Libraries, Liberty, and The Onion Router

I like libraries. The idea of a place where anyone can read anything is a fantastic innovation in human history.

I've written about libraries before.

Since Hypatia, and possibly before, libraries were not about just books, they are places where both learning and teaching occur. Young or old, rich or poor, the idea of welcoming everyone is inherently revolutionary.

Librarians are cool, too. If you think Google is good, go talk to a librarian. They know how to find stuff!

NeoCash Radio and The First Crypto War

NeoCash Radio has put up the short talk we had concerning the "First Crypto War", being, in my opinion, the time period from when Phil Zimmerman wrote PGP, to when the International Trafficking In Arms Regulations on the export of strong encryption were repealed.

I recommend my earlier post, "When The Net Was Young", if you haven't read it.

Spoiler: Geeks vs. NSA, Geeks won the battle, the war continues.

But there are elements to the story that I was not able to get into on the air, so I will spend a little while creating this blog post with links and additional materials concerning my comments in the radio show

The guys over at NeoCash Radio had me on for their show #77, talking about Bitcoin and all the rest of it.

Thank you, Daren and JJ, for the opportunity, and I look forward to our talk on the First Crypto War when that comes out.

Curt-

The Linux Live CD

It's been 12 years since Mark Knopper first created Knoppix, ushering in an amazing way to try running Linux: directly from a CD.

No installation hassles, no worries about losing data during an upgrade. No getting stuck in the middle of an install and not having a machine to use to track down documentation.

Just a running machine. Easily, quickly, and best of all temporarily.

Microsoft devours Skype

Skype has been purchased by Microsoft, for $8.5 Billion.

I have used Skype for years on Linux, even though Skype treated their Linux client as something like a red-headed step-child. Features like video chat were always included in the Linux client long after they were in the Windows version, bug fixes were slow, stuff like that.

But, and here's the biggest thing: It worked.

SSH, X11, and You

SSH Encrypted Network Connections


Recently I read an article where the author went through great pains to launch an application on a remote system and display it locally, over an encrypted session.


Doing this is actually far, far easier to do than ggarron makes it out to be. It's no more difficult than a single option in SSH. But first, what is SSH to you?


Right off the bat, please, don't fear the command line. If you're new to UNIX style systems, like Linux, the command line can seem daunting. It just sits there waiting for you to type something. Don't let it bother you, as long as you're not root you can't do much harm.

The logo of OpenSSH

Secure Shell is a command line application that allows you to replace telnet, ftp and xhost with a secure link to a remote system with serious protection of the data you transfer.


SSH uses passwords, or can be configured to use Public Key encryption, like GunPG or PGP do. Passwords can work into a system the first time, Public Key authentication has to be set up ahead of time.


For a good SSH primer, if you don't have a "Unix Power Utilities" volume sitting around, this article on WikiHow.com seems quite straight forward. There are lots of results if you use Google to look for "ssh howto", and I've noticed that the Ubuntu forums tend to cater well to "first time users". The OpenSSH.com Frequently Asked Questions list gets rather technical. 

Why is Linux security so much better than Windows? Part 2

A recent article came across my radar,

Black ops: how HBGary wrote backdoors for the government, by Nate Anderson

One particular paragraph in this article anyone interested in computer security really ought to read sprang out at me, on page 5:

"This is ideal because it’s trivial to remotely seed C&C messages into any networked Windows host," noted Hoglund, "even if the host in question has full Windows firewalling enabled."

This comment really isn't a "why is Linux security so much better", but just one example of that principle. The entire article deserves reading if for nothing else than to realize just how confident these people are that they can write such cracking software at will.

Friends don't let friends use Windows.