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SecureCon 2007

I am running a tutorial and giving a talk about SE Linux at SecureCon 2007 [1].

The tutorial will go for 3 hours on Wednesday the 7th of November and will cover using SE Linux in CentOS 5 and Debian Etch, it will be a hands-on tutorial where every delegate gets ssh access to their […]

New SE Linux Play Machine Online

After over a year I have finally got a SE Linux Play Machine online again.

The details for logging in are at this link [1]. I’ve created T-shirt and mug designs with the login details too, they are on cafepress.com LINK [2]. For fun wear such a shirt to a conference (or even when shopping […]

Xen and Security

I have previously posted about the difference between using a chroot and using SE Linux [1].

Theo de Raadt claims that virtualisation does not provide security benefits [2] based on the idea that the Xen hypervisor may have security related bugs.

From my understanding of Xen a successful exploit of a Xen system with a […]

Senator Online

I’ve been asked for my opinion of senatoronline.org.au which claims to be Australia’s only internet-based political party. The claim may be correct depending on what you consider to be “Internet based“. Here is a copy of their platform from their web site: Senator On-Line is not aligned to any other political party… it is neither […]

A Traditional Approach to an IT Career

I have just read Career Development for Geeks [1] by Erik de Castro Lopo [2]. It makes some interesting points about a traditional approach to an IT career. The path I followed for most of my career (after I had a few years experience) was to work as a contractor and happily leave jobs without […]

0wned a DVD Player

Above is a picture of a DVD player I saw on sale in Dick Smith Electronics [1] (a chain store that used to sell mostly electronics hobbyist gear but now mostly sells consumer electronics gear). I asked one of the staff why it said “root”, tests revealed that the DVD caused any player to […]

Blog Ethics

Reporters Sans Frontiers (AKA RSF AKA Reporters Without Borders) has an interesting document about blogging [1]. They are specifically focussed on blogging as a way of reporting news. Their definition of a blog states that it is “a personal website” (there are many corporate blogs run by teams) and that it contains “mostly news” (most […]

Lentil as Anything

I just read an interesting post by Kylie Willison [1] which mentions the restaurant Lentil as Anything [2].

The restaurant chain is noteworthy for charging what people believe that the food is worth (poor people can eat for free). I think that there are cultural similarities with the Linux community, so we should have a […]

WordPress and Thumbnails

I have just had a lot of trouble with Thumbnails on one of my blogs. It turned out that I had to install the package php5-gd and restart Apache before thumbnails would even be generated. The package php5-gd (or php4-gd) is “suggested” by the Debian WordPress package and it’s not a dependency, so the result […]

Open Hardware – What Would Change

I have just read an interesting post speculating about the possibility of open source hardware [1].

To some extent things have been following a trend in that direction. Back in the bad old days every computer manufacturer wanted to totally control their market segment and prevent anyone else from “stealing their business”. Anti-competitive practices were […]