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{ Category Archives } Security

What Goes Out Can Come Back In

Remember the old saying “What goes up must come down”, referring to the gravitational pull? Well, I have a similar saying for firewalls: What goes out can come back in. This is a cool SSH trick that will stump even the most seasoned network administrators.
The trick is port forwarding. The idea is [...]

Securing Your Connection On Freenode

Freenode offers a couple wonderful services to any IRC user that I’m afraid many just know about. They outline it very well on their website, but I’m afraid that many an IRC user aren’t taking advantage of them. As such, seeing as though my blog syndicates a couple planets, hopefully I will reach [...]

Image Puzzle

This image will circumvent Digital Restrictions Management on HD-DVD AACS disks. I have licensed this image under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States license. Enjoy!

More SSH Tips

I just love OpenSSH. That is the single greatest tool on unix-like operating systems, as far as I am concerned. I’ve blogged about SSH plenty. SSH tunneling, SSH forwarding, SSHFS and more. Needless to say, I believe that SSH is the single most flexible and powerful package on unix-like operating systems. [...]

Setting The Standards Bar

One of the things that I hate about instant messaging clients is the lack of adherence to standards. In fact, the specification that I think should be adhered to the most, isn’t. I’ve blogged about this before, so I apologize to the planets that I am syndicated to in advance for duplicating content. [...]

My GnuPG Locality Solution

Yesterday, I provided a problem about how to use my GnuPG key regardless of my location. In reality, there are only 3 computers that I sit at: Hercules, my laptop, and my main companion; Zeus, my “other” desktop, that is actually far more powerful than Hercules, but my wife is always on it [...]

My GnuPG Locality Problem

I ran into a problem. I need to have GnuPG wherever I am, mainly due to the fact that I need to digitally sign my email wherever I go. I need my GPG key with me.
However, I do not want to install my GPG key on every PC I work on (work, school, etc.). [...]

SSHFS

Series two, in a string if posts about SSH is sshfs. For those unaware, sshfs provides the ability to mount a remote SSH server as though it was a local device on your machine. But first, let me show you how to browse a SSH remote system using a GUI on the Gnome [...]

SSH Key Authentication

This is going to be old hat for some, but I know there are those who can benefit from it, so I’ll post a brief tutorial here. This post is to extend upon the post published by Christer on Ubuntu Tutorials.
There is a lot of software on the Linux system that I take for [...]

Using GPG With Mozilla Thunderbird

It’s a morning of security. What can I say? I just updated my GPG keypair, and after hitting “publish”, I thought to myself “Why not write a quick tutorial on using GPG with Thunderbird?”. So, here it is.
Before I get into it, however, I want to talk about my motivations for creating [...]

Changes To My Public GPG Key

GPG is an integral part of my life. I’ve been using it since 2004 when a friend of mine, Glen Kingston, helped generate my key. Since then, I’ve been using it just about every day. I use it to digitally sign all of my outgoing email, and I encourage people to encrypt [...]

Time For Higher Security In Digital Email Signatures

It’s time to step it up with security when signing emails digitally with your GnuPG/OpenPGP key. For the longest time, SHA-1 has been the default hash for signing text documents. However, SHA-1, a 160-bit strength hashing algorithm has been broken. The tough thing, is there have been plenty of collisions with SHA-1 [...]

Irssi Proxy

I’ve blogged on and on about Irssi, the single best IRC client out there, as most of you would agree. The reason it is so great, is the sheer number of features it has. There is no other client like it. In fact, here is a quick and dirty Top 10, why [...]

Secure Passphrases

I just read Christer’s post about creating secure passwords using a simple Linux utility ‘pwgen’. Good read, and even better tutorial. However, I hope you don’t mind a bit Christer, but I’m going to pick on your post a little.
pwgen creates 8-character random passwords. Using the various options, you can increase/decrease the [...]

SSH! It’s A Secret!

I’m serious- don’t tell anyone. It could cause havoc in the IT department when they find out that they can no longer sniff your packets, or log your traffic. What am I talking about? SSH tunneling, of course.
SSH is a powerful piece of software, but what’s even better is it’s ability to [...]