I had the privilege of speaking at LinuxWorld 2008 in San Francisco this year. It was a lot of fun and I certainly enjoyed the discussions with folks after my talk. My talk was on “Network Introspection with Open Source Tools” and I threatened to post updates on my progress here.
I’ve been working on packaging the code that I have into something that might be useful to the general public. I’ll post another blog entry when I have a rough cut version of the package available for testing/breaking.
I saw a posting recently by someone who described the books that changed their life. In an era of complete and total connection to TV, Internet, and Radio I thought the idea was excellent. If you haven’t been reading books, I highly recommend that you take some time and head down to your local library to check them out.
Keep in mind, I rarely read books in school. After 5th Grade, I preferred to spend my time playing sports, building Legos, and screwing around. I could “get by” on Cliff’s Notes, classroom dialog, and other 3rd party accounts of books. I’ve finally taken a liking to reading, so this is a good time to share my list of books that changed my life in chronological order of my first reading them.
If you’ve noticed (probably not), recently the server has been unreachable. A few weeks back this was due to a bad hard drive. I finally transferred everything over to the new hard drive and got the sites back up and running thanks to a few friends and The Planet.
Then this weekend, the data center that hosts this server exploded. The site is back up and running now, but there should be a few more hours of downtime on the horizon as they install and integrate a permanent electrical infrastructure to the data center.
Also, I’ve been selected to speak at the Linux World Expo in San Fransisco this year! My talk is “Network Introspection with Open Source Tools.” If you’re going, please stop by and heckle me!
I may start updating this blog at some point.
I’ve attended 4 Perl Conferences in the past 2 years. This year’s Pittsburgh Perl Workshop is the first that I’ve presented at. My talk was titled Security through Detection, Prevention, and Introspection. I have slides available.
I originally wanted to present a bunch of code, but I couldn’t really find a way to make the code very interesting. I wanted to teach people that security is part of all of their jobs. I made it a point to reveal some of the idiocy of the Federal Government Mandates in relation to IT Security. I also gave an overview of the security system I’m building with Perl at work.
There were laughs, smiles, and a lot of people woke up. All in all, I’d say it went very well. I’d like to refine the presentation and possibly resubmit for YAPC::NA this year. Bigger audience, and an opportunity for me to conquer a large slice of my stage fright.
If anyone out there reading this saw the presentation and has feedback, please comment on this post!
UPDATE: If you enjoyed the content of my talk on security, please check out these articles I’ve written:
In our first installment, we looked at some solutions to provide a hospitable environment for proxy evasion. Today, we’ll dig deep into how to do this with my favorite protocol of all time, SSH.
OpenSSH is a glorious implementation of a critical network protocol. Most networks have disabled and banned the use of telnet, rsh, and ftp in favor of the more “secure” SSH protocol. OpenSSH runs on every platform I’ve encountered (using CygWin on Windows). SSH provides an encrypted channel for data transfer. Usually that’s Keyboard Interactive Sessions or Files (using SCP), however SSH is capable of setting up multiple channels and acting as a SOCKS4 or SOCKS5 Proxy.
I love cfengine. There are tons of resources out there for managing all kinds of common and uncommon system administration tasks. Rather than regurgitate all that information I wanted to share how I worked around what has been noted as a short coming of cfengine, clients copying information back to the master server.
Gizmodo is stepping up to declare March, Boycott the RIAA Month.
This needs to happen. Justice must be swift and unrelenting. Back when the RIAA conned Metallica to lead the charge against Napster, they killed a significant portion of the internet. I’d go as far as to blame them for being the catalyst of the dotCom Bust.
Both the RIAA and MPAA need to shut the hell up and embrace new technologies.
(I promise I’ll post the Proxy Evasion Article as soon as I can get my Virtual Machine running!)
The holidays are always a lot of fun. I ran out of time to do some things like keeping this blog updated. There’s been a ton of stuff in the news relevant to IT security. I’m not going to recap.
I’ll be continuing my Proxy Evasion series as soon as I get a chance to put together some screen shots for the tutorial part of the article.
Hopefully that article will be completed relatively soon.
Hope everyone had a great holiday season.
Pick up a copy of this book:
There are a ridiculous number of organizations using transparent proxying as a means to limit access to external resources. The idea is that by proxying all web traffic, they can keep employees from visiting porn sites. I’m not necessarily convinced that this does them much good. My general experience has been that the type of people looking at porn during the day will not become more productive as a result of losing the freedom to look at porn at work. They’ll still be useless employees that you have to performance review instead of firing for inappropriate use of technology.
Additionally, these proxies do very little to increase the security of the network. I’m fairly certain that by the time the Proxy Vendor is alerted to malware distributing websites, an anti-virus company has already issued an update. This is redundant. Normally, I’d fully support this redundant - ok, I’ll drop the buzzword - Defense in Depth solution.
However, piggy-backing on the heels of ay real security value, which is best described as the graph of 1/x, are made up categories of websites to deter your users from doing things that your CEO believes are inappropriate. Interestingly enough, if the CEO is involved in Fantasy Football, you’ll be hard pressed to find an IT Infrastructure that denotes that classification of sites as inappropriate. I digress.
So, I’ve had this domain for 7 years now. The concept behind the name goes back even further than that. In highschool in 1997, our AP Calculus teacher made the mistake of getting backed into a corner when displaying a graph of f(x)=1/x.
You see, the graph approaches positive infinity as you approach zero from the left, and negative infinity as you approach zero from the right. A group of us in the back of the classroom started playing with the justifications that division by zero was possible and yielded a result. Our teacher made the mistake of using this graph as a foray into the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus. If division by zero is possible, it collapses the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus.
Well, today a guy made a number and assigned it to be the value of dividing by zero. Hold there bud, me and four of my friends did that in AP Calculus at a private high school in Bel Air, MD in 1997. Had our results been taken seriously, we should have been excused from our AP Calculus course.
I can get more into the theory, but as you can see from the Way Back Machine, we documented our theory online as early as 2001.
This annoys me almost as much as Imaginary Numbers.