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chikpee

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Everything posted by chikpee

  1. I'm really glad they decided to offer it in Gnome and KDE flavors..........though it looks like the "dragon" utility for easily switching between KDE/GNOME and Fluxbox is gone! :o Bummer. I've got the 32-bit Gnome VMWare version going right now.
  2. So far, haven't gotten it working on my DroidX. It hasn't official been tested on any Motorola phones, and my situation is probably even more complicated by the fact that I have the leaked 2.3 Gingerbread update plus the TBH tethering patch on top of it in a , so far, less than stellar effort to fix my broken wifi tethering capability. I'll be playing with this more in the future, though.
  3. Now that I think of it, this probably best moved to the Hacks/Mods section. Could a moderator please relocate it?
  4. Regarding GPUs, that's exactly the problem when they packaged Unity for the Netbook Edition in 10.10....I haven't seen a netbook with a GPU yet (where would you fit it?) and the integrated graphics chip on the Intel Atom is nothing to write home about. Unity in 10.10 ran really slow and laggy on a netbook, even with an upgraded 2GB of RAM. Me and most people I know either kept 10.04 for the Maximus feature of just switched to normal Gnome-Panel and tweaked it to maximize screen space. Both Gnome and Canonical are pushing their respective products hard and I don't think they learned much from the fallout of the KDE 3 to 4 transition, like I had hoped they would. I've been playing with Unity a little since 11.04 just go released......still laggy, unresponsive (like a half-second delay between clicking the App Menu in the side dock and it actually showing up), still a frustrating lack of structure, unintuitive, etc. Right now, there's little you can do to customize the look and feel of the dock and tool bar (but I'm sure that functionality can be added with a little more dev work). What irritates me most about Unity is how the main menu now behaves like a really crappy search engine...finally figured out I could "filter" apps by category to half-a$$ approximate a hierarchal menu structure. But still, when I want to open an application, why not give me, say, a single row of "Frequently Used Apps" and below that a layout of menus or categories of apps. It's the same thing that tees me off about the Android app menu: namely, everything splayed out right there with no organization or structure. Why the hell am I being shown "Apps Available for Download"??? If I want to download something, I'll open the friggin' Software Center, Synaptic, or APT and look for it! It feels like Canonical is advertising to me, lol! All the indications seem to be that Canonical was pressed for time and rushed 11.04 out the door just to meet the six-month release cycle deadline. I think Unity will eventually become a good UI, if they listen to the users and keep improving based on their feedback, but it still has a way to go. I played with Gnome Shell in February of this year...haven't touch the new Fedora release using it yet, but understand it's a little further ahead than Unity is. At the time, it seemed a little bit laggy and wonky, but much more responsive than Unity. Also like Unity, there were no longer all the applet and theme options you had with Gnome Panel, but I'm sure that will be addressed with more development time and as more people develop add-ons to it. But regardless, Gnome Shell seems to be a LOT further towards prime time than Unity. It actually still has menus ! There's also other questionable decisions both the Gnome team and Canonical are mulling over. One is the fact you now have to use Mutter to run Gnome Shell....no more Compiz, Metacity, or anything else. The flexible you had with Gnome (Compiz-Fusion eye candy for powerhouses, Metacity for older, less-beefy machines) is effectively gone. Unity at least for now offers Gnome 2 and Unity 2D, but for how long? It's slowly losing that built-in flexibility as well. Plus they want to ditch X11 for Wayland....which isn't necessary bad, since using X11 just because it's been around forever isn't really justification for never inventing a new display server...but I hope to jeebus they don't ramrod it forward like they have Unity. Wayland ain't quite out of beta stage yet, either. Both UIs are moving in a similar direction to Windows and OS X, more bloat and less friendly to slower machines. I actually own a fast computer now, but I like having an OS that doesn't suck up resources and leaves more CPU cycles and RAM for my applications. Gnome + Metacity was a really good compromise between looking good, being full-featured, yet easy on your processor. Ok, I'll admit the Apple copy-cat dig is a bit unfair on my part...that's a dig best levelled at just Canonical. Canonical does seem to lean heavily on Apple for inspiration in the last few releases (moving to the more purplish theme, moving the min/max buttons to the left, etc.). I'm on a Mac right now and a few tweaks of the Dock would have it more than halfway to looking like Unity. For now, I'll stick with Ubuntu Classic. When that goes away, it'll probably be Debian for me. I play with CentOS and Fedora from time to time, I'm just most at home with APT and other Debian-based features.
  5. http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=950083 - the project on the xda-developers site http://www.pentestit.com/2011/02/18/debdroid-run-network-sniffing-debian-system-android/ - the blog post I initially saw to discover it Since buying (and rooting) a Droid X, I've long bemoaned how far behind the Android platform seemed to be in comparison to jailbroken iPhones/iPod Touches, which have the Cydia frontend for APT, a workable BSD subsystem, and a whole host of ported applications. Yeah, sure, Android is "open" and "based on Linux", but all you get out of the box is the rather castrated CLI (love how the only error message it can generate is "Permission denied", regardless of whether I'm trying to pass it a root level command or just typing gibberish at the prompt), a barebones busybox install upon rooting, and it's apparently a bitch to cross-compile Linux apps because of the very different directory structure, APIs, etc. Looks like someone's finally advancing in the direction that jailbroken iPhones have gone. You get a full-fledged Debian ARM install running inside a chroot jail on your Android. You can either pass it commands with a debshell script or run debdroid to enter it. But you wanna know the BEST part? It comes pre-installed with openssh libpcap libpcap-dev ettercap wireshark carwhisperer btscan NMAP ntbscan ...and apparently some other tools and you can APT over anything already compiled for ARM in Debian's repos! Awesome! Finally, a portable Linux pen-testing machine in your pocket! It hasn't been tested with the Droid X (my current phone), but I'm going to play with it and see if I can get it to work...which might be tricky, since I just did a hack upgrade to Gingerbread, but we'll see. Darren, if you're reading this, you should DEFINITELY check this out and do a report on the show!
  6. Wouldn't be surprised if a project fork starts that seeks to preserve and build on the classic GNOME-Panel, but then again you could get much the same experience with Xfce. The hilarious thing is the whole Ubuntu Unity/Gnome Shell p*ssfight, when neither of them really seems like they're ready for production use. I'm sure a lot of the bugs will get ironed out eventually. I was using just a netbook at home for a long time and elected to stay with Ubuntu 10.04 for a long time because of Unity (and the fact that my integrated clickpad worked with the LTS release then promptly broke with 10.10). How the heck could they push Unity as a "netbook" launcher when its more resource intensive than regular old Gnome? The other thing is that I wish there was more innovation from Linux GUI makers, rather than a drive to see who can copy Apple the best.
  7. Just starting out....yeah, Infiltrator's figure is pretty accurate, assuming it's someone who's just graduated or maybe has only a year or two experience, dependent upon where in the US, cost of living there, etc.
  8. I dl'd the beta last week and played with it, but for some reason VMWare Fusion said I didn't have a good enough graphics card for Unity (doubtful) and defaulted to Classic GNOME. Haven't really taken time to troubleshoot why (Accelerated 3D graphics is enabled for the VM, so I know that isn't it). Played with GNOME Shell months ago on a netbook and it ran OK even considering the paltry integrated graphics card. Curious to see which one will turn out to run smoother and faster, but I admit I will miss the simplicity of plain old GNOME Panel. Never was much of a KDE fan, and I guess that's where many will flee who don't like the new-fangled UI's. There's always still Fluxbox for a good window manager that isn't a resource hog and looks nicer than just raw X11. As far as the PSN debacle...I had a PSN account a few years ago, before my PS3 was stolen in a burglary and I never bothered to replace it. I had bought stuff on there before, and though I think the credit card I used for it has since expired and been replaced, I will be watching it like a hawk for the next few months. Seems there's already lowlifes out there trying to sell allegedly stolen CC numbers from the PSN breach.
  9. I'll preface this by mentioning I work in the defense sector, mostly Army and Navy. I spent five hours last night trying to complete some mandatory online bullshite training. All I had to do was race through it and get the pretty PDF certificate saying I did everything and email it to my boss. Right as I came to the final section, I couldn't complete it because I was using Chrome and the interactive Flash-based quiz at the end wouldn't play nice with my browser. So I had to redo the whole frickin' thing in IE (it was one of those ones where you had to actually flip through every slide and watch every video, couldn't just skip to the end and take the test). That's just the latest incident in my six long years of head-bashing-keyboard frustration with defense sector web coding. Hell, the only reason I haven't totally given up on Windows on my home machine and entirely switched to Linux or Mac OS X is because of my work and the Windows and IE-only design attitude. And don't get me started about the actual desktop applications you have to use for the Army and Navy..."porting software" must be a dirty word at DISA. Are there libraries for Java and ActionScript/Flash that are purposefully designed to be as cripplingly dependent upon Windows API's, ActiveX, and Internet Explorer's "screw it" attitude towards W3C standards, as humanly possible? If so, I swear to God that every web designer that DoD hires to make its sites and online apps is using them. (I don't even have to ask about ASP.NET and VBScript.....I already know the answer to that one ) I'd love to see the JSP source code that DKO, AKO, and other big military and defense web portals use, the header must look like... import javax.servlet.jsp.MethLikeDependenceUponMicrosoft.* </rant>
  10. When SkyNet comes, it'll probably be a rogue DoD SharePoint server. It'll have so many PowerPoint presentations full of BS stored in it that it'll achieve sentience.
  11. I do like Ubuntu because of the frequent releases.....but I'm with you on not "trusting" it as much. For example, 10.04 LTS works great for my netbook, fixed a lot of issues with "clickpads" (touchpads with integrated buttons, a la Mac)...briefly upgraded to 10.10 and my clickpad was broke again, so I promptly switched back. And last I checked, still no true fix for it, so I'll just have to wait and see if 11.04 fixes it. My biggest lesson I've learned is not to get to upgrade-greedy and play EXTENSIVELY with the liveCD of the newest version before committing to installing it on your hard drive. I'll be curious to see what new Debian features will find their way into Ubuntu and which will be ignored (like the switch from bash to dash?).
  12. Compiling X11 from source on a BSD distro when I don't have the time to sit around and answer all of the four dozen ncurses prompts that come up for all its dependencies. Especially considering I just say "Yes" to accept the default and never added any additional packages or options. It took me THREE F'N DAYS to finish compiling X11 on my FreeBSD virtual machine
  13. That one's a serious contender. I've heard some people love and some hate ASUS's keyboards and touchpads. I need to go to Best Buy or somewhere else and play with some ASUS laptops and see which side I fall on. Very nice laptop! Can't find any reviews for this model. Any personal experience with this one?
  14. Is it possible? I'll preface this by stating that I used to be an ardent Apple hater. What did (kinda) change my mind was my wife begging for months to get a Macbook Pro. I convinced her I wouldn't blow that money on it, while secretly I schemed to make it her Christmas present and bought one, had it delivered to a co-worker's house, then, while she was gone for a week or two, proceeded to Boot Camp it with Win7 and install some nice Adobe apps for her amateur photography pleasure. I could never get her to use Ubuntu or Mint...but by God, I could get her to use a highly-modified BSD, lol. I then began to understand see why fanbois loved their Macs so damn much. Don't get me wrong, Steve Jobs is still Satan...but goddamn if the man and his employees don't know how to make a fine computer! Great display, awesome battery life that's almost as good as my netbook (we're talking 6-8 hours), solid build yet very light, love the multitouch touchpads (really hoping Ubuntu finally gets this functionality squared away in the upcoming 11.04 so I can have the same experience in Linux)...I could gush on. For me, the 13.3 inch model is a perfect size. I hate huge, bonkin' laptops that really do take up my whole lap...this one has a screen bigger than my netbook but is still lightweight and super-portable. Anyway, it's really tempting me to pay the hardware tax and get a MBP too, though I'll probably wait for the rumored upgrade everyone is expecting to come in the following months. Taking specs like the Macbook Pro, I've combed CNet and other review sites, plus New Egg, Tiger Direct, Best Buy, and numerous other online stores, in search of a computer that could match the Macbook Pro. I figured it would be easy enough to find a thin-and-light or ultraportable with better specs and might take a little more effort to find one that looked as good as the MBP......but it is with much chagrin that I have to admit that I have yet to find a serious competitor. Maybe the HP Envy, but it's even more expensive, plus I've heard bad things about the touchpad being really shitty and the laptop getting burning hot. Typical HP, lol, love the company, but every notebook I've bought from them could melt lead after running anything with 3D graphics for more than twenty minutes. So maybe you intrepid Hak5ers could help a bruddah out! Help me find a laptop to seriously match or exceed the Macbook Pro...else I may be forced to fall past the event horizon of the Jobsian Reality Distortion Field. And that would suck, because then I'd have to start wearing a knit cap in the summer, buy skinny jeans, and become more of a condescending douche than I already am. It's not hard to find better specs for cheaper........the real challenge seems to be putting into that smaller, more portable package. My main uses will be casual gaming, internet, may watch videos on it, and other multimedia uses. Also will be dual-booted with Win7 and Ubuntu. See here's the metrics for you... Processor and RAM: Would prefer a newer Core i Sandy Bridge series one , but the MBP 13-inch gets away pretty well by having the discrete nVidia card pick-up the slack, so I might compromise here. I just prefer the Core i series for "future-proofing" purposes. As far as RAM, 4 GB and up, again for future-proofing. Display/Size: HAS TO BE between 14 inches or less in screen size and less than 5 lbs. Generally in what is considered the "thin-and-light" or "ultraportable" class. And of course I'd like the screen to be nice and purty with high resolution. The specs to beat on the MBP are 1280 x 800 res with a 16:10 aspect ratio. An LED screen would be cool, but I'm flexible. Hard Drive: 250GB and up, since I'd like to dual boot. 500GB would be awesome. Prefer a normal old hard drive, solid-state is just too damn expensive. Graphics Card" Would like to have an ATI or NVidia integrated one, since the Intel integrated ones are mostly sh*t. The MBP boasts a NVidia GeForce 320M with 256MB of DDR3. I'm flexible on this one. I don't play the latest games, but I'd like to know that if I did purchase a game for the Windows side that's already a few years old, like Civ4, that it could handle it. Battery: An MBP can boast anywhere between 4 to 8 hours depending on usage. Would like one that could last 4 hours off the plug with just normal use. Ports and Slots: USB is just fine with me, 3.0 is even better. Don't really care if it has HDMI or SD slots. I doesn't even really have to have a DVD or BluRay built-in either. Keyboard and Touchpad: Backlit keyboard would be nice, but isn't a deal-breaker. Would prefer an integrated-button "clickpad", since I'm already used to it with my HP netbook. I'm still on Ubuntu 10.04 because I finally tweaked it to work well enough on with my clickpad (10.10 was a step backwards in touchpad support), but I'm optimistic it will improve in 11.04 and fully support multi-finger gestures and such. Design: Obviously, this is the hardest one, since it's incredibly subjective. I want a laptop that looks nice. A solid build is also desirable. Don't need some Toughbook that could stop a bullet...but don't need a chintzy, loose, and clanky slab of cheap plastic either. I really like the look of MBP and some other ones, like the HP Envy, that are using aluminum and magnesium in the case. As tried and true as they are, this rules out most Lenovo laptops that still look like their old IBM ancestors from ten years ago, though I understand there are some more classy-looking Lenovos being built nowadays. Networking: Ethernet and 802.11n wireless. OS: Don't give a rat's ass, it's getting Ubuntu. Windows will only be on the HDD for what won't work in VMWare/VirtualBox or Wine. Miscellaneous: I want something reliable, obviously, and also one that won't make my lap sweat from ridiculous heat coming off of it. Which might rule HP out entirely, lol. Webcams are pretty standard anymore, and I'm not super-particular about them, so I probably don't even have to request that. Serious brownie points for a build known to work very well with Linux and minimize the time I have to spend in /usr/lib, /etc, and scouring around for restricted drivers. I know it's a tall order, but maybe you know a great laptop that fits this bill to a tee and is less than the $1200 asking price for a Mac. Save me from Apple's evil clutches!
  15. ANONYMOUS, that ultra-dangerous hacker gang (skiddies) who strike from their super-secret internet board (4chan)! (to those few who probably haven't seen this ridiculous news story already) 4chan is great for a laugh and producing or accelerating 99% of the memes on the Internet....but this is pretty much the norm as far as their "hacking" abilities go (ie, crude DDoS attacks).
  16. WTF!?!?!? I used to love that show when I was a kid!
  17. Yeah, that "deluser" terminal command takes very good care of those pesky accounts
  18. @ Infiltrator Unfortunately, my company wouldn't shell out for the week-long boot camp, so I had to do self-study (already had more than the prerequisite 1 year of sec experience by that time). For self study, I used... Exam Cram CEH Guide Official EC-Counil CEH Review Guide Plus, a sh*tload of practice questions from a colleague who'd done the bootcamp The Exam Cram book is a little out-of-date (published in 2006), but was a very good resource. I would recommend it. The official EC-Council book was a waste of a good twenty bucks. Horrible, vague info (and the exam is very detail-oriented), and HORRIBLE editing. In fact, the most irritating thing of all was apparently someone did a Find->Replace on the entire document for the letters "be" that caused every sentence that started with them to be mashed into the previous one. And apparently, if you shell out the $500 for the official courseware and lesson plans (the CEH-bootcamp-in-a-box), the editing and spelling on it are even worse.
  19. I feel ya. I didn't even realize they produced an Android phone. But considering what overpriced crap their Vaio line of computers and most of their other consumer electronics are, I would've stayed the hell away to begin with. Remember, you are buying a phone from the same company that used to plant rootkits on their music CDs to keep you from pirating them (LINK)
  20. I'd say comp sci or similar if you want to do the associate route first. If you're specifically interested in security, when it comes time to go for your bachelors, look for a college that offers an information security degree program. ESPECIALLY look and see if there's a school you can go to that is an NSA National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance (I'm assuming you live in the US) http://www.nsa.gov/ia/academic_outreach/na...titutions.shtml (note: "information assurance" is fancy government speak for "information security") Having a degree from one those programs can get you a small waiver on experience requirements for certain professional certifications, like the CISSP. Also agree with Vako: find a part-time IT job while you're in college. Pursue work-study, your campus' IT center, or even local businesses that might need someone to be a junior sysadmin, web developer, etc. It'll really help you land internships later and eventually a full-time career once you graduate! While I was in college, I did IT help desk work for my university's computer labs. For security, there are a few certifications you can study for and get without any work experience. I'd recommend the CompTIA Security+ cert, just because job ads constantly ask for it and even non-techie HR hiring people know what it is. CompTIA Network+, A+, and Linux+ are also good ones for a beginner to get as well. A cert like that and some work experience while you're in college will give you a SERIOUS edge over your fellow students come graduation time.
  21. +1 on the CEH books.....except for the official EC-Council study guide one (which sucks), most all of the Certified Ethical Hacker books will give you a nice grounding in not just exploits and tools, but usually cover some of the concepts of networking, the TCP/IP stack, and other key concepts. But since you're studying for CCNA, I'm sure you've got the OSI model coming out of your ears. Another good book often used for CEH study is the Hacking Exposed series. Also, as harrison hinted at, a knowledge of programming is essential. You don't have to be fluent in programming languages or a crazy code ninja (though it certainly does help you A LOT), you have to at least be able to read and understand written code. C is a great place to start, since it'll also help to better understand C++, C#, Objective C, Java, etc. etc. etc. Ruby (Metasploit's language of choice) and Python are also good choices; I'm currently trying to expand my knowledge of both. Though for C, if you're really green to programming, I'd start off with something like Absolute Beginner's Guide to C or a similar novice book first and then the official Kernighan & Ritchie book. Keep playing with Backtrack and maybe pick up some books on Linux and Unix administration. Shell scripting is another nice skill to have.
  22. Doh! Busybox has netcat (nc) in it already. Oooooh! And it's the good old traditional one, with the -e remote command execution option! (hate how they took it out of the OpenBSD version of netcat that Ubuntu now comes with)
  23. Some of my co-workers are trying to talk management into paying for their OSCP training and certification. I currently have a CEH (had to do self-study, no boot camp for me :( ) and I'd love to tackle OSCP someday as a natural progression of my pentesting eduaction. But for right now, I'm trying to get my CISSP done before the end of the year (highly unlikely, at this point), more as my employment-in-a-bad-economy "insurance policy" then really feeling it's going to teach me anything I don't already know. The HR peons most companies put in charge of screening resumes for infosec positions don't recognize certs like CEH or SSCP, both of which I unfortunately have...but the dim bulb over their head flickers up when they see Sec+ or especially CISSP. Though it's getting more name recognition, I'm afraid OSCP is kind of in that same category of stuff no one will know what it is unless they specifically ask for it in the job ad.
  24. Just got my new Motorola Droid X on Friday and I absolutely love it so far, although for some reason doubleTwist doesn't like my Hak5 podcast subscription, so I have to hand-jam it onto the device. This is my first smartphone, but I have had an iPod Touch for over a year now. After jailbreaking it, I was amazed at all the command line goodness offered up by the dev community. A quick trip through the Cydia store had me set up with a terminal emulator, nmap, netcat, different wifi stumblers, openSSH...hell even Midnight Commander was on there (looked like crap on the small screen though, lol). After rooting my Droid X the other day, I of course hooked myself up with Wifi Tether, Titanium Backup, and some other goodies....but I'm really underwhelmed at the amount of command line tools available. :( I did get busybox installed (so I don't have to type "busybox <insert utility name here>" everytime), and I'm still exploring some developer forums to see what's been cross-compiled for ARM to run on Android phones, but I'm really craving some of those good old tools, like netcat and nmap (screw the Zenmap GUI in the Android Market, I want the command line, dammit!).
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