Chuck's Blog

About time. Click here for a read.

Two key paragraphs to notice:

Industry stakeholders were quick to weigh in about the FCC vote. Many have charged that the proceeding is a backdoor way to write net neutrality rules without a congressional mandate. Such rules would prevent broadband providers from favoring certain Internet traffic.

Changing broadband’s regulatory status is a “terrible idea,” Verizon’s top lobbyist, Tom Tauke, said in a statement. “Rather than attempting to make the new world of broadband fit into the regulatory scheme of the old telephone world, the FCC should acknowledge that this is an issue Congress should address.”

These statements definitely made my day. If it’s going to irritate Verizon then I’m sure it’s a step towards proper net neutrality.

ettercap is a little tool I’ve been playing with the past few days, along with metasploit. For anyone who has never heard of either of these tools, give them a shot in a test environment. What they can do is pretty scary stuff.

And yes, I do not care if you know my internal network IP for my laptop. Or one of freenode’s servers for that matter. However, in the last few examples I blurred out my IRC nick and MAC addresses, because I do care about those.

Gotta love secondary school administration.. often they think they’re top of the world. Heres a case that doesn’t have a chance of making it to the supreme court. Blake J Robbins v Lower Merion School District (link to Boing-Boing article)

Essentially this brings the key fact people forget often back to light: If you did not install the operating system from ground up, the box ain’t secure.

Though it is very sad that someone in the administration thought they could get away with this. School districts shouldn’t police kids outside of school — thats a parents job. This is not a new issue in the news though, there are many other examples of schools overstepping their bounds and trying to police kids for things they do on Facebook outside of school. Using the argument that the school owns the laptops and thus can monitor what is done on them should be null and voided too. I can’t put a keylogger on my machine, lend it to a neighbor, and sue them for viewing child porn sites with evidence from the keylogger.

I don’t care what the government says – if they do it outside of school, than it isn’t the schools business, even if it will distract kids the next day in class.

Alright, I’ll confess. I do have a Facebook account, even though I am a bit of a privacy nut. However, unlike most users I have employed the privacy settings to protect me from the average data mining theif.

Although it looks like it’s about to get a bit harder for these folks to get the data they want easily. Facebook just popped up a wizard today for me as I logged in, one that allowed me to change my privacy settings. Naturally I really didn’t change anything, because I already had my settings perfected, but this looks like it will help with eliminating most users privacy issues. Sure, the more hidden options like preventing your account from being indexed by search engines isn’t there, but maybe this wizard will help people realize it does exist.

Props to Facebook for making an effort, even if it is very small.

SSH has a nifty feature included with it that allows it to act as a SOCKS server. To use it simply try

ssh -D port account@server

And setup your local configuration files to use the server localhost:port as a SOCKS server. Every connection will then be relayed through server, which allows you to bypass filters the local network. It also encrypts all the data from your local computer to server, which works out great for those of us who quite often want to check our email on insecure networks.

Just remember though: The encryption doesn’t mean your data is safe from sniffing. It’s only safe from data sniffing inside the local network, so you still need to use HTTPS connections and such.