In this article, Stryde Hax (no relation to your humble commentator) does a fine bit of detective work on the technology that Lower Merion School District MAY have used to “monitor” their laptops. I’m struck by just how little difference there is between “remote administration tools” and spyware. Like most things, I guess it all comes down to intent.

It will be interesting to see if the anti-virus vendors add this suite to their signature list. Most of the major AV vendors flag VNC as a possibly hostile program. Will this be next?

Parents protect your children.  If your child’s computer has a webcam on it please physically disable it in some way when it’s not in use. If it’s a laptop, put a piece of electrical tape over the lens. If it’s on a desktop computer put a paper bag over it. You can remove the tape or bag if the webcam needs to be used.

In addition to virii which can unexpectedly turn the camera on, and remote technicians who may unexpectedly turn the camera on we now have a new threat… School administrators.

School-issued PCs were spying on kids

Official: FBI probing Pa. school webcam spy case

This is a pretty touching blog post by Mike Rowe. For those that don’t know, Mike Rowe is the narrator of  “Deadliest Catch” and host of “After the Catch.”

Captain Phil

I was dog gone excited. Finally my Kindle was going to be able to read .pdf files. I uploaded the 2.2.3 firmware manually (for some reason my Kindle 2 did not automagically upgrade from 2.0.3 to 2.3.3) uploaded the .pdf files from the CD in Shon Harris’ CISSP All-in-One Exam Guide, Fifth Edition. By George! I was ready to study! Then I tried to read the .pdfs.

It appears that the Kindle’s .pdf client does not support zooming. What you see is what you get. Unfortunately things were way too small. I attempted to rotate the .pdf to landscape. This did increase the size some, but not nearly enough. Converting the .pdf files to Amazon’s proprietary  format messed up the file’s pagination. Not good for a book with pictures.

AMAZON – PLEASE UPGRADE THE KINDLE’S PDF CLIENT TO SUPPORT ZOOMING!!!!

MS. SHON HARRIS – Please sell the latest version of your CISSP study guide in Kindle format!!!!

Very inexpensive adapters. They cost $6.49 each. The same size and form factor as the original. Now if I could find a cheap battery…

A5000-025US Power Supplies

http://www.flickr.com/photos/28609240@N03/2671666980/

TMZ has just reported that Captain Phil Harris, Captain of the F/V Cornelia Marie, has died. Captain Phil was my favorite Captain on “Deadliest Catch.”

I hearby dedicate this morning’s Red Bull to Captain Phil. You’ll be missed.

Don’t get mad at me if I answer a poorly written question correctly but in an unexpected way.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/macwebb/124284966/

Drum-roll please… The oxymoron of the week is:

Martial Satisfaction

As used in “Researchers parse pronouns , indicate couples using `we’ good conflict solvers, less stressed”

It appears that Alfa has increased the output power on it’s latest production AWUS036H WiFi cards. The old version of the card was rated at 500mw. Per Alfa’s new specs they’ve doubled the output power on the card to 1W. This card has historically been the wardriver’s workhorse. It’s nice to see it updated for higher output levels.

Alfa has also come out with the AWUS036NH 2W WiFi card. It’s supports the G and N protocols. It uses the Ralink 3070 chipset. I have one incorporated into my vehicle. I’ll be posting a review shortly. You’ll probably want to hold off buying one. The card was a bear to get working under Ubuntu 9.10 and I still have not been able to get Kismet to work with it.

If you plan on using the AWUS036H (NOT the AWUS036NH ) with Kismet the proper source line in /etc/kismet/kismet.conf is:

source=rt8180,wlan0,ALFA