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 [...]
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 [...]
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.
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 American Populace is being inconvenienced, spied on, stripped of Constitutional Rights, and taxed without any idea where that money is going. The perpetrator is not some foreign, militant, activist group, it’s our own Government. There’s no outcry. All of these treacheries are being committed to increase security while the fact remains [...]
As you may or may not know, I am gainfully employed by the Federal Government in the area of Information Security. Recently the Bush Administration responded to media hype to issue a Federal Mandate requiring all government owned laptops use encryption technologies to encrypt their data.
There are two interpretations of this memo.
Encrypt the ENTIRE [...]
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I programmed in PHP for a mortgage company. I ended up leaving that job for personal reasons. Apparently, 40 hours/week truly is not enough. I was a perl programmer prior to that excursion, and I guess I never grew out of it. [...]
Most of the organizations I’ve been a part of, the IT staff usually has exemptions from IT policies if not significantly escalated privileges. This distances them from their users. I also happen to know and test MANY different ways to circumvent the policies and controls in place on the network. You can’t [...]
As a programmer, I’ve had the concept of “DON’T EVER TRUST YOUR USERS” beaten into my head. For programmers, this concept is incredibly important. Users almost always exceed your expectations for creativity with your new application. By planning for unexpected input, and properly cleaning all variables you can theoretically account for abuses [...]