JDPFu.com 2025

Do you like Tom Clancy novels? Here’s a real-life story where the spies failed.

Operational Security, OPSEC, is hard. Even for the CIA.
Presentation by Matthew Cole of NBC News given at the Blackhat conference in 2013.

Seems that the metadata is more important than the actual conversation for cell phones. 25 minutes watching this video will make it clear even to non-technical people why we need to end US, state and local government spying of US citizens by the use of electronic means and license plate tracking.

Metadata alone was used by Italian authorities to determine about 18 US spies with 30 phones who snatched a suspect (Italian citizen) off the street in Milan in 2003. That person showed up about 14 months later in Egypt.

Phone metadata discovered this using a tool called “Analysts Notebook.”

DVDisaster – Replacement for ddrescue for optical media?

The manpage says:

DVDISASTER – data loss/scratch/aging protection for CD/DVD media

I’ve used it here to recover a few old DVDs that couldn’t be read by ddrescue at all. It failed with a few other DVDs too, so it isn’t a magic bullet.

It was already in the Ubuntu repos.

I think we should go fishing tomorrow.

Suggestion

Use sudoedit instead of sudo {insert-gui-editor-here}

A few days ago, I signed up for Netflix DVD service. The DVD catalog is much deeper than their streaming offers, that is why. I live in an area with a LARGE netflix distribution center across town and folks I spoke with over the years said they’d get DVDs the following day.

My expectations were high and hopeful for 2015. Seems both Netflix, NF, and the USPS are working against me.

Ansible is a DevOps tool. It is amazing. The purpose of this post is to get you thinking how to use ansible in your environment, not teach you to use it completely.

If you ever need to run a command on 2-50,000 servers and get the results back, then I can’t think of any easier, more flexible tool to use – better than shell scripts since there are so many administrative features already built into Ansible.

When Ubuntu 14.04 was released things were mostly ok, except on 1 desktop here, not all of them, keepassx autotype/autocomplete started failing. I could copy/paste using cntl-b and cntl-c into the userid/password files, but that’s 10x slower than pressing cntl-v and the tool fills in the userid{tab}password{enter} …

The fix ….

IoT is supposed to mean the Internet of Things – that means how every device from lamps, to TVs, baby monitors, home security devices, to washers, dryers, toasters, blenders, … thermostats, basically anything that uses batteries in the home should be connected to the internet so we can monitor them from our smart phones and remote computers anywhere in the world.

The killer app? Wouldn’t it be nice to have a hot bath ready for you at 7pm exactly 106 degF? Filled exactly to the point for your body to fill to the brim? Of course, you didn’t know you needed a bath for relaxation until about 4pm – when at work still.

People are flocking to Linux these days. Often, they bring with them computer knowledge from other systems that simply do not apply for most Linux systems.

One of those is about installing software. There is no setup.exe or install.exe for Linux systems. If fact, if you find yourself installing 99.999999% of Linux software in that way, you’ve already failed. Of course, this applies to Linux distros with a package manager. If you are running a non-package manager Linux, then you aren’t reading this anyway.

If you work in IT, security is a key concern.

Ever wanted a place with a huge list of security presentations, by the people who know?
Here it is.

Get your video downloaders ( youtube-dl is amazing) going and I’ll see you back here in 4 months after you’ve watched them ALL. ;)

These videos cover hacking AD+Kerberos networks, password cracking, key loggers, IDS/IPS, and even physical attacks like key bumping. Some of the videos will be about non-security stuff – media centers, DOCSIS, and of course, Linux and virtualization.

Came across an article on how to backup Ubuntu/Debian and related distro package lists, settings, icons and themes Seemed like a useful article, so I skimmed it.

It was about 20 pgs of text and 26 images. Is that really easier? They installed a GUI app that is completely redundant and harder to automate. I would be embarrassed. Way to make something simple, seem really hard.