Obama on Leadership

Anyone who has seen examples of strong leadership in the military from their CO or 1SG, from their CEO, or even their principal. My first boss out of college, when I was a public school teacher, actually stands out was one of the best leaders I had the pleasure of working for in the last 15 years.

Notice the humility, the focus on strong organizations, teamwork, and putting egos aside to solve a common purpose. This is definitely worth watching regardless of the politics (or your thoughts on Obama), but this sort of talk is impossible to imagine from a Dubya or Clinton. Not sure about McCain.

Childhood Psychiatric Meds on NYT Cover

As I picked up the bagels on the little shop on Dempster with the kindly older lady with the Russian accent (yes I will miss hearing just as much Russian as Spanish--and the fresh bagels) I was surprised to see this article on the front page of the NY Times on potential conflict of interest

Dr. Biederman is one of the most influential researchers in child psychiatry and is widely admired for focusing the field’s attention on its most troubled young patients. Although many of his studies are small and often financed by drug makers, his work helped to fuel a controversial 40-fold increase from 1994 to 2003 in the diagnosis of pediatric bipolar disorder, which is characterized by severe mood swings, and a rapid rise in the use of antipsychotic medicines in children. The Grassley investigation did not address research quality.

Doctors have known for years that antipsychotic drugs, sometimes called major tranquilizers, can quickly subdue children. But youngsters appear to be especially susceptible to the weight gain and metabolic problems caused by the drugs, and it is far from clear that the medications improve children’s lives over time, experts say.

In the last 25 years, drug and device makers have displaced the federal government as the primary source of research financing, and industry support is vital to many university research programs. But as corporate research executives recruit the brightest scientists, their brethren in marketing departments have discovered that some of these same scientists can be terrific pitchmen.

I'm not sure what is bringing this out in the open but there definitely seems to be increased coverage in the media about the challenges of diagnosing and treating childhood bipolar. And regardless of where one sides with the issue, that is a good thing -- because diagnosis is tricky, treatment is tricky and the meds are tricky. None of it is for the feint of heart.

Another Clinton Post Mortem on Kos

There is another quite witty Why Clinton Lost blog over on Kos:

Wow, Clinton strategy as Intelligent Design?

We heard that Clinton was liked by this demographic or that one, and it was asserted that those demographics were the important ones, and the ones won by others were less important. We heard that caucuses were not a sufficient measure of electability, despite their actually doing electing. We heard that entire states were also-rans.

It was not a narrative, but a meta-narrative. She was electable because she was electable, and anything that disproved that theory was dismissed as an exception. It was the campaign equivalent of Intelligent Design.

It was, in short, a terrible, mind-bendingly awful strategy. That is not to say that there was not substance discussed, in the debates -- but the campaign was not about that substance. That is not to say that there were not good points to be made in "electability" -- but her spokesmen made them shabbily. In the end, it was not an argument that could convince.

and scathing critique of how lame past Democratic campaigns have been run:

The goal is to assemble the broadest coalition possible -- by saying nothing that could possibly offend anyone. The premise is to appeal to "independents", and "centrists", and most of all the "undecided", that group of people so uninterested in politics that they cannot fathom the difference between the parties, but who allegedly can be mobilized into action if only you do absolutely nothing that will get them the slightest bit worked up. It is a cynical, wretched excuse for leadership, but more to the point it provides absolutely no room for error: it is an all-defensive strategy. If your opponent is a block of wood, incapable of making any positive plays on their own, you may pull it off; but if your opponent scores any point, you are left unable to answer it.

and the stuff of History

This primary season featured, after all, a classic contest: the irresistible force of Barack Obama against the immovable object that was Hillary Clinton. By any stretch, that would have been a barnstormer of a primary, but coupled with the historic nature of the year, a year in which a black American and a woman not only competed for the presidency against the white men that have held exclusive keys to the office since the nation was first founded, but competed for the first time on essentially equal ground, the first in which race and gender, while remaining issues, were relegated to fringe issues as opposed to all-defining, unambiguously disqualifying characteristics -- now that is the stuff of history.

Looking back, we should remember that, because that will be what will end up in the history books. Obama could have lost. Clinton could have won. McCain may yet still win. But they were all judged, if not entirely on their merits, at least as much on their merits as any politicians are, in today's environment. Martin Luther King Jr. said he had a dream, and was killed for it, but in the end equality is an unstoppable force. All that is required is that people desire it, and the rest, though it may take generations, or be slowed, or momentarily dammed, will happen.

Clinton Campaign like Bush Iraq Strategy

There have obviously been a lot of Clinton post-mortems but only Ben Smith's made me think of the similarities.

“There was a constant push and pull on what the overall message would be,” said a senior staffer, who recalled the endless delays on everything from Clinton’s speeches to her policies to her very schedule. “A lot of that paralysis went as high as her.”

and

As a result, when Clinton — as had been predicted by polls — lost Iowa, she and her aides were left with no set plan.

“There was not a plan in place — the plan was: Win Iowa,” said a senior staffer.

and

“After Iowa, everyone looked at her said, ‘Well, you were winning, so we didn’t feel the need to tell you all these things that were f---ed up,’” said an aide.

Bottom line in both: no contingency planning, too much reliance on other's judgement, and surrounding yourself with yes-[wo]men who won't tell you the truth.

Well Done (If there is any truth to this) and more Anti-Meds Talk (this time about the troops)

If this is true somebody deserves a medal for this one. Meaning, someone in Iranian intel.

Defense Department counterintelligence investigators suspected that Iranian exiles who provided dubious intelligence on Iraq and Iran to a small group of Pentagon officials might have "been used as agents of a foreign intelligence service ... to reach into and influence the highest levels of the U.S. government," a Senate Intelligence Committee report said Thursday.

and

The revelation raises questions about whether Iran may have used a small cabal of officials in the Pentagon and in Vice President Dick Cheney's office to feed bogus intelligence on Iraq and Iran to senior policymakers in the Bush administration who were eager to oust the Iraqi dictator.

and if you are into conspiracies theories like the nutcase that comes on AM 820 after Rachel Maddow (who is actually quite good).

According to the report, Ledeen, however, persisted, presenting then-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith with a new 100-day plan to provide, among other things, evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that supposedly had been moved to Iran — Saddam Hussein's archenemy. This time, the report said, Ledeen solicited support from former speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich and from three then-GOP senators, Sam Brownback of Kansas, Jon Kyl of Arizona and Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania.

Yeah, this Malloy character was talking was how shocked it was that 11% of troops in Iraq (17% in Afghanistan) were taking antidepressants (not sure about the stats, but from the Time article).

In 1994 then Major E. Cameron Ritchie, an Army psychiatrist, was among the first to suggest that SSRIs should deploy with Army combat units. In a paper written and published after she returned from a combat deployment to Somalia, Ritchie noted that the sick-call chests used by military doctors "contain either outdated or no psychiatric medications." She concluded, "If depressive symptoms are moderate and manageable, medication may be preferable to medical evacuation."

I would have expected much higher and it would be curious to see how those rates compare with comparably stressful occupations or with the population at large. But its frightening to think about the troops when they come back trying to get psychiatric care for even "mild" mental health issues such depression or PTSD or even given limitations of emergency hospitalization with top notch health insurance. "Just go the emergency rooom..." (if you didn't read my blog entry from last November during more stressful times).

And if Magellan is such joke, what must it be like to try to get treatment from the VA? But Sertaline is relatively cheap, so there is some hope.

Best Cheap Painless PCI Wireless Adapter for Linux that Supports WPA without using ndiswrapper?

Yeah, asking a lot.

The Encore ENLWI-G2 looks like a possibility. It uses the Realtek 8185. Or should I go with an Ralink chipset?

Or here's a crazy idea. Get a rock solid Intel driver and one of these MiniPCI to PCI adapters?

Hitler's ^H^H^H^H^H^H Hillary's Bunker

Given all the talk of "Hillary's Bunker" and that it got pulled from Youtube, it is worth watching again.



Warning: the subtitles are not workplace (or family friendly)

SCADASEC-L: The Best of Times and Worst of Times

The great thing about small communities (like the world of SCADA Security) is that the egos of folks are often inversely proportional to the size of the overall community.

As a result, people get their feelings hurt easily. Partly because everybody has either worked for the other guy (or tried to work for them) or tried to get them to work for you. And more often than not, you've bid against them for security services somewhere, some time. Or at least you've presented at their conference. (Of course everybody has their own conference now, so that isn't so hard.)

Small pie. Big frog. Get it?

(CAVEAT: If you have no idea what I'm talking about, you obviously haven't been following the thread on "Advertising" on SCADASEC-L)

Random Thoughts on Hardy Virtualization (Redux) and Other Topics

Although the shoddy support of dom0 across most distributions not just Hardy (at least my hardware) is depressing (but not as depressing as the last episode of Season 4 of The Wire, talk about bleak, although after reading the summary I may have misinterpreted much of the episode) the one bright spot has been KVM with Virtual Machine Manager. Everything is built in, no threat of custom kernel. (VirtualBox worked reasonably well but even when I installed the xVM binary off the Sun site, ubuntu kept wanting to install a new *-rt kernel). Trying again on Ubuntu, since my first attempt to get Tracks (an interesting-looking rails GTD app) on CentOS failed miserably, much like my attempts to do the cgi version of MoinMoin running under Apache. Disabled selinux, disabled suExec and it stilled didn't work -- before deciding just to run the Desktop Edition until I have time mess with it again. The good thing was a got some custom themes working for the first time (had never tried) and ended up getting sinorca4moin working pretty easily.

Bring on the generation, race, gender, culture wars?

So like many folks Andrew Sullivan's article article on Obama back in December made a significant impact on my views of this year's presidential race -- and what was at stake. The notion that we can somehow get past 30 years of culture wars, 16 years of gridlock, and somehow move past the same tired, superficial debates that characterize our presidential campaigns seemed tremendously appealing -- and might even be possible.

But with the anger and spectacle of irate Hillary supporters leaving the DNC Rules & Bylaws meeting or those outside and countless interviews of West Virginian's and Kentuckians, I'm not so sure.

The first supporter from Manhattan (who thought the person asking for her name might be CIA) identified herself first and foremost as a "older American woman" who bitter about the success "inadequate Black male." The raw emotion was shocking, but it should come as no surprise that a party that has assembled a heterogeneous coalition based on identity politics (race, class, gender, sexual orientation) would come undone because of identity politics.

Live by the sword, die by the sword.

(Perhaps a similar argument can be made for the Republicans and Christian fundamentalists, but that is best left for another post)

But this campaign has revealed a number of things about the Democrats. The notion that the Democratic party has a monopoly on diversity and tolerance has been ripped apart not only by YouTube but by the statements of its party leaders. As long has African Americans (and those better educated and those more economically secure and those more religious) supported the "right kind of nominees" it was a big tent, but the tent get's a lot smaller (or at least less full). You see this in the comments of Bill Clinton attacking Moveon.org, when Hillary talks about White Americans (this is code word for how dare Blacks...) or when the "Latte-sipping" Democrats are attacked for being elitist.

With ex-Republican-voters (like myself) supporting Obama, and Boomer Feminists proclaiming their support for McCain, it ought to be an interesting campaign.

Stunned Ickes?

So getting the kids back into a routine after a trip is always a challenge, but it was complicated by the DNC meeting. Just too hard not to watch. Even for my 9 year old. He was transfixed, although he obviously didn't get it all. We started watching when at the "15" vote and chants of "Denver, Denver, Denver" and I wasn't really sure who wont until it became obvious.

And Ickes was quite a treat. How many times did he say "ass?" He did say that, right? And who did he say became more eloquent the more he drank?

Classy, if a bit bitter. But didn't really represent himself (or Clinton) all that well, but I guess we should have expected that. "Hijacked!?"

These Democrats. First Florida in 2000 and now this circus.

(LULAC, hehe, I remember them from Texas)

Pretty rich. The real question is the all this an act to fire up the Hillary supporter and torpedo Obama or do they really believe what they are saying?

(You know, the whole are you a liar if you know you are a liar question. And Is lying to yourself really lying?)

So the new count is Obama: 2,052, and Clinton: 1,877.5 with 2118 necessary to win?

But maybe the fun is really over and I can go back to blogging mostly on Linux again

This Hillary Supporter is an "American" who will vote for McCain

It would be pretty fun to be in DC right now to see stuff like this

PLA vs. SCADA

From China’s Cyber-Militia: Chinese hackers pose a clear and present danger to U.S. government and private-sector computer networks and may be responsible for two major U.S. power blackouts.

One prominent expert told National Journal he believes that China’s People’s Liberation Army played a role in the power outages. Tim Bennett, the former president of the Cyber Security Industry Alliance, a leading trade group, said that U.S. intelligence officials have told him that the PLA in 2003 gained access to a network that controlled electric power systems serving the northeastern United States. The intelligence officials said that forensic analysis had confirmed the source, Bennett said. “They said that, with confidence, it had been traced back to the PLA.” These officials believe that the intrusion may have precipitated the largest blackout in North American history, which occurred in August of that year. A 9,300-square-mile area, touching Michigan, Ohio, New York, and parts of Canada, lost power; an estimated 50 million people were affected

And Nmap cause the Florida blackout?

A second information-security expert independently corroborated Bennett’s account of the Florida blackout. According to this individual, who cited sources with direct knowledge of the investigation, a Chinese PLA hacker attempting to map Florida Power & Light’s computer infrastructure apparently made a mistake. “The hacker was probably supposed to be mapping the system for his bosses and just got carried away and had a ‘what happens if I pull on this’ moment.” The hacker triggered a cascade effect, shutting down large portions of the Florida power grid, the security expert said. “I suspect, as the system went down, the PLA hacker said something like, ‘Oops, my bad,’ in Chinese.”

And who has heard of Cybrinth or Stephen Spoonamore?

Stephen Spoonamore, CEO of Cybrinth, a cyber-security firm that works for government and corporate clients, said that Chinese hackers attempt to map the IT networks of his clients on a daily basis. He said that executives from three Fortune 500 companies, all clients, had document-stealing code planted in their computers while traveling in China, the same fate that befell Gutierrez.

I saw prove it. Show me the logs of an informed attacker demonstrating knowledge of their target device, protocol, or application. Not, random script-kiddie crap from Chinese Universities. Been there seen that -- as has anyone that has set up a honeynet.

Show me a journalist that has a clue on this topic.

Hat Tip: Marc Ambinder.

Air America: MIA in the Rustbelt

So I'm smack dab in the middle of a rustbelt rest area (my daughter is struggling with her PBJ bagel from Einsteins, yeah nice than the ones in Indiana) and scanning the dial there must have been a half-dozen different AM stations playing Limbaugh, and no Air America. No wonder this neck of the woods went to Hillary.

So was forced to listen to RUSH and it was quite amusing (before I became too disgusted) This half-wit women calling in asking for advice from Rush on how to "sell McCain" to her liberal California friends. And I swear there was a 30 seconds and lots of groans before Rush could come up with an answer. "He loves his country. He is for the war," was about the best he could come up with. Wasn't sure he supported the Bush tax cuts or not. Back on the road.

My VPS (yearly) cost 2.85 Tanks of Gas

So I've been running a VPS box over on RimuHosting for a couple of years now and have been really happy, but I'm trying to "get lean with my IT" just like at my last employer. Plus my wiki has been down since the MoinMoin Vulns, and I really haven't missed it so I figure I'll pull the plug and create a wiki over on http://code.google.com/p/blogfranz/ as well as use there SVN repo for config files and code snippets I want to remember. (For example I just comitted my fluxbox keys and startup scripts)

Why the hell not? Google already owns the keys to the kingdom might as well give them everything else, so that if some dangerous Web 2.0 hacker would compromise my whole virtual presence. What you can do!

Olbermann: Unforgiveable

OpenSolaris 2008.5 Isn't So Bad

OpenSolaris has come along way from that nasty red and blue console based installer I remember using back in the 90s. A nice GNOME based LiveCD. 32/64 bit. GRUB & GNOME. Tolerable package management although there must be some other repos somewhere. Imagine, having to have to built pcap and tcpdump from scratch in 2008, the horror. But it worked!

What didn't work (on my T-61):

• Xen Dom0 (this is a known issue)
• Sound
• Intel 4965 has been sporadic
• Novatel 727 EVDO card (probably just haven't figure it out yet)
• VirtualBox/xVM (problems with kernel modules. probably fixable)
• Compiz (totally hangs the box)
  

Sort of weird that the JDK isn't installed. But overall they did a nice job with the GNOME theme. Fonts look better than most Linux distributions and seems quite snappy. And of all things nmap (4.20) and NmapFE are in default install. Funny.

Is there a distro that supports dom0 out of the box (on my T-61)?

Not Hardy, Not Edgy, Not FC 8 or 9, Not OpenSolaris 2008.5, Not OpenSUSE 10.3/11. Not CentOS 5.1.

I give up.

Anatomy of An SSH Brute Force Attempt (In Pictures)

Just for fun I decided to turn on SSH on the dirty interface on my highly secure Debian firewall to see what shows up in LCE.

First I filter on all TCP/22 activity



I'm actually most concerned with the valid logins first so I check them



Whew. Only 2 logins, those are probably OK.I could check and see who they are but I'm too lazy and I'm anxious to get to the invalid logins:



But I want to get a better sense of time. Big spike right has I was recovering from getting the kids ready for school.


I back up to look at the two types of events I'm seeing during this period of attack: failed passwords and invalid users. I actually discovered the other day that there is an SSH error message for failed login attempts where the username is valid but when it doesn't match the address in the AllowUser option of sshd_config. I thought that was cool. Not sure why I'm not seeing these here.



and





Yep, Italy again

inetnum:        141.250.0.0 - 141.250.255.255
netname:        UNIPG-NET
descr:          Universita' degli Studi di Perugia
descr:          Centro Ateneo Servizi Informatici, CASI
country:        IT
admin-c:        OG6-RIPE
tech-c:         FG757-RIPE
status:         ASSIGNED PI
remarks:        Perugia Academic and Research Network
mnt-by:         GARR-LIR
source:         RIPE # Filtered

OpenSUSE 11 Beta 3 Impressions

My Thinkpad's started dying today, so after doing the long slow drive wipe to what was left, I tried OpenSUSE 11 (64 Bit) Gnome LiveCD, and here the first impressions:

• Much prettier than Ubuntu, I like all the green (vs. the Ubuntu brown)
  
• First Linux distro to get the resolution right through the GUI for a widescreen flat screen with my Thinkpad (only got display mirroring
• Wireless worked flawlessly
• Compiz worked flawlessly and snappily (although sound died after it installed)
  
• Gstreamer plugins (for Totem) worked if a bit clumsily and Flash plugin auto installation failed (in contrast to Gutsy and Hardy)
• Seems snappier, not sure if that is the 64 bit kicking in (always been too conservative) about that.
• Repository auto updates have improved significantly since the last time I used SUSE much

No reason to try this on the server, but I may run this when my new drive shows up in the mail.

Where did you obtain your academic qualifications to make these statements, Mr. Aitel?

Dave Aitel wrote a must read editorial over on Security focus called Thinking Beyond the Ivory Towers

In the information-security industry, there are clear and vast gaps in the way academia interacts with professional researchers. While these gaps will be filled in due time, their existence means that security professionals outside the hallowed halls of colleges and universities need to be aware of the differences in how researchers and professionals think.

I saw firsthand this gap when my group at Cisco funded security research at some of the leading Computer Science (and even information security) programs (that should know better) in the nation. You'd be surprised how difficult it was to find 4-5 projects to fund a quarter.

Anecdotally, I saw an absolute lack of understanding by some doctoral students (and their well credentialed advisors) about which attacks (against protocols, for example, like basic concepts of the what sort access was needed to the network) were practical or even how they would go about conducting them. No clue. And all the formal methods and literature review meant nothing.

And all I needed was my lame English & History degree from Texas A&M to see that -- well and some experience developing (or even just running) an attack tool or two. Even script-kiddie knowledge would suffice.


BTW, the title comes from the comment from Dr. Neal Krawetz, PhD

UUID and Fstab and Reiserfs (or lack therof) in CentOS

About a month ago, I forgot to blog on the Ubuntu wiki page UsingUIID which shows you how to get the UUID of a filesystem which is now necessary for fstab (has been since at least Edgy).

In short, use the vol_id command:

root@gx620:~# vol_id /dev/sda2
ID_FS_USAGE=filesystem
ID_FS_TYPE=reiserfs
ID_FS_VERSION=3.6
ID_FS_UUID=15987a57-dd66-4276-8645-931291ef7fc4
ID_FS_UUID_ENC=15987a57-dd66-4276-8645-931291ef7fc4
ID_FS_LABEL=
ID_FS_LABEL_ENC=
ID_FS_LABEL_SAFE=

And given all the Debian pain (yes, code and operational diversity is good--and not blindly following the results of automated tools!), I actually put CentOS 5 on my main server at home until I realized that reiserfs (which I've used for quite some time for some irrational reason) is only available with CentOS Plus. Screw that. Ubuntu 8.04 LTS it is.

Best Kids Video: Sabatoge vs. Jozin z Bazin

Which is the least inappropriate for a 9 year old?



or (warning very catchy and gets stuck in your head)

Forgot about Iran, Obliterate W VA (But Spare Jessco!)

This Huffington Post Article has some pretty scary stuff. My wife (who was raised in the Mississippi Delta) thinks this is WORSE than Mississippi.

Encrypting Firmwire and Logic (who would have thought)

Haven't read any of my Control Engineering spam for ages but
Protect intellectual property: Encrypt firmware, control code caught my eye tonight:

Opto 22 released the “Secure Strategy Distribution System, as part of PAC Project version 8.2, the company's flagship automation software suite that includes control programming, HMI development, OPC connectivity, and enterprise database integration components. The software gives OEMs and machine builders the ability to encrypt firmware and control programs so they can only be uploaded or downloaded to a controller via use of a secure encryption key," the company says.

AppleCare has been great, well, except...

So I finally wiped my 12" G4 last week and decided to finally get it looked at. Wednesday, less than a 5 minute wait with tech support, who spoke English (obviously one of of those hard working white Americans) and didn't even seem like she was reading off a script. Friday, brought into the Genius Bar. She (notice a pattern here, kind of like when mid year of my 2nd year of teaching, I realized the class that I had the best discussions with was 70% girls) ran some diagnostics could reproduce the problem, but shipped it out anyway and I got it back today by Fedex. They replaced the hard drive. Great! Should have done this a long time.

Except the the awful grinding noise is back again there (obviously a fan) and I've already started populating my PowerBook with apps.

Repeat the process or live with it?

Simon vs. Hoff: Who is Baiting? Who is Switching? And why does this smell like SCADA?

Mainly because I need to get a non-political blog in the top position again (because I'm certainly no expert on virtualization security, but I am a virtualization end user who wants to know! ) but Simon Crosby's reaction to Hoff gives me a feeling of deja view in terms of the bait-and-switch approach to vulns I've heard from some SCADA vendors (or control systems standards efforts) over the years.

Although slightly more sophisticated than spouting off how many bits of encryption a protocol uses, saying that a given protocol is not Internet-facing, or claiming that to fix an implementation flaw in a weak protocol you should upgrade to protocol that uses SSL, some of the security cliches (or at worst, half truths) that undermine his credibility, and even I can recognize include:

• Open source is more secure...
• He mentions viruses and virus vendors in his first breath.
• Equating security fixes with security/insecurity (and slamming VMWare!)
• Bringing up EAL something or other
  
• Mentioning TPM in any context

Knowing a thing or two about mania, I'm also curious about this sort of manic efforts (apart from making it so small you can't even see it) to secure the hypervisor, and whether he is willing to admit that there are some classes of attacks against guests (or, obviously, against the hypervisor) that are unique (or perhaps only possible) in a virtualized environment and that they care about? Or will the AV vendors solve these, too?

Done. There no more faux Hillary (or Hilter) on top. Can sleep now.

Sore Loser, Racist, Unethical (All you need!)

And I could have just watched this instead of Tuesday night

Funniest YouTube in A While

Even better if you've seen Der Untergang but amazingly well done!

But obviously quite vulgar so don't watch if you are easily offended. (I warned you!)

Best Line: "The Voters have stolen my nomination"

Runner Up: "I'm so sick of drinking whisky with those pigs"

EVDO airframe drivers and Hardy

Turns out (big surprise!) I was full of it the other night for contemplating leaving Linux for OpenSolaris to get better USB throughput.

[ 63.558567] /build/buildd/linux-2.6.24/drivers/usb/serial/usb-serial.c: USB Serial support registered for airprime
[ 63.558587] airprime 2-1:1.0: airprime converter detected
[ 63.558675] usb 2-1: airprime converter now attached to ttyUSB0
[ 63.558719] usb 2-1: airprime converter now attached to ttyUSB1
[ 63.558761] usb 2-1: airprime converter now attached to ttyUSB2
[ 63.558768] airprime 2-1:1.1: airprime converter detected
[ 63.558812] usb 2-1: airprime converter now attached to ttyUSB3
[ 63.558854] usb 2-1: airprime converter now attached to ttyUSB4
[ 63.558897] usb 2-1: airprime converter now attached to ttyUSB5
[ 63.558903] airprime 2-1:1.2: airprime converter detected
[ 63.558946] usb 2-1: airprime converter now attached to ttyUSB6
[ 63.558995] usb 2-1: airprime converter now attached to ttyUSB7
[ 63.559037] usb 2-1: airprime converter now attached to ttyUSB8
[ 63.559043] airprime 2-1:1.3: airprime converter detected
[ 63.559088] usb 2-1: airprime converter now attached to ttyUSB9
[ 63.559129] usb 2-1: airprime converter now attached to ttyUSB10
[ 63.559171] usb 2-1: airprime converter now attached to ttyUSB11
[ 63.559180] usbcore: registered new interface driver airprime
[ 63.577915] /build/buildd/linux-2.6.24/drivers/usb/serial/usb-serial.c: USB Serial support registered for GSM modem (1-port)
[ 63.577937] usbcore: registered new interface driver option
[ 63.577939] /build/buildd/linux-2.6.24/drivers/usb/serial/option.c: USB Driver for GSM modems: v0.7.1

And

mfranz@ubuntu-t61:~$ lsmod | grep usb
usbserial 35688 5 option,airprime
usb_storage 73408 0
libusual 18980 1 usb_storage
scsi_mod 151180 6 usb_storage,sbp2,sr_mod,sg,sd_mod,libata
usbcore 146028 8 option,airprime,usbserial,usb_storage,libusual,ehci_hcd,uhci_hcd

Port Forwarding on Windows (Python to the rescue)

If there are Windows equivalents of redir I'm not aware of them, but the first proxy I tried on A list of open-source HTTP proxies written in python (a cool site I ran into several years ago) was TCPWatch and it worked great (at least on Python 2.5.1 under cygwin.)

(Truth be told, the first tool I ran across was pinhole in an ASPN recipe but it ran into some issues, possbly thread related)

He's closed it

Finishing up the dishes (2 and half kids in bed) and listening to Obama's victory speech and it feels like a winner. The high road. Classy. Presidential. Finally an uplifting Tuesday.

"We will end it by telling the truth..."

Nice.

A Quarter from Report to Disclosure: Respectable

From the CORE Advisory on Wonderware

WTF is Python?

* 2008-03-03: Core sends proof-of-concept code written in Python.
* 2008-03-05: Vendor asks for compiler tools required to use the PoC code.
* 2008-03-05: Core sends a link to http://www.python.org where a Python interpreter can be downloaded.

and

of the advisory is re-scheduled to March 31st 2008. With regards to the questions and requests about the contents of the security advisory, Core indicates that Core's technical publications are aimed at providing legitimate security practitioners worldwide with the technical details necessary to understand the nature of the security issues reported; so they are able to devise, by their own judgment, the risk mitigation approach that fits them the best. For that purpose, Core believes that it is fundamental that they have precise and accurate technical details about security issues -- as Wonderware itself has demonstrated with the request for further technical details and proof-of-concept code -- and that the whole reporting and disclosure process is transparent for scrutiny of all interested parties.

And back at ya..

The vendor says that is having trouble understanding what the value is in providing specific detail as to what technical issue is happening and asks for clarification to understand how this information would benefit organizations. The vendor acknowledges that the proof of concept code did help to replicate the issue and that without it, it would have needed more time to identify it from the report alone. The concern is that the details provided in the report may give a hacker a specific direction to look for the vulnerability. Finally, the vendor indicates that will have a better estimation for the rlease date of a fix by Friday March 28th, 2008.

A level playing field?

Thus, Core believes that it is necessary not only to indicate the mere existence of the bug, but also to explain how to uniquely identify it in the vulnerable software (to avoid confusion with all other known bugs or to differentiate it from others that may be discovered in the future). It is also important to determine how the vulnerability could be used by potential attackers so that proper detection mechanisms can be built, for example firewall rules, or IDS and antivirus signatures. While Core recognizes that this may provide some additional data to would-be attackers, clearly it also provides preciously needed information to the defenders thus, leveling a field on which Core believes the attackers are initially at advantage.

And all for just a DOS?

Welcome to the party!

A Spade?

Interesting Nation article that unpacks this notion of "electability"

So, in the name of another personal quality--honesty--I'd like Hillary Clinton to make the following statement: "Though my opponent has run a terrific campaign, in primary after primary, I have proven that I am the more electable candidate. I am more electable because I am white. Barack Obama--Wow!--he's certainly inspired a lot of hope, but as voters in Indiana and North Carolina make up their minds, as the superdelegates make up their minds, they should remember that Barack Obama is black. They should also remember that a whole lot of white working-class Americans are racists. White racists are an important part of the Democratic Party, and time and time again, they've supported me because I am white. I am ready on day one to govern as your white American president."

Faster EVDO: Maybe A Reason to Try OpenSolaris?

So the Linux USB serial driver is capped at 500Kb and as I found tonight (piece of shit RCN is averaging about 50% uptime these days) it was pretty much impossible to watch 30 Rock (or any of the other streaming NBC shows) with my EVDO card plugged into my Linux router. (or now that I think of it, maybe this is a just QoS issue since I'm going from 100Mb to 500kb?) but of course when I plopped the card into XP got 1MB easy and we could watch all about the Teamster sandwiches with no problems.

But this OpenSolaris WWAN project looks promising.... Wonder if I can get my Novatel card working with Nexenta Core?

Or are there any of the EVDO routers (that take USB) that don't run Linux or have somehow managed to work around the 500Kb cap?

To answer my own question, it looks like the airpime drivers might actually do the trick.

The Cheap Thrill of Using Enterprise Security Tools to Monitor Your Kid's Surfing Habits

One of the nice things about working for a security vendor is being able to able to run cool product on your home network (like when I brought a Cisco 7120 home!). And given the complexity of my home network (4-5 routing/forwarding devices, 2-3 switches, and 10-20 hosts up at any given time) it's not as much overkill as you might think.

The image below shows a 5-day view of my network events using LCE.

The 2nd row is the "firewall" category which primarily consists of syslog's from my two Cisco 851's. The events drop off 2-3 days ago when I disabled the ACLs and forgot to turn them back on.

Oops.



The last row is "web" which you'll see a spike during the last day.

What happened is I finally qot squid up an running for my son so he could use the Linux box in his room. Yeah normally a bad idea but probably not relevant if have security tools that cost as a midsize car watching your network.

If I drill down on the "web" events and find that they are all from squid logs (access.log) which I'm monitoring with an LCE client.



Most of the denies were to sb.google.com so I went into the whitelist and added that so that should flatten that plot.

Drilling down on the cache hits, I can see many of the thumbnails for one of the game sites I let him go to are being cached:

1209917543.808 7 192.168.2.170 TCP_HIT/200 19581 GET http://media.y8.com/gfx/y8bartender1.jpg - NONE/- image/jpeg
1209917543.870 52 192.168.2.170 TCP_HIT/200 12089 GET http://media.y8.com/gfx/thumb_399.jpg - NONE/- image/jpeg
1209917543.871 4 192.168.2.170 TCP_HIT/200 15471 GET http://media.y8.com/gfx/y8family_restaurant.jpg - NONE/- image/jpeg

And a one of the misses shows the sort of games my 9-year old likes to play.

1209906995.596 154086 192.168.2.170 TCP_MISS/503 1420 GET http://y8.com/tags/Killing - DIRECT/y8.com text/html

No More Suit/Tie in Indiana

A while back, my wife and I were talking about what it is that sounds fundamentally different about the way Obama, Bill Clinton (and Reagan, for that matter) speak and the last few Democratic candidates such as Gore, Kerry, and Hillary.

Whether they actually are or not, the latter sound like they are talking down to you, like they are patronizing you, lecturing you. And when try to talk "at your level" they sound inauthentic, scripted, stilted. I think is one of the factors why Kerry (and Gore, if you believe he actually lost) were beaten by a W.

Hillary knows this and this and she wants to paint Obama like Dukakis and Kerry were painted. This is why Clinton (channeling Rove, attacking strengths not weaknesses) attacked Obama as an elitist. I don't know much about community organizing, but I know that most people that have had non-elite jobs, those that have not had the upper advantages on their side from day one. I'm talking about public school teachers, the police, like those serving in the military (even as an officers) that have force you to be exposed (and work alongside, even when in a position of authority) folks from all walks of life -- do not talk this this.

Then of course there is a regional/dialectal element as well Gore is Southern but the patrician, old money South. Kerry, Dukakis, and Hillary are "Yankees" (as my wife would say) and just they can they can lose this from their identity that no more than Stringer Bell or D'Angelo Barksdale could lose the street.

Your Little Friend Alsamixer

So I totally managed to screw up my kernel-modules (hint: trying to uninstall a running kernel package is never a good idea) so I ended up doing a new install of Hardy late last night. I only had server image so I used that. But no sound? So I ended up following the quite excellent SoundTroubleshooting wiki page and ran across the alsamixer command. I may have used it before. Not sure, but it helped me track down that the speaker was on mute. I'm still running into some weird GNOME (or GDM) startup issues when using XFCE or standing GNOME bootup.

A Little Post-Ikea Saturday Humor

East-west trips from Skokie to Schaumburg can be brutal. And then with three kids in the big yellow and blue (although we have discovered Smaland, thank God) but today wasn't too bad.

But watch this before they pull it down (or Youtube's CDN goes down). The last few weeks have been pretty depressing politics wise, but this is good fun.

Prez & Pedagogy on The Wire

I wouldn't know about policing or politics (although all the SIGINT doesn't seemed too far-fetched) but in Season 4, much of the school story line is spot on. Or at least based on my 3 years teaching in a Middle School.

Of course I wasn't in a failing inner city Middle School like Mr. P (coincidentally, so many of my kid's teachers here on the Chicago North Shore have have even more unpronounceable Polish names, but I digress...) but a lot of it still rings true.

After college (think Netscape IPO time), I taught 7th and 8th in a school that implemented many of Ted Sizer's ideas on school reform on the Northwest side of San Antonio, where kids lived in the same gated community as David Robinson and George Strait.

Although I had my share of "challenging" kids not I can't remember being told to Fuck Off like Mr. P and the only blood I ever saw in the class room was from bloody noses.

And although I left teaching (for tech) over ten years ago, so many of the scenes in the latest (meaning what we are watching now) season take me (and my wife, who was also a teacher) back to our frightening "first year" and give me a sick feeling in my stomach.

Stuff like getting your classroom ready. Never being prepared enough. That awful silence in the morning that will soon be broken when the door opens. The perceived weakness and lack of confidence that let's your classes get out of control (relatively speaking, of course). The older female teachers that get the respect you wish you could command -- and the fear, which you hope you never will. The making it up as you go along, figuring out a month in what you should have done the first day (like come up with a classroom management plan). And then there's the good stuff, too. Creating that fragile bond with your students. And the humor and the tragedy. We've just finished Disc 2 so it will be interesting to see where this ends up.

Nice Corrective on Clinton Foreign Policy

If you want to stroll memory lane, check out this Nation piece on Clinton foreign policy.

The whole thing is worth reading, but here are some of the highlights I remember from the 90s. In particular I remember Somalia (while I was in college) then resulting genocide in Rwanda. Remember how they showed all the bodies floating down the river?

Yeah, happy times. Bring back the 90s.

The Clinton record on which Hillary is running is anything but stellar in global or even US security terms. What would become the hallmark political timidity of the Administration was first demonstrated after eighteen American troops were killed in Mogadishu in October 1993 in an ill-fated assault on a Somali warlord. Though that operation was entirely American-planned and led, the Clintons let stand (if not promoted) the isolationist falsehood that the tragedy was the fault of the United Nations, which also had a peacekeeping mission in Mogadishu.

and

The Clintonian record on Osama bin Laden, Afghanistan and the defense of the United States itself is both bleak and tragic in the light of what happened after the Clintons had gone from the White House. The trial of Ramzi Yousef, implicated in the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, had revealed an Al Qaeda blueprint for strikes against high-value American targets, but the Administration did not act expeditiously to shore up policies and tools at home for dealing with this possibility--or inevitability.

Instead, the Clinton Administration focused on Khartoum, where bin Laden had established a base. He was ultimately chased out of Sudan under US pressure, only to find in a welcome haven in battered, bankrupt Afghanistan, first under the mujahedeen and then the Taliban. One useless US missile attack on an Al Qaeda camp there in 1998 after the bombings of two American embassies in Africa failed to do him any harm. (The United States also hit a pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, possibly the wrong target, in an effort to destroy what was believed to be a chemical weapons facility.)

and to concluded

Administratively, the Clintons (we are now asked to assume that it was both of them) signed off on a reform that took away the independence of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, merging it, as well as the United State Information Agency, into the State Department. Arms control lost an important voice in policymaking. Crucial information services took a hit worldwide, and the United States could not have abandoned an effective public relations tool at a worse time.

In diplomacy, even a veneer of decency and statesmanship can matter. Neither Richard Holbrooke, the author of Dayton, who lost no opportunity to refer to the UN as "deeply flawed" or Secretary of State Warren Christopher, who disposed of Boutros Boutros-Ghali in the most high-handed and thoughtless manner, can lay claim to glory as statesmen. Albright, responding to critics at the UN, reminded everyone that we are the "indispensable nation," so get over it.

Could there be a subliminal message now in talking tough to foreigners? Is Barack Obama somehow one of them? Patriotic lapel pins are in and substantive discussions about America and the world are not.

I wish more would have spent on exploring the possibilities of continuities (or at least Bush foreign policy as a logical consequence/progression) of the Clinton years, but perhaps that can be found elsewhere.

Open Source Virtualization in Ubuntu Hardy (First Impressions)

So Open Source Virtualiztion in Ubuntu hasn't been a smooth ride. The linux-virtual and linux-xen kernels panic my T-61 due to what appear to be SATA and USB issues, respectively, but KVM seems to be working a little better (you need to apt virt-manager, kvm, libvirt-bin, and probably a few others) and actually surprisingly snappy.

Virtual Manager is now included and works reasonably well (if run as root, there are some permission issues) to provide VMWare-console like experience. I was able to boot (from the .iso) a Debian Etch install but I aborted due to hda (DSC Timeouts) but Hardy Server worked amazing well:

root@ubuntu:~# uname -a
Linux ubuntu 2.6.24-16-server #1 SMP Thu Apr 10 13:58:00 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux
root@ubuntu:~# cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 2
model name : QEMU Virtual CPU version 0.9.1
stepping : 3
cpu MHz : 1994.872
cache size : 2048 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 2
wp : yes
flags : fpu de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 up pni
bogomips : 4007.02
clflush size : 64

Networking "just worked" a pleasant suprise thinking about what a pain it used to be back in the day with User Mode Linux. You'll also note that you connect into the console via VNC, which was nice.

Update
So Hardy seems to be the anomaly. OpenBSD 4.2 failed to install, Ubuntu 7.10 failed to boot the CD. Also Virtual Manager frequently wouldn't start up or shutdown VM's.

So all in all a pretty dismal picture.

Stumped Nails It

In Hillary Clinton, GOP Heroine Andres Martinez, nails it:

Clinton is a capable woman who'd make a credible presidential candidate in her own right. But she is not here in her own right. She is cashing in on her husband's brand. She didn't become a senator just because she is hard-working and smart and talented. She also became a senator (in an adopted home state, no less) because she was the president's wife -- and not just the president's wife but the president's aggrieved wife, able to draw on a reservoir of good will and sympathy. How her ascent advances the meritocratic cause of women is beyond me.

We all know this, and yet the Clintons ask us to deny it. They also ask that we accept the notion that a term and a third in the U.S. Senate is plenty of experience, while two-thirds of a term is woefully lacking. There have been plenty of other conceits we have been asked to accept along the way, including that one about how you could innocently "remember" coming under sniper fire when you never had.

This was Hillary Clinton's nomination to lose. And if she had won it as expected, none of this would be worth revisiting -- the voters would have spoken, and the nomination would be rightfully hers. But she failed to win it. Obama won't win either, at least not on the basis of pledged delegates, but he is ahead both in the delegate and popular count, and has wildly surpassed expectations.

A Worthy Replacement for My 12" Powerbook G4?

The HP2133 looks amazing. Probably no coincidence that it looks like my old PowerBook. About one more year on AppleCare left on it.

My New Minimalist Retro Desktop

So despite my glowing reports about hardy it hasn't been all wine and roses. I finally filed a a really annoying bug which causing the keyboard to go wacky in X, so that I couldn't enter any control characters. That is the bad news. Really annoying. At first I thought it was just some weird control character shit within gnome-terminal that was screwing up remote minicom sessions (IOS wasn't too happy either) but no it was the whole shebang.

But in the good news, having HAD IT with Openbox (it too was not happy under Hardy, and WTF can't I disable window contents when moving them!) I've fallen in love with fluxbox and (as you can see) it plays nice with panel apps like nm-applet, pidgin, and amarok. And good old gkrellm does a really nice job on Thinkpad hardware stats.

And oh yeah, gRun is so much faster than using blasted GNOME/KDE menus.

Believe me.

So who needs OSX?

(Well actually I still haven't had much luck with dual headed displays, so maybe I still do)

Cisco Convergence Award: Garretcom

Similar to the Daily Dish Awards this probably gets the Cisco Convergence Award - which means everything is better over Ethernet/TCP/IP!.

Way to go GarretCom!

Establishing common ground between physical and cyber security strategies

As industrial networking evolves and processes change at a rapid pace, the need for cost-effective security is at an all time high. Today, a dependable industrial network operation is not just nice-to-have, but a must, as is the need to understand the interrelated structure between physical and cyber security.

IP technology offers many benefits including network flexibility, increased productivity and cost-savings. Moreover, bandwidth in Ethernet-based protocols is rapidly increasing, enabling fiber and copper media to transmit more data.

Tune into this Control Engineering editorial Podcast and listen to success stories from combining physical security and IP functionality, including cyber security, on existing IP-based systems.

* Combining fire, security, and access control into a standard IP-system to increase security and simplify management by bringing the control in-house.
* Having access logs, intrusion detection and fire alarm reporting to one control station.
* Using hardened Ethernet switches and PoE (Power over Ethernet) to make it possible to deploy IP-based security devices reliability and cost-effectively throughout a hostile and/or widely distributed industrial environment.

95%

Although I started a blog how my wife is like Tom Hayden's wife (yes that Tom Hayden) but the exit polls were more interesting.

VMWare Server on Ubuntu Hardy

This is all you need, but the libgcc was what tripped me up:

# unzip VMware-server-linux-client-1.0.5-80187.zip
# tar xzf VMware-server-console-1.0.5-80187.tar.gz -C /tmp
# cd /tmp/vmware-server-console-distrib
# sudo ./vmware-install.pl
# sudo cp /lib/libgcc_s.so.1 /usr/lib/vmware-server-console/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/

I've been hacked by PBS Kids!

So this is as a pretty good example of why you need to tune your Snort signatures. These are what have fired from the Debian signatures. Pretty lame, huh?

As my 4-year old would say (DUH!)

From Call is out to bring security testing into the QA process

Testing the security of software applications should be part of the process of developing the software, not an afterthought. But one security analyst says that’s easier said than done.

Danny Allan, an IBM security researcher, made the case for advancing security research for software applications at the Software Test & Performance Conference April 16.

Allan argued, citing Gartner research, that while 75% of IT attacks are targeted at applications, 90% of IT security spending goes to securing the network, not the applications.

Oh and you can get rid of all those pesky firewalls, too.

OpenBSD Finally Gets WPA/WPA2

This could be good news for all those fools^H^H^H^Hfolks that try to run *BSD on their desktop/laptops (although I'm sure someone will prove me wrong, cause I didn't take the time to man those devices)

Damien Bergamini (damien@) just committed WPA-support (wikipedia) for OpenBSD. In the commit message, Damien states that "bwi(4), malo(4), ral(4), iwn(4), wpi(4), ural(4), rum(4), upgt(4), and zyd(4) should work." And, Damien says "support for more chipsets should arrive soon."

To me this is of more significance for folks that build wireless routers than anything else.

But what do I know/care. Although truth be told I wouldn't mind running PF as my home firewall if the USB EVDO card would work.

Another Small Cheap Linux Laptop (like the Eee PC) Except This is Completely Resistent to Worms and Viruses

Ran across the InkMedia on LinuxDevices that is in the same class as the Eee PC with the following specs:

VIA C7-M ULV Processor
Internal 8.6" Diagonal SVGA (800x600) LCD panel
Supporting 1024 X 768 True Color Video Output on external monitor
Supports MPEG2 and MPEG4 decode acceleration in hardware.
4 USB 2.0 ports, 1 USB 1.1 port (for keyboard)
2 SD slots
512 MB Ram
2 GB NAND Flash, containing read only file system (compressed)
User file storage on SD card
1 Stereo minipin audio out, stereo minipin mic in
1 RGB out for VGA monitor
10/100 Ethernet jack
802.11 a/b/g WiFi
100-250V 50/60Hz universal power supply
5-8 Hours of battery life

The most impressive thing is it is completely secure

After many years of working with School Net India, Gerry Morgan, the founder and designer behind InkMedia, became frustrated with the huge number of computers that were ruined because of virus infections. As a result, he set out to create a computer with a flash-based operating system that comes with software imbedded into its core. It has everything that a typical student, family or small business would need.

It figures the Canadians would come up with a completely secure device first. Damn them. One step behind. And their restrooms are cleaner, too (at least the ones I remember on Vancouver Island)

Obama Rally in Philly Last Night

Not a small crowd. Not a bad speech. Do I believe every line? No. Can the tide of Globalism be stopped? No. Are those rustbelt jobs coming back? No. Do I really think McCain is a Bush third term? No.

If elected, how much could Obama really accomplish? Could he break gridlock and change "the game?" Who knows?

That is not the point. We don't know those answers, but we do know that things need to be shaken, not stirred and the chances of that occuring with Clinton (or McCain) are slim to none. Then of course there is the painful prospect of listening to a Clinton (with her disgusting Chicago accent and patronizing Gore/Kerry-like tone) inaugural address or State of the Union or even press conference is too unbearable to contemplate.

It wasn't my fault, Dad!

It was that computer you were on!

Blame it on Jing!

Well I did a little bit worse than last last year on getting the old taxes in (hour and a half to spare), but hey a lot going on (like selling my house!) but the real culprit was Jing. Or the fact that the addition of Sam has cleaned one to many brain cells causing me to forget my Intuit password like every hour.

Another I-35 Security Startup

Following my LinkedIn updates led me to CoreTrace and this great picture.

I don't wnat this guy anywhere near my endpoint. Wonder how long he'll will be the mascot? He looks like he could get a bit bitter and cling to guns (but probably not religion!) if his VC money drys up and he had to go work on 6th Street.

Then he could do shots with Hillary and drive over to College Station and go shooting near the Brazos River like I used to do back in the day. Meaning the shooting part. Nothing like a nice stream bank to unload a few clips.

But application whitelisting? And from the usual suspects (if you were anywhere close the Austin/San Antonio scene in the last decade) but speaking of Austin startups that green appliance sure looks nifty. And based on the screencast, looks a hell of a lot easier than SmartBits/WebAvalanche. What a pain!

As Clean As It Gets

House goes on the market soon. Third house we've had to make ready in four years. No more moves after this one.

But this is the hole where I'll be working until June or when the house sells, whichever comes first.

And for those of y'all in more temperate climates, it is still cold enough to wear a stocking cap, especially in my basement office.

I don't give a shit, I'm a researcher (and the E-Word in SCADA)

I wasn't at RSA but based on this An Open Letter to Joanna Rutkowska this session would have been either really cool (or really frustrating to see)

I think it's only fair to point out that given your performance, you're not only an "independent researcher" but more so an "independent contractor." Using the "I'm a researcher" excuse doesn't cut it.

I know it's subtle and lots of folks are funded by third parties, but they also do a much better job of drawing the line than you do.

Despite your position on the matter and unlike you, I do give a shit, Joanna. I care very much that your research as presented to the press and at conferences like RSA isn't only built to be understood by highly skilled technicians or researchers because the continued thrashing that they generate without recourse is doing more harm than good, quite frankly.

Now, I know you can't control the press or what they print, but you certainly don't seem to invest much in terms of ensuring accuracy or clarifying the corner cases you're talking about. Here's an example from a Forbes article based upon your RSA presentation:

This is actually not entirely irrelevant to another classic discussion on Ethics on the SCADA mailing list but I have to get back to getting my house ready for the photo shoot tomorrow!

For some reason this comment me of a line from the Hunt for Red October, when a much thinner Alec Baldwin, says at a critical moment in the movie, "I'm just an analyst." And the San Angelo movie theatre (full of 98C's and 98G's from Goodfellow AFB) breaks out laughing. Much simpler times.

Ah to be 19 again. Just kidding!

What the hell are Midwestern Values?

I was born in Kansas (but never lived there much) but I'm at a loss for these "Midwestern Values" Hillary refers to in her attacks on Obama? Of course this infers that Obama does not have them.

Some here are some some ideas my wife and I came up with

* Insanely clean floors (or perfectly rounded shrubs)
* Taking your Christmas lights down within two weeks (or not leaving you Christmas tree in the back yard until the first day of Spring, like someone I know)
* At least 6 months of Cheerios in your pantry (or "storm cellar")
* Informing on your neighbors? (or at calling the village when your dog barks too much)
* Fascist snow day regulations (you know, the even/odd thing that cost me hundreds of dollars since I moved to Skokie)

Then of course it gets interesting if you replace Midwest with Mideast, West Coast, Southern, African, Indonesian, Hawaiian, Asian, etc.

But the good news, after Hillary's response to Bitter-gate, my wife finally thinks Hillary is evil!

Yes, I have won!

NOTE: If you are wondering about the image, that (and all sorts of other freakish things) came up when I did a google image search for "midwestern values"). If female robots are the embodiment of "midwestern values" you can count me out.

CNN Gets it Right on the Bitterness (or Blue Collar Park Ridge?)

Hardy Heron Beta and T-61: Pretty Much the Perfect Laptop

With all my whiny blogs lately I figured I'd do something positive for a change. A few weeks ago I took the plunge with the Hardy Heron (the next LTS) release and it definitely had a few rough spots, but at least on my T-61 it is definitely the best distro I've tried so far and things have been pretty stable, especially give the hundreds of package updates to core components since then. Performance is improve. Suspend and hibernate work perfectly now without any special hacking. This is was not the case with Gutsy. Wireless/Network Manager seems much more reliable. And then there are few security features. Ubuntu finally has a firewall (/etc/init.d/ufw) which isn't enabled yet in my build. GPG is integrated into the desktop. You can right-click to encrypt/sign files. Java installed perfectly when I went to Hushmail. Flash did, too. And the fonts, there seems to be big improvements there as well.

See the wiki page for the complete list of stuff and keep the Ubuntu spirit alive!

But what's up with "wintry mix" of rain and snow around tax time?!?

The Angry Bitter Rustbelt

So even Andrew Sullivan (about as big as an Obama fanboy as you can find) is somewhat critical of the Obama remarks about the "bitterness" working class whites. But I don't find much to disagree with in the spirt or the words themselves.

Three weeks ago we drove from Chicago to Frederick, Maryland and back. On the way East we took the Southern route down through Indianapolis (the Northern suburbs, where we stopped for dinner, seems surprisingly nicer, nicer than the Indianapolis I remember from 1980) and spent the night in Columbus, which wasn't too bad either. We drove through the old factory towns of Eastern Ohio. Down into Maryland through Cumberland, Hagerstown, then Frederick.

On the way back I accidently took the PA Turnpike (and was pleased to see my iPass worked) and it had a much different feel. Particularly around Pittsburgh, then heading North through Youngstown, then Akron, before spending the night in Cleveland. The decay was visceral. The rot. The feeling of places that have been but that no longer are. (I wish I could find a comparison between Texas and Ohio that I found somewhere, that came out during the primaries that illustrated the opposite path these two states were on, on a number of levels.)

A couple of years ago when we decided to move from Austin, were briefly considered Pittsburgh (I was entertaining the idea of trying to get a job CERT) but all the research my wife did, it seemed to be one of the most racist intolerant places in the country driven by pent up anger and bitterness (damn foreigners taking our American jobs away, since all the best jobs belong to Americans you know! We deserve factory jobs were folks make as much as MCSE's) Sure there was a haven around Universities and you could get some cool houses for relatively cheap in Squirrel Hill, but who would want to live there? Especially with an adopted Chinese daughter? Even the Episcopal Church is stuck in a time warp there.

Call me an elitist (or just nostalgic about the Great State of Texas) but these "blue collar" parts of Ohio or Pennsylvania seem scary in ways that parts of East Texas (or West Texas) are certainly not. Yes there is Jasper, but there is something different about the racism in a place that actually has minorities than what that doesn't. There is something different about states that are on a downward trajectory and those that have some life in them (the Sunbelt) with people on the move, with a horizon in front of them, people moving in, moving out, people that are not stuck between hills, along the rivers, in dying little downs with smokestacks

I think even think Illinois and the well-off North side of Chicagoland has a bit of that feel of death and rot that is hard to put a finger on unless you've lived somewhere else.

Layer 8 Stealth Firewall Switches

So here's a rule of thumb, if your knowledge of networking is based on what you can pick up at Buy Buy on that first trial credit card's they give you in college, you probably shouldn't be shooting your mouth off.

Read this fw-wiz thread to see what I'm talking about.

Happy Birthday Nessus!

Renaud has a nice Birthday writeup on Nessus over on the Tenable Blog.

I first used Nessus (and Ethereal, back when both were far less stable than they are now!) in the Summer/Fall of 1998 when I included it in "Network Attack & Defend," a five-day hands-on TCP/IP Security class I developed/taught down in San Antonio for Trident Data Systems. Lot of frequent flyer miles later, brain cells lost, grey hairs, since then....

(CAVEAT: I work for Tenable now)

Not Alerting on Scheduled Nessus Scans with Snort (Debian-style)

So my (Debian based) firewall routes traffic for the three subnets I have behind it, each which is front-ended by either a Cisco 851 or a Linksys AP. On one of the subnets I have a VM running Tenable Security Center which runs daily Nessus scans from two Nessus scanners.

The first scanner (on my Son's Ubuntu 7.10 Optiplex) scans the non-Linksys devices connected to the AP, both wired and wireless. (I exclude the traffic because even traffic through the APs hangs the WRT54G and sometimes the WET54G (bridge). The second scans its local subnet and the other Cisco-protected subnet. I will add a third Nessus scanner behind this subnet that scans back so that on the non-Linksys segments I have a perspective of scans both inside and outside the Firewall (meaning router ACLs)

But this obviously causes even the default Debian Snort ruleset to alert. So tweaking this knowledge base entry to the pecularities of a Debian (4.0) Snort install, I did the following:

1) Create an /etc/snort/excludes.conf that has BPF (not host scanner-ip) to ignore scans to/from that host

2) Modify the PARAMETERS variable in /etc/defaults/snort

# Parameters for the daemon
# Add any additional parameteres here.
PARAMS="-F /etc/snort/excludes.conf -m 027 -D -d "

3) Restart snort as usual
Simple, almost too simple to even blog about...