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No, not a lesson in CyberSecurity.  Just a tale. I was working on setting secure shell (SSH) access to a remote computer from mine.  I've installed Linux on it and have enabled SSH access via RSA keys only.  That's the only real way of doing it properly.  Only allow users to come in (disallowing the root user) via SSH as long as they have the 4096bit RSA key locally on their computer that's registered with the remote computer. I'm using a few years old Watchguard firewall one that I've not had muhc experience with.  I managed to log into it as the administrator and to look at what it would take to get SSH port forwarded to the Linux computer in question. With that Watchguard I was able to set…

I've been going over a bunch of things these past two weeks and have had to deal with a bunch of guides that are just out of date.  One might think that the author is busy and the like.  OK, so be it.  But some of these guides are the only guides out there and some of this stuff is pretty complex. I was working on getting openvpn running on my pfsense router.  I wanted it to work with frootvpn.  As I searched around I found guides for PIA and a bunch of those guides were quite varied in how.  I watched youtube videos.  Those were even more varied.  None of the guides handled any sort of issue that might crop up. When I was putting together some asterisk servers…

Muscle Memory It's really a bitch.  It does have the consequence of producing some very bad results.  Working hard to get something done quickly to solve a problem that you aren't familiar with then finding the solution then putting that solution in place where you use muscle memory instead of thinking through the actual issue.  Here's what happened.  Man was I perplexed and when I discovered what I'd actually done was a pissed at myself. My main website is self hosted.  I use letsencrypt to provide the certificates.  Every so often you get a message that the certificate is out of date and needs to be renewed.  I did this by creating a script that runs via a cronjob off the root account every 2.5 months.  One script triggers as…

I'm a believer in giving you what you pay for.  My services have been offered for over a decade now. I do just about everything.  My prices are the same as they have been for over 5 years.  I haven't increased my costs. Today though I received two calls.  One was from someone that wanted to know if I could install Windows on his computer.  I explained that I do that all the time virtually every day.  I checked further by asking if he had the product key for windows.  He said he did not have the disc and didn't know the product key.  He said he had a virus that he couldn't get off his computer.  He said he had a second hard drive.  He said the virus was…

I'm trying to keep a log of some of the interesting things that I had to deal with on a day to day basis. Things done/encountered yesterday: Early in the morning Robbie and his mom showed up to get her obitalk device configured.  About a week ago we had to go through and clean up her accounts.  She couldn't remember the email addresses that she needed nor the passwords.  We had to go through all the accounts recovering the passwords once the accounts were identified.  Her gmail account was tied to her yahoo account for password recovery and she didn't know the names or passwords of either.  We recovered those and I made sure she brought a notepad where she could write down the names and passwords of each so…

http://www.ghacks.net/2016/07/28/microsoft-removes-policies-windows-10-pro/

This article discusses other older news articles pre-dating the 9/11 terrorist attack in NY, NY.  It demonstrates that terrorists were using encryption at least 6 month prior to the attack and certainly it can easily be extrapolated that in order to use you had to know about encryption before you began using it. This article also explains that encryption technologies are prolific.  The program Telegram is produced by a German entity and WhatsApp is based on open source technology, where in neither case will the US government be successful at legislating against it by demanding backdoors. Yes, ISIS Is Using Encryption -- But Not Very Well

In a Rigged System, Hillary Clinton Is Too Big to Indict In a Rigged System, Hillary Clinton Is Too Big to Indict In a Rigged System, Hillary Clinton Is Too Big to Indict In a Rigged System, Hillary Clinton Is Too Big to Indict

Don't get me wrong.  I like the computer.  It's just that there are issues.  Some of those are currently insurmountable. So, I start this off with some negative feelings and you have to ask how is this article going to turn out.  It is hard to say because though this is a nice computer there are issues and it would be nice if I didn't have to deal with them.  Mostly they surround Linux.  However that may be, turning to Windows 10 is not the answer.  It is far to egregious to use.  I'll either re-purpose this as a dedicated phone system or figure something out. (more…)

From the article: The White House has urged Republican lawmakers to give up efforts to strip the Federal Communications Commission of regulatory powers and tens of millions of dollars in budget funding. President Obama's senior advisers would recommend that he veto the House of Representatives' budget bill for fiscal 2017 because of these and other provisions. The Republican budget proposal "includes highly problematic ideological provisions," like ones that "prevent the Federal Communications Commission from promoting a free and open Internet and encouraging competition in the set-top box market, impacting millions of broadband and cable customers," the Office of Management and Budget said in a statement of administration policy yesterday. Emphasis added by me. White House warns Congress not to kill net neutrality and cable box rules