Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one, apart from the sender and intended recipient. There are a lot of ways to order a 52 card deck. You can hide a message by putting the cards in the correct order. The only thing missing to take this from an obscure message to a secure one is a password, or pre-shared key that serves as the agreed upon starting order of the deck.

The default out-of-the-box installation should delete any additional anonymous users after installation and disallow remote logins completely, but it doesn’t. At least all you have to do is run the mysql_secure_installation script to do so.

Daemon
Daniel Suarez’s book, “Daemon”, just released December 29th, 2009 is a great read. I picked it up in an airport over the weekend and couldn’t put it down. I’m not an avid recreational reader. I only pick up a work of fiction about every three months or so. Sometimes I …

The update experience in Fedora, including the recently released Fedora 12, is flawed. There are just too many packages flooding the repositories for the current release model to function efficiently and securely. There seems to be no requirement for updates to only fix bugs and add hardware support while avoiding implementing brand new features. But is the drive here just to become more like Windows?

While there are application groups for just about every category of software from graphics, software development, office productivity, multimedia, and others, there’s no specific group for security or auditing related packages. Here’s a list of the security and auditing related packages that are now available in the standard Fedora 12 repositories. From intrusion detection to data recovery, Fedora has come a long way in the last couple of years.

Microsoft built 7 from the ground up to be a secure computing environment and retained the key security features that helped protect Vista, such as Kernel Patch Protection, Data Execution Prevention, Address Space Layout Randomization, and Mandatory Integrity Levels, but Windows Vista and Windows XP are equally at risk to viruses and exploits and overall Vista brings only marginal security advantages over XP. Net gain, zero.

Australian news sites are reporting that Integral Energy, the company that supplies energy throughout New South Wales and Queensland, has suffered through a W32.Virut.CF virus outbreak. The company had to disinfect all 1000 of their desktops. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that the company’s anti-virus software hadn’t been updated since at least February. Luckily for the Aussies, the power grid’s servers run on Sun Solaris.

My suggestion is to come up with a system that makes sense to you. If it asks for your favorite pet’s name, maybe the answer could be “nail biting” or “chocolate lab”. You just have to remember how you translated the secret question.

The model has strong principals, but the goals blow my mind. I’ll explain in a minute, check out the principles first.

Here’s yet another good reason to think about breaking free from your mental slavery to microsoft. The same ones who had 4 xp desks in a perpetually broken state, even with AV and limited accounts, haven’t broken a default linux install yet.