Ben's Ramblings http://www.ben.io/blog Just a small spot sticking thoughts, projects, and interests. Sat, 15 May 2010 02:30:35 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Intense Debate ? http://www.ben.io/blog/?p=125 http://www.ben.io/blog/?p=125#comments Sat, 15 May 2010 02:30:35 +0000 Ben http://www.ben.io/blog/?p=125 Trying out this new intense debate plugin for WordPress. Not that there is much debate on my blog or that its intense, but it seems to be a simple to use plugin which allows for spam filtering also. I also blame Zai for this idea.

]]> http://www.ben.io/blog/?feed=rss2&p=125 3 Apple Bluetooth Keyboard on Ubuntu 10.4 http://www.ben.io/blog/?p=121 http://www.ben.io/blog/?p=121#comments Sun, 28 Mar 2010 17:09:35 +0000 Ben http://www.ben.io/blog/?p=121 For a seeming eternity Ubuntu has for whatever reason failed to ship a version which upon install that can pair properly with Apple’s Bluetooth keyboard. Bug after bug has been filed on this to no avail. So to my lack of suprise, after installing the new 10.4 (Lucid Lynx), Bluetooth would not pair with the keyboard.

Luckly, the situation has seem to improved to the point where only two changes are needed to get it working:

aptitude install blueman

  • Add hid_apple to /etc/modules (must be first) to allow Bluetooth to survive a reboot.

Progress? Kinda…..

]]> http://www.ben.io/blog/?feed=rss2&p=121 3 Ubuntu 10.04 window button design headache http://www.ben.io/blog/?p=114 http://www.ben.io/blog/?p=114#comments Mon, 15 Mar 2010 05:28:01 +0000 Ben http://www.ben.io/blog/?p=114 I downloaded the newest Ubuntu to toy with in VMware and I really had the great desire to strangle who ever decided it would be a good idea to move the minimize, maximize, and close buttons to the LEFT side of the window bar.

pic of window bar

After my momentary, are you kidding me, thoughts, it occurred to me that OSX has the same setup.

Now, interestingly enough I have a Mac and I use the left side buttons on it. Yet for at least a hour I continued to try to click at the right to get things closed in Ubuntu. Muscle memory, for those who do not think consciously about where to click when getting rid of, was going to cause me headache for the foreseeable future.

So to save you the headache I went through, enjoy the fix (from the command line):

gconftool-2 –set /apps/metacity/general/button_layout –type string “menu:minimize,maximize,close”

]]> http://www.ben.io/blog/?feed=rss2&p=114 0 Testing Testing…. http://www.ben.io/blog/?p=109 http://www.ben.io/blog/?p=109#comments Thu, 04 Feb 2010 06:31:58 +0000 Ben http://www.ben.io/blog/?p=109 First post from the WP app on my Nexus One.

Enjoy a picture of me stuck waiting for a train. EDIT: seems image upload not working.

]]> http://www.ben.io/blog/?feed=rss2&p=109 0 Juan Enriquez shares mindboggling science http://www.ben.io/blog/?p=108 http://www.ben.io/blog/?p=108#comments Tue, 05 Jan 2010 11:21:03 +0000 Ben http://www.ben.io/blog/?p=108
via ted.com

Test post to Posterous from TED one of my favorite places to see glimpses into the future. Also testing cross posting to my personal wordpress site.

Posted via web from Benjamin’s posterous

]]> http://www.ben.io/blog/?feed=rss2&p=108 0 Drone video feed intercepted by insurgents… http://www.ben.io/blog/?p=104 http://www.ben.io/blog/?p=104#comments Thu, 17 Dec 2009 16:13:48 +0000 Ben http://www.ben.io/?p=104 I was looking over the WSJ and I stumbled upon an article on video feeds from predator drones being intercepted by insurgents. I had to stop and re-read. Intercepted with a “$26 off-the-shelf software”. Are you kidding me? Let me add some salt to this wound.

“The potential drone vulnerability lies in an unencrypted downlink between the unmanned craft and ground control. The U.S. government has known about the flaw since the U.S. campaign in Bosnia in the 1990s, current and former officials said. But the Pentagon assumed local adversaries wouldn’t know how to exploit it, the officials said.”

Classic security through obscurity. Lets hope they won’t figure out how to exploit it, genius. Every transmission should be protected from interception and tampering. To not do such a thing on a military drone is just incompetence.

source article link

]]> http://www.ben.io/blog/?feed=rss2&p=104 0 The futility of fighting file sharing http://www.ben.io/blog/?p=100 http://www.ben.io/blog/?p=100#comments Fri, 10 Jul 2009 00:33:26 +0000 Ben http://www.ben.io/?p=100 For years I’ve always been of the opinion that file sharing was an obviously un-winnable war which content publishers needed to accept already. But how futile their efforts will become didn’t occur to me until I was grabbing a torrent of a file and decided to peak at the list of connections out of curiosity. To my amazement, every single one was encrypted. I remember this being talked about, but that it has gotten so widely adopted and is completely transparent to the end user was interesting to me.

]]> http://www.ben.io/blog/?feed=rss2&p=100 0 Rizon Real Time Blacklist – part 1 http://www.ben.io/blog/?p=86 http://www.ben.io/blog/?p=86#comments Mon, 22 Jun 2009 17:31:38 +0000 Ben http://www.ben.io/?p=86 After some thought, I decided it would be useful to document some of the projects i’m actively working on for this site. One of such projects is a real time black list (RBL) for the Rizon IRC Network. The network consists of 20~ servers holding around 15 – 17 thousand users.

Why is this important? Because IRC is such a old and simple  text based chat protocol. It is often abused by hackers, script kiddies and other malicious reasons to abuse people’s personal computers which have been compromised and turned into drones. They are then often used to disrupt the chat of others, or even denial of service attacks.

First the setup, after talking with some other RBL projects, dronebl.org and proxybl.org, I decided on a mix of MySQL and rbldnsd.

Rizon has several methods of detecting compromised hosts, drones, open proxies or other types malicious users. Each time a user is detected which matches one of our rulesets, his or her IP address is added to our ban list, normally for a 3 day period. While 3 days is useful, we wanted to pool the knowledge we had gained of the IP’s which were bad.

No small task, but I decided to spin up one of Rackspace’s new Cloud Servers to Debian (5.0). Tasks before me include:

  • installation of mysql, rbldnsd, and lighttpd, my web server choice.
  • setup of DNS records to create my blacklist & domain acquisition
  • creation of php scripts to allow our services to add hosts & comments
  • creation of scripts to dump the mysql database into a zone format for rbldnsd
  • creation of informational website as well as a check & removal system for users who have cleaned up their problem.
  • meet with the different Rizon developers depending on service and agree on a protocol for blacklist adds.

more to come…. as I get things implemented.

]]> http://www.ben.io/blog/?feed=rss2&p=86 0 VMware Fusion Goodness http://www.ben.io/blog/?p=80 http://www.ben.io/blog/?p=80#comments Sat, 20 Jun 2009 00:06:01 +0000 Ben http://www.ben.io/?p=80 I finally got done configuring my laptop the way I want it, and impressively VMware Fusion lets me full screen VM’s per each of OSX 10.5 spaces. With 4gb and a dual core processor, my macbook is holding its own. Ubuntu 9.04 (xfce4), Windows XP, and Windows 7 (RC) for those unfamiliar.

]]> http://www.ben.io/blog/?feed=rss2&p=80 0 Colbert gains new respect for U.S. Air Force http://www.ben.io/blog/?p=76 http://www.ben.io/blog/?p=76#comments Fri, 19 Jun 2009 20:35:19 +0000 Ben http://www.ben.io/?p=76 I was amused by Steven Colbert’s trip to Iraq as apart of the USO efforts to provide releif for service members abroad. Hulu even allows you to edit a clip, so here it is in all its glory:

]]> http://www.ben.io/blog/?feed=rss2&p=76 0