTube page looks like again after downloading, you can always substititute the filename into a v= url.

GTK Themes in Linux

Ubuntu Linux, along with many other GNU/Linux distributions, comes with the Gnome Desktop Environment by default. There are a great number of themes available and more and more being added every day. However, some of the better themes require the pixmap engine to be installed, without it, the themes will install, but will fail to render partially or entirely correctly.

In Ubuntu you can easily correct this by installing the pixmap engine, simply type the following into a terminal window:

sudo apt-get install gtk2-engines-pixbuf

and you are on your way to getting amazing themes and great new looks to your desktop!

For themes and information, visit Gnome-Look.org

Shiny at 3GSM: NVIDIA next-generation mobile phone interface

Is this just a glimpse of things to come? Is it just me, or does this interface look strikingly similar to the Beryl/Compiz effects for GNU/Linux?

The Real Hustle - Waitress Card Cloning

Jess is a waitress trying to steal peoples card details using a hidden device.

dsniff - a great tool for your network's security

dsniff is described in it's man pages by its author as a plaintext password sniffer;

I wrote dsniff with honest intentions - to audit my own network, and to demonstrate the insecurity of cleartext network protocols. Please do not abuse this software.

The purpose of this software is to be used to audit the level of security on your own network, for example, you may have a main computer, and a laptop, which accesses shared files on the main computer. You password it to keep people out, but the password is being sent in plain text across your network, for anyone to read. Dsniff just makes it easier to pinpoint the problems, so you know what to fix.

Here are some examples of protocols that use plaintext insecure passwords:

• FTP
• Telnet
• SMTP
• HTTP
• POP
• NNTP
• IMAP
• LDAP
• Rlogin
• NFS
• X11
• CVS
• IRC
• AIM
• ICQ
• PostgreSQL
• Symantec pcAnywhere
• Microsoft SMB
• Microsoft SQL protocols
• and more

This was a large problem with using network hubs, when switches were introduced, they no longer echoed the message of one computer to all computers, and for a while, security through ignorance was king. We now know better, through newer breaches of security, often known as monkey or man in the middle attacks. This usually employs the arp poisoning technique. Making all hosts believe that an untrusted computer is the network gateway, thus allowing it to see all traffic through the network.

Feel free to discuss the inherent problems with many of today's still commonly used plaintext protocols, and what it means for you or your business.

VMWare to get hardware 3D acceleration support?

This supposedly shows Apple's Mac OSX running a version of Windows in a Virtual Machine, using VMWare, and displaying 3D accelerated graphics.

Source: ArsTechnica: VMWare's 3D graphics acceleration just around the corner?