JDPFu.com 2025

Ok, so when MSFT switched data providers over 2 years ago, both my Win7 media center systems (7mc going forward) stopped getting guide data. I worked and worked and worked with every available solution. On the main 7mc system started working about a month later … after manually having to setup and schedule recordings for 2 weeks. Most of the recommended solutions had people changing their ZIP code … well, since 1 of the machines has been working with my correct ZIP, I knew that wasn’t the issue. Followed all the so-called solutions , most of which said to flush 7MC and reload using a different, nearby, ZIP. Did this multiple times for the first 6 months or so. Never worked.

Another example of why you shouldn’t trust consumer routers. d-link

It isn’t just this specific d-link router. We’ve seen the same issues over and over and over with pretty much every non-enterprise vendor.

Plus we don’t want our devices used by crackers to DDoS Brian Krebs anymore, right?

We are Linux people. We CAN do this ourselves.

Always wanted a way to get the full content from websites without all the extra stuff and have a way to take it with me on a portable device without a data plan. Wallabag to the rescue.

Plus, I don’t want too many central orgs like google/fb/twitter/NSA/GCHQ/KGB/Mom knowing what I was reading.

Wallabag is like read-it-later. Once setup (and the setup is much like Nextcloud), then almost any webpage I’m viewing inside a browser can be grabbed for later using “cntl-alt-s” – That tells a browser plugin to tell Wallabag to save that URL for reading later. Great for longer Ars or Krebs on Security articles. Also a great way to grab instructions for setting up something non-trivial as a record. Wallabag supports annotations, so if those instructions don’t work, we can add comments/corrections. We can also share this content with others.

A friend found this link.
Security Conferences
Seems to have all the security conferences in the USA covered.

Nice 1-stop location to find more videos than anyone will be able to watch. There is a slight downside. The few videos I’ve watched were encoded a h.265/HEVC. HW support for this codec is non-existent and my Kodi Raspberry Pi v2 can’t play those without massive stuttering. Had to re-encode the videos before watching.

Why Are Driverless Cars Cool? After all, we’ve been driving vehicles for over 100 yrs and it seems to work very nicely, right?

Ok, think back to that old western movie (or The Three Musketeers ) when the cowboy whistled to his horse and the horse moved where she/he was needed for the fast get-away. Remember how nice that was – great animal, neat trick, right?

But what does that have to do with driverless cars?

Selling security vs doing security. The first one is a hell of a lot easier.

Link

With so many different vendors pushing thousands of different products, we all need a little help to find the right product to fit our needs.

Product reviews were helpful, but those have been taken over by commercial interests gaming the system. Read somewhere that 80% of product reviews on sites like Amazon are fake, put up by review management companies in violation of the ToS for Amazon, but still it is next to impossible to stop these.

So a few websites started making reviews which seemed to be based on facts and real trials. Sorta like Consumer Reports, but free. There is a difference between how Consumer Reports does their reviews and how these websites, like TheWirecutter.com do theirs. I´ll explain below.

Logitech C920 Works on ChromeOS, but not on Linux? Huh?

Be certain to read the last paragraph. It started working and has been solid.

For the last 4 months, I´ve had a chromebook running ChromeOS because I hadn´t figured out how to get it to boot Linux with an encrypted SSD off the internal drive. Solved that last week (completely removed the write-protect screw) and was surprised that the Logitech C920 which has been working under ChromeOS perfectly for all these months doesn´t work at all under Ubuntu-Mate 16.04.

• List of C920 Supported OSes
• Logitech Support about Linux and C920

• https://tox.chat/ – Secured connections using 50+ character IDs which are manually shared. Thick clients exist for all the popular platforms. Beta level today. I´ve never used it.
• https://talky.io/ – Javascript dependent on WebRTC (Firefox, Chromium and Chome) that runs in a browser. No real security except using an odd room name so others don’t accidentally join. To join, both a webcam and microphone seem to be mandatory, but can be disabled (mute buttons for each) after joining, before anyone notices. Just make up an odd room name, share it, that´s it. https://talky.io/JDPFU4562dgr – for example. Have everyone go there to meet (limit 15).

FIDO-u2f is a newish standard to provide low-cost security devices as a second form of authentication. The normal way this works is

• userid
• password
• on-time token (OTP or U2F or Oauth)

This provides added assurances that a week password won’t lead to account compromises. The U2F protocol makes the setup and daily use of a small USB device fairly simple.

Also, u2f is cross-platform primarily because it acts like a keyboard as far as the OS thinks, so Linux, OSX and Windows are each supported.

That’s the theory. Everyone seems to forget a few minor details.

Below I spell out what I’ve learned when setting up a Yubikey u2f device for use at a few online accounts. Google accounts, dropbox and github are the main accounts, but because google is an authenticator for many other online accounts, those are indirectly secured as well.

A YubiKey NEO firmware v3.3.x will be used as well.