Everyone is talking about this, and I wont be exception, because it’s a great improvement for the web experience. I say this because I’m a huge fan of applications like Quicksilver on the Mac, and Gnome-do on Linux. Specially on laptops, because I hate to move my hands from the keyboard.
Here’s the video that everyone is talking about, and that can change the way we interact with the Web:
There’s this article on ZDNet. It reports that recently, there has been allot of active attacks against Linux systems, using stolen SSH keys.
As the article explains, once inside the machine, the attacker uses local kernel exploits to gain root access so that a rootkit known as phalanx2 gets installed.
One thing that is missing in Ubuntu is an easy way for a novice user to turn on and configure the firewall. It’s bad enough to not have the firewall turned off by default. Even if you argue that Ubuntu is secure by default because it has no services listening on the network on first boot, that’s not an excuse to leave the firewall turned off.
Ok, there is ufw (uncomplicated firewall) which I think it’s nice because saves me all the hassle of messing with iptables when I don’t have the time nor the mood to deal with it. But it’s command-line based! Novice users don’t really like or know how to use the terminal!
Gufw is an easy, intuitive, way to manage your Linux firewall. It supports common tasks such as allowing or blocking pre-configured, common p2p, or individual ports port(s), and many others! Gufw is powered by ufw, runs on Ubuntu, and anywhere else Python, GTK, and Ufw are available.
This project sounds nice to have in Ubuntu by default. In fact I liked it so much that I decided to contribute to it. So expect me to talk more about it in some future posts.
One of the compromised Fedora servers was a system used for signing Fedora packages. However, based on our efforts, we have high confidence that the intruder was not able to capture the passphrase used to secure the Fedora package signing key. Based on our review to date, the passphrase was not used during the time of the intrusion on the system and the passphrase is not stored on any of the Fedora servers.
While there is no definitive evidence that the Fedora key has been compromised, because Fedora packages are distributed via multiple third-party mirrors and repositories, we have decided to convert to new Fedora signing keys. This may require affirmative steps from every Fedora system owner or administrator. We will widely and clearly communicate any such steps to help users when available.
Today finally arrived the hardware parts I’ve ordered from Chiptec. It’s really amazing how computer hardware is getting cheaper. Of course this is a very simple system (Dual Core 2.4Ghz), but I’m not a (true) gamer. If it runs Urban Terror and lets me code stuff, it suits me just fine.
After installing all the parts, I had to buy a SATA DVD-RW Drive because none of my IDE drives worked with the new board.
With this new hardware, I couldn’t resist to give Windows Vista a try. I’ve used it many times at work and on my girlfriend’s laptop, but never at home.
It was the first OS I installed on the machine, and guess what, Vista turned my brand new hardware into a big and fat pile of donkey shit. It was almost slower than my Pentium 4. As I write this, Ubuntu is installing, for the sake of my mental health.
While searching for some python documentation for my new personal project I stumbled upon this very interesting site.
The Python Challenge is “the first programming riddle on the net”. It has 33 levels of programming riddles to solve using python (or other language) coding.
I recommend it to every programmer, it’s a nice way to raise your skills and learn new things.
If you use Feedsmith (the Feedburner plugin for Wordpress) you have probably noticed that it redirects all the feeds in your wordpress blog to your feed in Feedburner. This is very handy, except if you want to have feeds of posts filtered by tag and/or by category. The URL for such a feed is something like this:
This URL will show you a feed of all posts tagged with “linux”.
It happens that if you have the Feedsmith plugin activated, the URL shown will redirect to the global feed in Feedburner. If we want to change that behavior we need to get our hands in the dirt and hack the plugin’s PHP code.
To do this, just find the plugin’s PHP file. By default its located in /wp-content/plugins/. Edit the file using any editor with ftp client or whatever you wish. Find the function named ol_feed_redirect() and change the following code:
if (is_feed() && $feed != 'comments-rss2' && !is_single() &&
To the code below, by adding !is_tag() && at the end of the above line:
Finally I’ve finished the Firefox extension for hashr. The extension is a toolbar that allows quick access to create hashes with more than 40 different hashing algorithms. In fact it’s just a XUL front-end to the online tool.
You can find it here and maybe soon, find it also at the official Firefox Add-ons site, if approved.
This is something I missed in the last weeks. I’ve noticed that Gmail now has an option in the settings page, that allows the user to force https (SSL connection). I’ve tested it, and it works just fine.
This saves the effort of having to insert https manually in the URL, because otherwise, Gmail will only use it in the transaction of the username and password and discard it after.
After you select the option you’ll have to log out and log back in for the changes to take effect.
