Techspert

Truth Happens

2007-05-10T17:38:00.001+10:00

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

2007-05-06T17:56:00.000+10:00

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.

Get youtube-install script
run the script as super user to install globally
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

2007-03-12T00:12:00.000+10:00

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

2007-02-19T12:33:00.001+10:00

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

2007-02-18T18:44:00.001+10:00

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

dsniff - a great tool for your network's security

2007-02-13T12:09:00.000+10:00

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?

2007-02-09T16:57:00.000+10:00

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?

Video games train the visual system

2007-02-08T09:06:00.000+10:00

I read an interesting article about video games and the human visual processing system:

One of the key functions of the human visual system appears to be its ability to filter out distractions. Our brains are constantly challenged to pick out critical information that exists within a visual field full of extraneous objects. This sort of challenge is also the basis for a variety of video games, leading a team of researchers from the University of Rochester to ask if gamers might have an advantage at this form of visual processing.

Full story: Ars Technica

Root DNS servers hacked

2007-02-07T18:24:00.000+10:00

"Hackers briefly overwhelmed at least three of the most important root domain name servers in the United States yesterday, in one of the most significant attacks against the Internet since 2002.". See the traffic graph here.

Source: digg.com

Performing Tricks With Your DNS Service

2007-02-07T17:59:00.000+10:00

A little-known feature of many DNS servers, such as BIND9, is the ability to do DNS wildcards.

What is a Wildcard? Wildcards in DNS, like in so many other fields of use, allow you to specify an *anything* clause, to allow the use of any name where the wildcard has been provided.

Why is this useful? You may be in a position to use wildcards to your benefit, originally a single machine would only have a single hostname assigned to it, why would it need more? but as computers have become more powerful, their ability to run multiple services simultaneously has skyrocketed, for a long time now Web servers have hosted many different websites, called virtual hosts, at the same time, on the same machine, without any noticeable decline in responsiveness.
In short, computers on the web typically have more than one hostname in use, and it can be used with wildcards to your advantage. Imagine allowing ftp access to subscribers of your services, you could give them the hostname: ftp://ftp.example.com, or you could give them a custom tailored link, that works just the same, ie: ftp://username.example.com. You may also allow their ftp space to host html files for private web space, with simple Alias settings in your web server, you could use the personal host for their site as well: http://username.example.com. Corporations, or companies and individuals with a large web presence can benefit from better organisation via sub-domains, rather than having www.example.com/admin for the employees' backend, they could use admin.example.com, the advantage of this is flexibility, in future if this admin section needed to become separated from the public site, it is now trivial to do so, if they decide to register an SSL certificate for it, that can be done easily now too, away from the main site.

Anything else? There are many great things you can do with wildcards, you could point them all to a site, and tell that site to recognise the wildcard directive, then code the site in php/asp/.net etc to recognise which host header is being used, and provide the relevant content.

Google Reader Keyboard Shortcuts

2007-02-07T10:06:00.001+10:00

LifeHacker has a great article about Google Reader and it's strength with Keyboard shortcuts, I'm a big fan of the keyboard shortcuts in gmail, so naturally this article caught my attention.

Source: Life Hacker

Picasa for GNU/Linux

2007-02-06T19:15:00.000+10:00

Picasa has been around for a while now, but until recently I hadn't had the opportunity to use it, that's because there was no Picasa program for GNU/Linux platforms.

I tested Picasa out some months ago, and a screenshot of my Ubuntu system running Picasa was even used with permission on a ZDnet article about it's Linux release.

I suggest giving it a try, without full hardware accelerated graphics drivers, you may experience problems with some full screen options, but otherwise it's very responsive and quick, the only other problem I encounted, and is documented by Google, is trying to open a file in Nautilus file browser, and selecting the file you are after, it can instead only open the correct folder, it is still up to you to try and locate the file. This is only a problem if there are many many pictures.

Download Picasa for GNU/Linux

Google apps for your Domain

2007-02-06T18:42:00.000+10:00

Have a gmail account? How about gmail for your domain? It's easier than you think, Google Apps for Your Domain is the perfect way to get gmail functionality with the personalisation of your own domain name. It doesn't just end with gmail either, you get gtalk, calendar, and other popular gmail features.

There are some drawbacks, you can't use it as your gmail account for any other services, such as blogger or AdSense. Nor does it get the gmail features as quickly, and it is currently limited to 2GB per mailbox and a total of 25 email accounts before you must pay to upgrade to more, but for free, it's unmatched value to anything else I am aware of.

So how can you get it? Visit www.google.com/a to get your google account, with full instructions on how to get your domain's MX records pointing to google's mail services.

Use your own domain with Blogger

2007-02-06T13:02:00.000+10:00

Are you serious about your web log? If you own your own domain name, you can use it with your Blogger account with a few simple clicks in Blogger's Settings tab, and a quick addition or change of your domain name.

Step 1: Create a subdomain record and set the CNAME value to ghs.google.com
Step 2: To to the Settings tab and then Publishing, see Fig. 1.
Step 3: Enter the details for your domain, then save.

Figure 1

Remove Blogger Toolbar from your blogspot page

2007-02-06T10:30:00.000+10:00

Here is a great way to hide the blogger toolbar that appears along the top of blogspot pages. Simply add the following CSS to your blogger template:

/** Show/Hide Navbar Tweak */
#navbar-iframe{opacity:0.0;filter:alpha(Opacity=0)}
#navbar-iframe:hover{opacity:1.0;filter:alpha(Opacity=100, FinishedOpacity=100)}

Source: bloggerforum.com