I’ve started a wiki at wiki.securabit.com.  I’m looking for people who want to help make this thing special.  The idea behind it is a security oriented reference wiki for everything hands on in our industry.  Tutorials and HOWTO guides for everything from secure programming to configuring your routers or whatever securely, etc.  I want to keep the focus pretty narrow so that it’s a technical, factual reference, that isn’t very long winded.  Short and to the point is the goal here.   If you’re interested in helping out please let us know.

I started playing around with Tabula Rasa yesterday.  I think it’ll keep me occupied for a couple months while I wait for some more good Xbox 360 releases.  It’s definitely a good bit of fun, but not something I can get addicted to.

Nokia N770 Internet Tablet

I wooted this little baby the other day for $135 shipped and have been playing with it since yesterday evening. It’s an internet tablet, and allows you to do far more than most low-end PDA type gadgets. I’ve never been that much of an electronic toy person so I don’t have a lot of experience with the numerous different types of things out there that allow you to connect to the internet via wifi vice whatever you happen to have for your cellular plan. It runs a variant of Debian Linux with the 2.6.12 kernel. The device has dimensions of 5.5×3.1×0.7 inches, making it roughly the same size as a PSP. Read more »

For those of you who never watched Mr. Wizard when you were growing up, you missed out on quite a show.  I used to watch it before I went to school at least a couple of mornings per week for a couple of years, and it was downright fascinating every time.  He made science easy and fun to understand.

Don Herbert died yesterday at the age of 89 from bone cancer.  If you had never heard of him go check out his website, you might learn a thing or two.

Learned a new word today, which applies quite nicely to me.   Audodidacticism

It’s basically defines a person whose education is primarily through self-directed learning, self-teaching.  It’s not any sort of special label, as everyone can be defined by this at numerous points in their lives, but I did find it neat to learn a new word.

I found it by reading about Alan Watts, whom I learned about when I stumbled upon this very insightful passage by him, redistributed and animated by Trey Parker and Matt Stone (South Park guys).

I bought one of these over the weekend, and it arrived yesterday.  Setup was a breeze, didn’t bother using the CD.  I now have WPA2-PSK securing my wireless network.  Definitely worth the upgrade over my old Gateway router that came with my laptop back in 2004.

I’m going to upgrade the firmware on it that was discussed in this lifehacker article.  Hopefully I don’t brick the router.

While doing some daily reading, I came across a good article on CNN. It states that with the click of the mouse complete strangers can find Social Security numbers, birthdates, bank loans and even digitized signatures that a clever thief could easily manipulate onto official-looking documents. Basically everything anyone would need to steal your identity is right online, put there by local and state government agencies. Even the president is at risk of identity theft. Now I don’t know about you, but when the president of the United States is at risk then it goes to show that not enough is being done.

Very few Americans know how vulnerable they are when it comes to online public records. Thieves are less likely to make a trip to a county recorder’s office to steal information when they can do it anonymously through the Internet. Before sending any personal information across the web, at the very least ensure you are using a secure web browser (SSL). For more information on this story you can visit CNN.

For those of you familiar with the the specification (and for those of you who aren’t) (which is estimated to become official in April of 2008) it appears that the Task Group charged with creating the specification does not seem to have intentions to implement protection for control frames on the wireless network.

This means it will still be vulnerable to DoS (Denial-of-Service) type attacks that exploit control techniques over the wireless spectrum.

Given that the specification is still about 2 years off there is still plenty of time to add some mitigation to this, although the process is likely as bureaucratic as any so this might not be feasible.

Source Article

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802.11