LINUX NEWS
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Thursday, March 15, 2001TABLE OF CONTENTS
1) Sean’s Notes
2) Linux News
DVD Decryption in 7 Lines
Layoffs at Linuxgruven
SOUP, Anyone?
Ain't Kapitalism Great?3) Linux Resources
Showing syslog in real-time
Fundamentals of Web Application Development
The Secret to Success
Anatomy of an Attack
SE Linux4) App o’ the week
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1) Sean’s Notes
A while ago (January 25th, in fact), I gave you a link to “Underground”, a book about the hackers and phreakers of the 1980’s. At the time, it had been released to the online community as a free download.
http://www.underground-book.com/
I downloaded it to my Palm Pilot, and promptly forgot it was there. I remembered about it when I was stuck in a waiting room, so I started to read it. For the next two days, I was glued to my Pilot, fascinated by the story.
Not wanting to spoil the plot, I’ll just say the book is a series of stories, told from the viewpoint of the crackers. It’s not glorifying their actions, instead it spends a lot of time talking about their involvement with law enforcement.
I don’t know what drew me into this book. Perhaps it’s a nostalgic trip through memories of the hours I spent acquiring “secret” computer knowledge from BBS hackers. The first time I was able to connect to a computer system in another country from the comfort of my home was an epiphany. Though I didn’t understand a thing about what I saw and read, the desire to gain a deep knowledge of how these systems worked is something that stayed with me, even to this day.
In some ways, I think it is this quest for power and outreach that draws people like us to Unix, especially Linux. No more do you have to risk jail time to connect to other computers, or break into machines to have a conversation with other enthusiasts, but the global reach is there. We can peek under the hood of our machine, can simulate enterprise class applications on a desktop, and even play the cat and mouse game with the script kiddies out there. (Though, the target these days seems to be defacing web pages or causing damage, rather than increasing knowledge).
Give Underground a shot… You may learn something about what motivates you. At the very least, it’s a great story, and a background on what shaped the Internet culture. I’d also recommend “The Cuckoo’s Egg” by Cliff Stoll. Some of its characters are mentioned in Underground, but this one is told from the viewpoint of the systems administrator.
Long live the penguin,
Sean mailto:swalberg@brainbuzz.com
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2) Linux News
DVD Decryption in 7 Lines
DVDs have a fairly restrictive licensing scheme, and are encrypted to boot, thus limiting their availability under Linux. Some time ago, a fellow managed to figure out the encryption and posted DeCSS to the Net, which allows anyone to decrypt a DVD and watch it on Linux. Not to be out done, some MIT students rewrote the code in only seven lines of PERL.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,42259,00.html
Layoffs at Linuxgruven
Linuxgruven has been the source of many questions lately… Is it worth it to pay them for a course, in order to get a job? Or, is it a scam? Recently, this company laid off 100 employees, and the Slashdot commentary has a lot of insight into this event.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid/03/10/140214&mode=thread
SOUP, Anyone?
SOAP is Microsoft’s answer to distributed computing (that’s Simple Object Access Protocol). Ximian, formerly HelixCode, is working on making sure that Linux users aren’t left out of the loop. To do this, they’re porting SOAP to the GNOME environment and dubbing it SOUP.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-5079895.html
Ain’t Kapitalism Great?
Kapital is a personal finance manager designed for KDE that has recently been released in an online format in preparation for an upcoming boxed release. It isn’t free, but if the screenshots are any indication of the functionality, it’ll be worth the $25.
http://dot.kde.org/982559990/
3) Linux Resources
Showing syslog in real-time
Brainbuzz member mdnelson posted this great set of instructions on how to get syslog to output to a virtual terminal. Using this technique, you can see the real time output of the logging system on your monitor.
http://itresources.brainbuzz.com/tutorials/tutorial.asp?t=S1TU1110
Fundamentals of Web Application Development
Designing web applications is no walk in the park. There are a lot of things you have to keep in mind. This article goes into great depth on what makes a web application successful.
http://www.phpbuilder.net/columns/angus20010304.php3
The Secret to Success
Luke Ehresman, the brains behind the ever-so-cool SquirrelMail project, gives an accounting of what it takes to make an Open Source project successful. Remember, you can’t throw money at the developers to make them work harder, since everyone is working on a volunteer basis.
http://freshmeat.net/articles/view/223/
Anatomy of an Attack
One of the best ways to learn how to protect yourself from crackers is to think like one. This article shows packet traces of a successful attack on a RedHat 6.2 box, along with commentary on what’s going on.
http://www.netw3.com/documents/compromised_redhat.html
SE Linux
The American NSA (National Security Agency, or No Such Agency, depending on who you ask) did some work to make a more secure version of Linux dubbed “SE Linux” (Security Enhanced). The main goal seems to be adding mandatory access controls to the operating system in order to replace current physical security measures being used. This secretive agency even released the source code. Keep your eye on this site, as future articles that explore the code itself are promised.
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/s-selinux/?n-s-381
4) App o’ the week
A reader sent in this App o’ the week… Dia is a high- quality drawing tool, along the lines of Microsoft Visio. It is quite functional, easy to learn, and best of all, free.
http://www.lysator.liu.se/~alla/dia/dia.html
(C) 2001 BrainBuzz.com. All Rights Reserved.
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