Organizing a LUG and being active on Linux forums, I find that the same questions get asked over and over. Here are the most common questions that I’ve answered.
Why Linux?
Troubleshooting
Booting
Best Practices
Security
Privacy
...
Most nerds accept that email is not private. We are willing to send unencrypted emails to our friends, family and coworkers because it is convenient. We forget that email is really like a postcard, not a letter, so anyone along the way can read all the contents.
A few people use encrypted email. The...
You will need to be in Marietta, Georgia, USA next week for this to be useful.
Event: ALE and ALE-NW : GPG Keysigning Party
When: Thursday, December 13th at 7:30pm
Where: SPSU Campus, Atrium “J” Bldg. rm J266
Visit http://ale.org/ for more information.
Advanced prep is required so be certain to ...
This week we’ve all read how General Petraeus was forced out of his position because the FBI was able to read his emails. I’ll leave the moral question about affairs for you to determine on your own, however, from a technology perspective, he did many things wrong.
I’ve added an up...
Today I needed to reboot my main desktop to prevent a stupid setup of processes from running. I'm working on a presentation about a backup tool and had kicked off a snapshot. A large number of processes were running, so rather than hunt them all down, I decided that a reboot would be the easiest ...
KeePassX is my password manager of choice.
Enigmail is the GnuPG signature and encryption add-on for Thunderbird.
Pinentry is used by Enigmail to enable secure entry of PINs, passwords and pass phrases. It blocks copy/paste and forces all keyboard entry into the pinentry textfield. That’s great...
In this Tax season, I find myself needing to share sensitive documents with relatively unsophisticated people and organizations. How should I share my files with them?
The Options
There are a few options to get those sensitive files to a provider. I will attempt to list the options, then describe t...
INAL, but as an enterprise architect, here are a few key things I can think of that law offices need to add to their existing network and computer security practices.
Truecrypt – encryption is critical. Use it on all laptops and any data transferred off site.
par2 – parity to ensure th...
I can’t take credit for this idea, but I read about it someplace over 5 years ago. Why is it possible to have altered photo IDs at all anymore?
Use PKI.
When you request an ID (Drivers License, Photo ID, Passport), the request includes a photo. That photo is converted to electronic form and use...
