lix blog

Fresh Air feature in Falcon 7X airplane. – Just the nicest plane available for X-Plane.

Links:
Falcon 7X Developer
Falcon 7X download
X-Plane flight sim

Call for Participation for 28th Chaos Communication Congress
27|28|29|30 December 2011, bcc, Berlin, Germany

The Event

The Chaos Communication Congress the annual four-day conference organized by the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) in Berlin, Germany. First held in 1984, it has since established itself as “The European Hacker Conference” attracting a diverse audience of thousands of hackers, scientists, artists, and utopists from all around the world.

Lectures

In general, lectures, workshops, and projects dealing with technology, ethics, science, security, art, philosophy, politics, and culture are welcome. However, it is not mandatory for your talk to exactly match the given topics. Anything that is interesting and/or funny will be taken into consideration. We use hacking in a very broad sense of the word, but we won’t say no to excellent submissions on computer security research.

Source: CCC Event Blog
Submissions: Pentabarf
Official 28C3 Website

… ouch!

Christian Kienle just found a disturbing privacy issue affecting Preview.app. If you wanna see a demonstration simply watch his video. He’s making this issue public so that every user can find out about it and is able to prevent bad things from happening with their (private) data.

host:~ user$ wget http://193.198.207.6/wiki/file/xyz/z.gpg
host:~ user$ gpg -d z.gpg > z_encrypted.7z #Passphrase: "ACollectionOfDiplomaticHistorySince_1966_ToThe_PresentDay#"
host:~ user$ 7z x z_encrypted.7z

… then further (in this case extracting cables from “Embassy Lilongwe”):

cat cables.csv | grep -i "Embassy Lilongwe" | grep "^\"" | awk -F "," '{print $1}' > malawicables_numbers.txt
cat malawicablenumbers.txt | awk '{print "grep -A 999 \"^\\\""$1"\" cables.csv | sed \"/^\\\"$\/,\/$d\/d\" > MalawiCables_"$1".csv"}' | sh

[Update 4th September 2011]
To visualise the cable data, one could use cable2graph. (Source: Annalist. – Thanks, Fefe.)

Result: Malawi Cables

… =^.^=

References:
Cryptome
BoingBoing
PasteBin

for the LULZ =^.^=

1. Unconsiousness
With the OS X 10.7 software release Apple fulfills and nurtures the users unconscious handling of his computer. The users data, such as photos, documents, etc. are geo- and meta-tagged and the accordant applications connect to the respective servers, such as Google maps, “the Cloud”, several Akamai servers, keeping the user in the dark about how and where his personal data is shared.

2. Self-surveillance
Further the operation system entrap and mislead the user to activities of self-surveillance, by eliminating “Big Brother” and leading the operator through “sexy” and technically well designed applications, which conceal where data and meta-data is shared and stored. The nebulous “Cloud”, easing the users data replication, inducing potential privacy hazards, assuming that the user has “nothing to hide”.

3. Anti-Social
By implementing Social Media applications and functionalities, explicitly based on proprietary standards and formats, caching cookies that track their users continuously, even after having logged out, complete patterns on the users behaviors are tracked, locally stored and shared on obscure servers and nebulous “Clouds”. The friends counter remains a real-time raising number of people whom the user never meets in real life (any more)…

4. Average
Apple Macintosh used to be a product of computers that come together with an operation system that is designed for professionals. Graphic Designers, Film Directors and Musicians. Since OS X 10.7 the system is designed to merge into the needs of a mediocre human to nurture his archaic behavior by caressing a touch-pad with his finger. A built-in baby comforter may follow in upcoming versions…

5. status_msg > /dev/null && userinfo > /apple/survey && echo –bold “WTF!”
By suggesting the user to improve the functionalities of programs, the operation system shares system data which can explicitly identify the computer and the user. Users privacy is deliberately violated.

6. Contemptuous
No ext2, ext3 or ext4 support. Gimme back my control over my data & choice of filesystem!

Source / Video

On my Nagios Server I use twitter to send status alerts. It works nicely with Identica & Twitter.

The setup is easy. First install twidge with

root@host:~# apt-get install twidge

Then write a twidgerc file with the according twidge configuration

nagios@host:~# vi /etc/nagios3/twidgerc
[DEFAULT]
oauthaccesstoken: %(serverbase)s/oauth/access_token
oauthauthorize: %(serverbase)s/oauth/authorize
oauthdata: [("user_id","XXXXXX"),("screen_name","YOUR_SCREENNAME"),("oauth_verifier","XXXXXX"),("oauth_token","XXXXXX"),("oauth_token_secret","XXXXXX"),("oauth_callback_confirmed","true")]
oauthrequesttoken: %(serverbase)s/oauth/request_token
sendmail: /usr/sbin/sendmail
serverbase: https://api.twitter.com
shortenurls: yes
urlbase: %(serverbase)s/1

Make sure the file is readable by Nagios user. (!)

nagios@host:~# chown nagios /etc/nagios/twidgerc

Then add the following lines to /etc/nagios3/conf.d/contacts_nagios2.cfg (on GNU/Linux Debian).

define contact{
contact_name twitter
alias Twitter
service_notification_period 24x7
host_notification_period 24x7
service_notification_options w,u,c,r
host_notification_options d,r
service_notification_commands notify-service-by-twitter
host_notification_commands notify-host-by-twitter
email twitteraccount_to_contact
}

… and add “twitter” to the members in the contactgroup (in the same file).

members root,nagiosadmin,twitter

Then add these lines to etc/nagios3/commands.cfg:

define command {
command_name notify-service-by-twitter
command_line echo "#Nagios $NOTIFICATIONTYPE$ $HOSTNAME$($SERVICEDESC$) is $SERVICESTATE$" | twidge -c /etc/nagios3/twidgerc update
}
define command {
command_name notify-host-by-twitter
command_line echo "#Nagios $HOSTSTATE$ alert for $HOSTNAME$" | twidge -c /etc/nagios3/twidgerc dmsend $CONTACTEMAIL$
}

Nagios will tweet the service notifications and send a directmessage to the according user with the host notification.
Here’s an example:

=^.^= Lx

The current president of the U.S. was dazzling his “fellow citizens” during his election campaign in 2008 with promises about change, making the citizens believe “they can”. Turns out that the holder of the nobel peace prize, which he got just for raising hope and not for his actions, is another hypocrite acting as warlord in the interest of neo-imperial terrorism, causing exploitation, indoctrination without respect to human laws and international agreements. – Just not keeping his promises.

Guantanamo Bay is still not closed, the war in Iraq has not ended, international corporations not held responsible for their financial and ecological disasters, but protected by the administration, the U.S. still have not accepted and ratified the Kyoto Protocol, Osama Bin Laden a hoax, etc. Now he’s the one to invoke the “Patriot Act” (ref.), – what a silly name for a law btw, – against Wikileaks to ensure his misgovernment remains intransparent. Total LULZ! Didn’t he promise he’ll dump this Act once he’s President?

Whether the United States are directed by a Democrat or a Republican, the jankies remain a horde of imperialists, culture destroyers and terrorists. In two weeks these creatures are going to celebrate their 10 years self-deception at “Ground Zero” and zero ground is the average intellectual level this country is being governed upon…

Source