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Is Lebara the Cheapest Mobile Phone company in Australia?

My parents have just got a mobile phone with a Lebara pre-paid SIM [1]. Lebara advertise free calls to other Lebara phones but have a disclaimer that they charge a 25 cent flagfall and charge 15 cents per minute after the first 10 minutes – which is still cheaper than most mobile calls although not […]

libcsoap/libnanohttp

Recently I have been doing a bit of work on libcsoap (the C library for making SOAP XML calls over http) and the libnanohttp library that it depends on. The most important part of my work on it was making it thread-safe with the technique I described in my post about finding thread unsafe code […]

Play Machine Online Again with Xen 4.0

My SE Linux Play Machine [1] has been offline for almost a month (it went offline late May 30 and has just gone online again). It’s the sort of downtime that can happen when you use Debian/Unstable.

For a while I’ve been using a HP E-PC (a SFF desktop system with 256M of RAM and […]

New SE Linux Policy for Squeeze

I have just uploaded refpolicy version 0.2.20100524-1 to Unstable. This policy is not well tested (a SE Linux policy package ending in “-1” is not something that tends to work well for all people) and in particular lacks testing for Desktop environments. But for servers it should work reasonably well.

I expect to have a […]

Can you run SE Linux on a Xen Guest?

I was asked “Can you run SELinux on a XEN guest without any problem?“. In a generic sense the answer is of course YES, Xen allows you to run Linux kernels with all the usual range of features and SE Linux isn’t a particularly difficult feature to enable. I do most of my SE Linux […]

Virtual Hosting Prices

Linode has just announced a significant increase in the amount of RAM in each of their plans [1].

The last time I compared virtual hosting prices in a serious manner was over two years ago [2], so it seems like a good time to compare the prices again.

Now there are some differences between these […]

Carpal Tunnel – Getting Better

Three months ago I wrote about getting Carpal Tunnel Syndrome [1]. A few weeks after that I visited the specialist again and had my wrist brace adjusted to make it a little less uncomfortable. The specialist also gave me some quick ultra-sound treatment and then said that if it didn’t get better in a month […]

Should Passwords Expire?

It’s widely regarded that passwords should be changed regularly. The Australian government declared last week the “National Cyber Security Awareness Week” [1] and has published a list of tips for online security which includes “Get a stronger password and change it at least twice a year“.

Can a Password be Semi-Public?

Generally I think of […]

Defense in Depth and Sudo

My blog post about logging in as root and whether sudo provides any benefit [1] got some interest on Redit. In the Reddit comments on my post [2] there are a lot of strange things. One interesting comment was to suggest that logging in as non-root provided “defense in depth”.

The NSA is credited with […]

Links June 2010

Seth Berkley gave an interesting TED talk about developing vaccines against the HIV and Influenza viruses [1]. The part I found most interesting was the description of how vaccines against viruses are currently developed using eggs and how they plan to use bacteria instead for faster and cheaper production. One of the problems with using […]