When it comes to passwords nearly everyone has their own system to deal with them. But how secure are they? Today most passwords under 9 characters are not really deemed secure thanks in large part to the databases that are available to simply look up the passwords. But aren’t they encrypted or secured from prying eyes you may be thinking? Sure but the most common form is to save them in MD5. SHA1 and similar variants are uncommon as well as better methods but for the vast array of online web sites, MD5 is considered standard.
Continue reading 'How Secure Is Your Password?'»
Security
cracker, data, login, md5, method, methods, online, OS, password, passwords, RC, site, ssl, Store, system, unknown
I received a rather interesting spam the other day and it would seem to have included some well private details. It looks like this email contains login information for various mail systems but I honestly did not follow up with it. I figured it may be of interest to the owners of these sites so I’m posting it here rather than attempt to start tracking abuse emails for various domains.
Continue reading 'Spam with a bonus — ‘Oops’'»
Security
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If you are using Rythmbox and having trouble with getting windows shares to work, I found a neat workaround for this. I am using Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala which uses Gnome Desktop, and found a pretty simple solution, courtesy of launchpad.net which is the site where all bugs related to Ubuntu or any packages tracked back upstream can be filed, and hopefully solved. This bug isn’t specific to Ubuntu or Gnome, but is actually a bug with Rythmbox. You can read the bug at the link in this article, or simply follow these instructions.
From a shell or terminal (to open on click on “Applications” then “Accessories” then ‘Terminal’) copy and paste the following:
gnomevfs-ls smb://mywinpc/mymusic
Make sure before you hit enter to change ‘mywinpc’ to the actual NAME of the PC your share is located on, and ‘mymusic’ is changed to the name of the share your music is found. This step will then display some output and tell you to then enter the username to login, the WORKGROUP name, and of course your password. Once done it will majically mount the drive for you.
Now you should be able to start Rythmbox and select ‘Import folder’ and find this location readily available.
Computers & Tech
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Released to the public on October 22 Canonical’s latest and greatest Ubuntu yet “Karmic Koala 9.10“. For many folks using a Linux distribution probably ranks up there with a visit to the dentist, but I have to say that as the kernel keeps improving in leaps and bounds the software wrapped around it can just work on the majority of hardware without issue.
Sure many folks may try it out and find out that it ‘does not work’ with their specific hardware, but compared with last years 8.10 the numbers are down with the sad exception of two particular vendors; ATI and Intel. ATI recently dropped support for much of their older hardware, but then released a new series of drivers that do support. Thankfully using the older drivers or using the open source communities versions can at least get them working, if you have problems with the more supported drivers. Intel on the other hand has basically thrust it’s middle finger up at the linux community with a blatant refusal to provide open source to allow many distributions to be able to integrate support, so for many it means booting to a broken system, and downloading proprietary drivers and praying it works. Obviously this isn’t the end of the world, but from my perspective a seriously ‘good’ reason to avoid using Intel hardware, especially if you want to use wine to run Windows games or applications, you’d do so much better with non-Intel chipsets. nVidia has the best support out of the box for most people not only linux users, but also windows users that it’s becoming a staple requirement. Don’t get me wrong, Intel does provide drivers, but do not expect them to work directly from installation. In some cases the generic drivers get installed and it works, in other cases you’re faced with non-working hardware and off to the various support forums seeking a solution. Thankfully they are available.
In my situation I decided to get a new laptop and specifically bought a Compaq CQ60 which features NO Intel or ATI hardware, simply so I could avoid any hassles. I’m pretty good at fixing these issues, but if I am spending money and the amount is equal, why buy something with hardware that will not work? So without further adieu, I release my notes on installing Ubuntu 9.10 x64 on this laptop.
Continue reading 'Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala” Release Candidate – Installation Notes'»
Computers & Tech
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Well I finally have the site migrated over. I can honestly say the testing was the hardest part, several weeks fiddling with problems on the test server, and when we went live, only one minor hiccup which I’m glad to say Tim from Hostpapa reminded us…check file permissions. Doh!
Now that this is done this comes with good news and bad news. First the good news.
Continue reading 'Changed Site'»
Site News & Updates
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