JDPFu.com 2025

When traveling, we probably are not paranoid enough.

Here’s an article about your smartphone and/or laptop being hacked when overseas.

I’m fairly paranoid, but it had me wondering if I am paranoid enough when traveling overseas.

Are you? What steps do you take to be more secure than the next person? Do you believe that is enough?

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 visit the link ASAP to get your keys setup and added to the list. Do this at least 2 days prior to the meeting to allow time for the organizers to complete their preparation.

GPG is useful if you want to send secure email like General Petraeus should have.. Having signed keys is not strictly required for gpg to be used, but it does increase the trust similar to how the W-O-T does for internet websites.

Other articles here about using GPG.

A few readers might be interested in this article about eReader privacy from the EFF.

Sadly, the privacy ratings for the eReader that many people are considering or already have is not included in the chart or article. If you have an eReader device and use the most popular reading softwares on it, chances are that what you read is being tracked and shared more than you'd like. I haven't seen any tinfoil hats available to block the eReaders from reporting back to the home office that don't also break the features. If you care about personal privacy, the 1 pg article is definitely worth your time.

The last few years I’ve been manually fighting blog spam here. Usually it isn’t all that bad, but recently it became significant, hundreds of messages a day. Since that happened, I’ve been looking for a simple and built-in way to address the blog spam issue. I don’t know when it happened, but the blog software added recaptcha support. I’ve had a key for that service some time now … Nov 2009 … but have just deployed it today. It seems to be working, but obviously having a 3rd party able to track all pages viewed here is less than ideal. I’m sorry.

Anyway, if it works well this week, I’ll probably enable live comment posts.

Help me test this solution over the next few weeks by posting on-topic comments please.

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 update below, since new technical information has become known.

Happiness is …. seeing Repair complete.

Remote Desktops Rock! Sometimes an ssh shell into another box just isn’t enough.

Just a few minutes ago I wanted to add a new TV recording on PBS. Normally, I do that through a web interface to Windows7 Media Center, but due to recording conflicts, that wasn’t possible. Remoting into the virtual machine where Windows7 Media Center runs was needed. Simple enough since that VM runs Windows7 Ultimate AND has RDP, the Windows Remote Desktop Server, running.

The last month or so, this blog has been acting up. Partially broken. Today, with the help of the Typosphere IRC channel, I discovered a fix and implemented it.

From the Better Be Nice To Your Network Administrator Department here’s a story from Information Week about a brokerage firm being screwed by their network admin. Seems he preferred to be savior, not worker. This meant that he needed to break things so he could fix them when everyone else was watching and waiting.

The last month or so, this VM has been running low on storage thanks to some aggressive firewall filtering and increased logging to make abusive guests automatically blocked. Sorry to all my friends in China and Russia who are blocked now.

This morning, the blog was really slow and sitting at 97% disk utilization. It hit 100% yesterday, so some quick log file deletions were needed. I needed to add storage sooner than later. It is Saturday morning – a normal system maintenance period. The time was right.

Following the instructions to increase KVM VM Image File Size and 20 minutes later, all is well. Plus the VM and blog seem to be much, much faster. I’d forgotten how performance is slowed on UNIX systems when the file system gets full.

$ df
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/vda1              5228060   3588288   1376312  73% /

Plenty of space now. Don’t forget to use parted and gparted to handle larger HDDs with 4K boundaries correctly, automatically, not fdisk. Those tools work correctly for older HDDs too.

Anyway, I hope it makes your experience visiting my little corner of the internet a tiny bit more enjoyable.