sarbastic

It’s no secret that WEP and WPA can be cracked, WEP in less than a minute. Security guru Bruce Schneier recently wrote that his own home wifi network is open – no password, no encryption. My packet filtering freeBSD server’s power supply started making a lot of noise and I decided to turn it off for good. Moreover, I turned off WEP at the wireless router.

My old Netgear router doesn’t support the new and more robust WPA standard, and WEP provides almost no security: there is nothing to be gained by enabling it. No more dealing with hex keys. It’s easy for friends and family to drop onto the network when they come over. Likewise, new machines are easy to configure.

What’s the worst that could happen? I live in the suburbs. The idea of someone sitting in a car, in the Colorado cold, stealing my connection isn’t a likely scenario. And if it they did, so what?

More likely, a neighbor would connect to my network – probably inadvertently - and steal band width from my connection. Unless my network is running slow, I’m not really worried about this.

But what about our family’s computers and data? We have several Linux/FreeBSD boxen, and two Macs. Our wireless router is no less secure than any of the free wireless hot spots I connect to: the airport, cafes, office park free wireless, etc. We simply take the same precautions at home we would take at a public wifi connection.

A few simple things should keep your data safe:

1. Keep your computers up to date.
2. Use a safer browser, like Firefox.
3. Don’t enter any data you care about – passwords, web forms, etc. – from a web page that is not being served over SSL (https in the url).
4. If you use an email client, make sure you use SSL to pop/imap your mail.
5. Encrypt any sensitive data on your machines.

Make sure you do the above when you use a public wifi connection.

I do a couple other things, that won’t stop anyone in the know from using my network, but will keep the neighbor kid from accidentally using my printer.

• You can use access by mac address to white list your computers. This can be easily spoofed, but will prevent anyone from ‘accidentally’ connecting to your network.
• Turn off (or disconnect) your printer when you’re not using it.
• Check your wireless router’s log files.

References

Cracking WEP and WPA Wireless Networks

Bruce Schneier. My Open Wireless Network

Genki Sudo retired from mixed martial arts two Decembers ago, after seeing a sign in a urinal saying “one step forward.” Genki is not only a tremendously gifted fighter, but he’s one of the greatest entertainers in the fight business. Check out his amazing entrance in this video – compared to the standard thug like entry to some crappy rap-metal, complete with black hoodie and angry stare. Note how calm he remains fighting off his back, the respect he pays his opponent, and the trademark “We Are All One” flag he flies at the conclusion of every fight.

Good luck to Genki wherever the future takes him. As a fan, I’ll miss his ring antics and skill.

I’ve tried using Grip and other GUI CD ripping tools. They are much too complicated and unpleasant to use. I found a great command line tool for ripping CDs: abcde, A Better CD Encoder. You can easily rip to flac, ogg, or mp3 format – even all at the same time. It queries the CDDB database, and is easily configured from a single – well commented – file. It’s available in most of the Linux distros, or you can install it from source. If you need a full featured, yet easy to use ripper, look no further than abcde.

Once installed, insert and mount a CD; type abcde -o mp3; abcde will prompt you to confirm the CDDB settings, and you’re done.

I wanted to install Open Office on my Xubuntu laptop, but since I’m already using the Sun Java JRE – a requirement for Java development, I don’t want to install the excremental GCJ (GNU Compiler for Java Runtime). Aptitude wants to install gcj-4.1-base gij gij-4.1 libgcj-bc libgcj-common libgcj7-0 libgcj7-awt libgcj7-jar and other sundry gcj packages. I prefer to manage my SDKs/JREs outside of APT.

I’m also not interested in any of the so-called desktop integration Ubuntu uses; I use fluxbox and it’s easy enough to add soffice to the root menu.

The Linux download of OpenOffice.org includes RPMs. Here’s how to install it on a Debian derived system – like Ubuntu.

Make sure you have Java installed

  $ java -version
  java version "1.6.0_01"
  Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_01-b06)
  Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.6.0_01-b06, mixed mode, sharing)

Download OpenOffice.org

Download OpenOffice.org (currently version 2.2.1) for Linux, without the jre, from: OpenOffice w/out JRE

Untar the download someplace.

Navigate to the RPMS directory.

Use the alien program to convert the RPMs to deb packages.

 sudo alien --scripts --keep-version -d *.rpm

 sudo dpkg -i *.deb

(If you don’t have alien installed, sudo aptitude install alien first)

OpenOffice.org will be installed in /opt/openoffice.org2.2

Start OpenOffice.org with /opt/openoffice.org2.2/program/soffice

UPDATE: 8 February 2008

Sun SDK 6 is now available in the Ubuntu repositories. Here’s how to back out the above, if you’d like to return to a solution under package management:

Install the Sun Java 6 SDK

   sudo aptitude install sun-java6-jdk

Get rid of the Open Office install we did above:

  sudo aptitude purge openoffice.org-core

(Accept aptitude’s ‘solution’)

Install OpenOffice from the Ubuntu repository:

sudo aptitude install openoffice.org

Now your OpenOffice install is managed by Ubuntu, and you still didn’t have to install the grotesque GCJ. Life is good.

Debian releases are few and far between, irritatingly so. It’s great news to see that Debian 4.0 – named ‘Etch’ – was released 8 April 2007. It looks to have plenty of good upgrades, including Xorg, udev, etc. See the release notes for details.

For annoying political reasons, Debian doesn’t include Mplayer. See the Multimedia Debian Packages for a solution. Kudos to Debian for this milestone.

If your searching for a rock solid, well thought out, free operating system. Debian is a great choice.