21 Funny Christmas Cards

Rai    Others     christmas

Here are some funny Christmas cards that are sure to start your holidays with a cheer shared by tinyprints.com

Top Ten Terrible Tech Products

Rai    Hardware     computer, gadget, Games, News, software, tech products, Technology

There are few gadgets emerging every now and then, some has changed the history of technology, some well, got stuck in the bottom of the barrel. I found a nice article in http://crave.cnet.co.uk that describes the top ten terrible tech products according to their reviews and I find the article interesting. Here is a breakdown of their list:

• Windows Vista. CNET describes Windows Vista as the worst tech product for its incompatibility with hardware and downgrade-to-previous-version option. I think hardware manufacturers will definitely release hardware drivers for Vista sometime in the future but I am not really into “sacrifice your precious RAM for squiggly app windows” person.

• Sony Rootkit CDs. Sony has apparently released a software with a purpose of protection against piracy programmed into their audio cds. The bad thing, according to CNET, is after you load their software, it will leave your computer vulnerable to hackers over the internet. I am personally not aware of this. This is bad for Sony who has been around providing us with breakthroughs in technology. If you have a personal experience with this root-kit CD, share it here.

• Amstrad E-m@iler Telephone. This is an equipment that allows you to send emails using your phone and I have seen a product similar to this but I have not used or tried it. This product might have been an ass-kicker had not it arrived so late. During its release, computers and internet are common so spending a huge sum of money for something that does what your computer can do plus more is a total waste.

• Atari Jaguar. In 1993, Atari released Jaguar meant to rival Sega and Nintendo consoles. But software has been diffcult to write for the Jaguar console, according to CNET, and because of this, less titles came around and meant death to Jaguar. This is the last console that Atari released.

• Apple Puck Mouse. CNET writes that this mouse was difficult to use because of its round interface, however, it is the first mouse to use the USB to connect to the PC. I think it looks cute though.

• Tamagotchi. I doubt nobody remembers what Tamagotchi is. This is the coolest toy ever! No matter what CNET says about this toy, I lo-o-o-o-ve it!

• Gizmondo. CNET describes Gizmondo as a hand-gaming console with rubbish games. Looks like Gizmondo never left UK to spread its wings is US and Asia.

• The Squircle. The Squircle is an MP3 player that uses an SD card for storage because it does not have internal memory to begin with, writes CNET. But I think its cute and the name is unique.

• Barcode Battler. CNET describes Barcode Battler as a hand-held game device that uses barcodes for your games. Don’t ask me, I don’t get it either.

• Sinclair C5. An battery-operated tricycle running at 15mph “just twice the speed of one of those electric mobility scooters for old people”, CNET says. Aside from being expensive, the seat-to-pedal distance was unchangeable, there were no gears and it overheated going up hills.

If you think there is something out there that is considered a terrible tech product, share it here.

Disk Format in Linux

Rai    Linux, Tips     command, disk, format, Linux, newbie

There are some cases which you may want to format your hard drive, like maybe doing an OS upgrade or quitting your current job (heh..), but being a neurotic person that I am, I have thought about low level formatting, a hard drive erasure technique that leaves unrecoverable traces of data. This technique is very useful if you are a keeper of highly confidential files and worried of other people who can get hold of your supposedly clean drive and restores your data and eventually, stealing the citical information.

The term low level format is actually a misused term for only the drive manufacturer can perform the low level format and this is performed before the drive is sold in the market. The succeeding format methods that can be used are considered as high level, for when low-level format is used, the drive might be rendered useless. So from here on, I will use the term zero-fill in cleaning a hard drive.

Zero-fill means creating a series of 0-bit data that are saved on a file or device. We all know that data are not really numbers and characters, but series of 0’s and 1’s that are machine-readable. Linux has a built-in command known as ‘dd’ that can perform zero-fill on a device or file, in this case, a hard drive. A simple one-liner of dd command that can perform a hard drive formatting is:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda

The command says that dd will write 0 (/dev/zero) to the device /dev/hda, the first IDE drive in the machine. This will command will overwrite any existing data in the drive with null data, hence performing a format procedure. However, some forensic data recovery can scan the formatted drive and still recover data. So how do you get past these pesky data recovery tools? One way is to perform dd on the drive and fill the drive with random bits. This will mask the data creating utter chaos in the drive making it difficult for recovery tools to find and organize data.

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda

or

dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/hda

This command is the same as the forementioned, but instead of 0’s, it fills the drive with random bits generated by the kernel. urandom and random are different from another so you may want to check out the man page of these to figure out what suits mo better.

If you feel that doing random fill on the drive is still not enough, most people like doing the same procedure for seven times. You can do a simple loop of the command like so:

for n in `seq 7`; do dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda; done

The command “dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda” will be done 7 times as per with the “seq 7″ condition. This may take quite a while especially on large capacity disks but I think this will do the trick of preventing forensic data recovery on your drive. Another command that can be used is shred, which is like so:

shred -z /dev/hda (The switch -z means zero-fill to hide the shredding)

I have personally not tested this command so I may not be able to give you feedback about this.The man page for shred reads:

Overwrite the specified FILE(s) repeatedly, in order to make it harder for even very expensive hardware probing to recover the data.

Sounds interesting. From the looks of it, it is similar to urandom and random.

If you have experience in using shred or any other command to format your drive, I’d like to hear it.

Philippine’s LTO Site Defaced / Hacked

Rai    Linux, News, Society     cybercrime, deface, hack, lto, neda, Philippines

This morning, Philippines’ Land Transportation Office official website, www.lto.gov.ph was defaced by someone who calls himself iSKORPiTX. The website’s original landing page was replaced with the hacker’s page displaying the waving flag of Turkey.

This is another defacement of Philippines’ government site following the defacement of NEDA official site.

Here is the screenshot:

Hmmm.. another script kiddie on the loose? I don’t know – you tell me

Actually, I have received a notice from one of our hosting providers during the time that the accounts in their servers were compromised. The page shown above is somewhat similar to what we had to one of static sites (no big deal here, no critical operations were being performed on that site). The explanation they gave was they are suspecting a worm or virus of some kind with the capability to sniff FTP accounts especially those that were left unchanged. This kind of activity gives the hacker opportunity to delete and upload files to their will. We changed providers after that.

You got your own hosting provider horror story? Share it here.

An update from http://technogra.ph

Update: We’ve been notified by Aileen Apolo of Google Philippines that the PNP Cybercrime Unit will be handling the case.

Pinoy Tux Weblog Update

Rai    PinoyTux    

There are a couple of things that happened to my PinoyTux blog that I was not aware of.

The first one is my blog has been behaving in a manner that I do not want to be and I am not sure how long this has been going on. I only found out about this when I created my post for this month which is about the latest release of Fedora 8. After I did my first post, my article disappeared after I clicked the Publish icon. At first I thought that my session has timed out because I have this habit of doing the article straight to WP which is not advisable. I ought to make the first draft in a word processor (OpenOffice.Org Writer is a good choice here) but being stubborn that I am, I wrote the whole article straight in WP only to be vanquished by some unknown bug. I am not really sure what is going on so I tried again, doing the article in WP – again. Sounds like I have not learned my lesson, right? I clicked Save and Continue Editing button, then Boom! Out goes nowhere my post went. And not only that. Comments does not get in. I mean they also go to nowhere. There might be something that sends everything I put in to I-Dont-Know-Where-It-Went land.

WTH!?

So I decided to re-write the whole thing again, in WP – again but this time I saved a copy in my Gmail account. I clicked Save and Continue Editing button, and guess what happened? Nothing. As in into nothing my article went – again. I am not really sure what happened but I tried repairing and optimizing my databases to make sure that the tables are in order. I tried changing the theme so I can check if messed up the theme with all the ads that is going on. But the damn article still disappears every time I click either of the three buttons available. Googling did not helped either because I am not sure what to look for in the first place. I tried several keywords but none of the results matched to what I am having at that point. Impatient is one of my nastiest characteristics so I downloaded the newest version of WP, backed up everything, reinstalled WP and did some touch-ups. That resolved the problem. Until now I am not sure what is the culprit which I think is critical because once I know what is the underlying cause, I can prevent it in the future. But until then, the only prevention I have in mind is to keep posting every day so I can check if my articles get published

The other thing that I am not aware is really not a big deal but it makes me happy anyway. I found out that when I use the keywords “Filipino linux blogs” in Google, guess who is in number 1 spot? Weee….

I am not an SEO specialist and I do not know what I have done to deserve this, not that I am complaining, but it is nice to see my blog coming up to that spot where I do not have to scroll down or turn to page 2. See, I am not so hard to please

Try the result here

Happy days