You can't have it both ways

Too long for Twitter. 

Law enforcement agencies consistently praise Apple for introducing “activation lock,” which they claim has reduced violent robberies because criminals can’t steal iPhones and resell them.

However, these agencies now want Apple to allow law enforcement to bypass this feature, which is essentially the same.

While the lock screen passcode differs from the activation lock on an iPhone, the request is essentially the same: please allow us to guess or bypass the password.

I understand both sides of this issue, but I also believe that there are places, like the human brain, protected by the fifth amendment, where the government should not have access.

I just had the best travel experience ever

Left my office at 4:30 for a 5:15 flight.  I know what you are thinking, you are crazy...

You're right. Normally would never do this, but was running behind with stuff today.  Drove from my office in Columbia, MD to BWI. 

Parked the car, no problem. 

Walked to security (already checked in on my phone), went through TSA pre line, using the boarding pass on my watch.  No line. 

No one bothered me about my bag, no one told me to have my boarding pass and ID out and ready...

Went through security in about 30 seconds. 

Walked to gate, plane too small to bring on roller board bag, so, pink tag check it at gate.  Done. 

Boarded with watch, zone 1, only one in zone 1.

Went right to my seat, no waiting.

Hour flight, quick Coke on the flight, I wrote three emails, done. 

Got off flight had to wait 5 minutes for bag, darn. 

Walked out to car rental bus, had to wait another five minutes, darn. Bus driver was friendly, no waiting there, went to car rental facility, no traffic, got my space from the Hertz Gold board, walked to car, got in, tapped my phone to give me the address and directions to hotel, drove to hotel.

I was already checked in (via app) at hotel, no lines, picked up my key, walked to room. In room, was waiting a small snack.  

From when I left my office to my hotel room, less than three hours.  

Over the course of my career I have encountered everything that can possibly be wrong with a trip (except crashing in a plane, knock on wood).   Today, nothing went wrong.  

Today was a good day. 

Should we fire low-quality contributors to projects?

Friend of mine at work pointed this article out to me this morning:

Should we fire low-quality contributors to projects?

Good article that deals with the dilemma of dealing with toxic community members to a project.

Luckily in Snort and ClamAV, I've only had to deal with a handful of these.  Usually people that hide behind nicknames and like to try and shame people into submission to their ideas.  I've actually had people apologize to me years later for trolling or simply being toxic.

However, if you are a community manager for an open source project or a community project, this article gives you a couple things to think about.

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Threat Spotlight: Angler Lurking in the Domain Shadows

Nick Biasini on our Talos Outreach team wrote a piece of awesome over on our Talos Blog, I just wanted to highlight it.

Over the last several months Talos researchers have been monitoring a massive exploit kit campaign that is utilizing hijacked registrant accounts to create large amounts of subdomains for both initial redirection and exploitation. This campaign has been largely attributed to Angler Exploit Kit with fileless exploits serving various malicious payloads.

Check out the Angler Blog Post.

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Feature I found in iOS8 that I like

Just popped up on my iPhone. 

I went to a small auction today.

There were a bunch of people there. 

Because having small monitors is silly

My home desk with a 30in monitor, and a 24 in monitor. Anything smaller than 24 is just child's play.

My iPhone did something useful today, and I didn't even ask it to

Happened to swipe down from the top this morning (Notifications screen) and I noticed that my iPhone told me that it would take about 34 minutes to get to Newark from where I was. 

Now, I've noticed this before, always when I was on the way to work or something where I had an appointment on my calendar with an address in it, my iPhone would estimate the time it would take for me to get there.  But today, I had nothing on my calendar, so how did it know where to estimate my time to?  So I thought about it. 

 Then I realized it was the "Frequent Locations" setting under privacy. I left this on when I upgraded to ios7, because I wanted to see, if anything, what useful functions came out of it. 

I went into there today and I noticed for the past several weekends my family went north to go to the mall, shopping, or something else near Newark, DE.  So the iPhone remembered that and said "okay, well, today is Saturday, so I am betting you are going to go to the mall today." And it gave me arrival time to that location. 

I think it's handy, borderline creepy, but helpful. 

So, I went to a different mall today, in a different direction. Just to screw with my phone. 

Oh Chevy.

They have spell check on that commercial making software right?

Taliban pose as pretty women on Facebook, dupe soldiers | ZDNet

Taliban pose as pretty women on Facebook, dupe soldiers | ZDNet:

Speaking of Facebook, here is another cautionary tale about being careful who you talk to online.  Just because they say they are a woman, doesn't mean they are.

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How to secure your Facebook account

How to secure your Facebook account | ITProPortal.com

Some good tips here, just how to make sure the following settings are setup the best you can for privacy. Not really a lot of content, but good to forward to that person in your life that needs a bit of help.


Privacy settings
Ads, apps, and websites

Mountain Lion: How to get the most out of iMessage

So, now that Mountain Lion has been released for everyone I thought I'd write a quick blog post on how to get the most out of iMessages (now called Messages) on your iOS device and your Desktop.

If you are an Apple Ecosystem person (iOS + OSX) you'll love it.  Messages is the replacement for iChat and it allows you to have the same conversation with anyone that is in the iOS ecosystem across all your devices all at the same time.

So here's how to get the most out of it.

Open Messages, the icon looks like the above picture.  In your preferences, you need to set up your iMessages account.  I use my iCloud account, (me.com), but you can use any email address I believe.  So, add your iMessages account.  Enter all your email addresses there on the bottom, it may ask you to verify them (at which point Apple will send you an email through the account that you entered to ensure you actually own that account):

The next setting to pay attention to is the "Caller ID".  Pay particular attention here because you are going to want to set that to be the same as your iOS device.  This is the awesome part where everything becomes one.

Then you should be good to go on the desktop.

Now let's setup iOS to be exactly the same.  So go into your Settings in iOS, and go to Messages.  It should look something like this:

Tap on that with your finger.  Take a look at the settings and set those up how you want them.

But you'll see a section that says something to the effect of "Send & Receive":

Note: I am using the developers preview of iOS 6 to take these screenshots, so your screen will look different.

Go in there and add all the same email addresses that you added on your Desktop.  Also, on the bottom, you will see "Caller ID".  Set the Caller ID to be the same as what you put on your Desktop.  On your iOS devices, I'd suggest NOT setting it as your phone number.  I set mine as my iCloud email address, as that address has my phone name right in it and it's pretty obvious to the recipient who is sending a message.

Repeat this process if you have multiple OSX Desktop machines (laptops), iPads, iPhones, whatever.

After this process is complete, whenever you have a conversation through iMessage, it'll be the same on all your devices.  Desktop, iPad, iPhone whatever.  When people answer you back, it'll go to all your devices.

This allows you to start a conversation on your Desktop, pick up your iPad, go to a meeting, have the same conversation going on seamlessly, no syncing with anything, and keep going in the same conversation.  Have to leave the meeting to go somewhere?  Pick up your iPhone, because the conversation will be exactly the same.

If everyone in the ecosystem did this, it would be a seamless network of interaction between everyone.  I love it.  I hope that Apple will streamline this setup process a little bit, (like unifying the phone number and email address, and allowing the setup of the accounts in one place, and those settings pushed through iCloud to all devices, so that everything is the same)

One more thing.

Open up Facetime.  Open up your preferences in Facetime, and set everything up the same way.  That way, your Facetime is also ubiquitous everywhere.  

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@Sparrow, I have a feature request

In the Gmail interface, if you are in the middle of a "conversation" there is a black arrow to the message you are currently working with.  That way you can put the arrow on a specific email and then hit enter to expand that message.  The current Sparrow interface doesn't have the black arrow to see where you are in the conversation.

That being said, if you are in the middle of a thread (where there are new messages appended to an already thick stack of messages in a conversation that is collapsed when you reopen it), the black arrow should be by default placed on the new (non collapsed message), as Gmail does.

This is all for consistency in between the two platforms, and the need for the keyboard shortcuts (the best feature of Sparrow IMO) to function exactly the same as Gmail's.

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Apple Hardens Security with Mac OS X 10.7.4 and Safari 5.1.7

TidBITS Safe Computing: Apple Hardens Security with Mac OS X 10.7.4 and Safari 5.1.7:

What a fantastic idea.

From the article:

Safari will now check the version of Flash you are running and disable it if it is not capable of updating itself to a current version. Flash versions 10.1.102.64 (yes, that’s a version number, not an IP address) and older don’t include the capability to update themselves to new releases, requiring users to update manually. Newer versions will self-update as Adobe releases fixes, which minimizes the chances a user will be exposed to Flash-related security issues.

It also fixes this error:

Mac OS X 10.7.4 fixes a security error introduced in 10.7.3 that exposed a user’s password if they upgraded to Lion while leaving the legacy version of FileVault enabled. The flaw was due to a developer leaving debugging code enabled, which logged the user’s password in plain text. This problem affected only the older version of FileVault that encrypted a user’s home directory, as opposed to the FileVault 2 feature enabled in Lion that encrypts the entire disk. To be exposed, you would have had to upgrade a legacy FileVault system to Lion and keep the older FileVault in place.
Although this extremely serious bug essentially negated any password security on affected systems, relatively few users were likely exposed. 

I believe this pcap to be bad.


Alerts (2.9.2.2, dump-1.pcap)
1:18275:9 FILE-IDENTIFY HyperText Markup Language file download request Alerts: 1
1:16425:15 FILE-IDENTIFY Portable Executable binary file download request Alerts: 3
1:21860:1 SPECIFIC-THREATS Phoenix exploit kit post-compromise behavior Alerts: 4
1:21042:4 BLACKLIST URI possible Blackhole post-compromise download attempt - .php?f= Alerts: 1
1:21492:12 SPECIFIC-THREATS Blackhole landing page with specific structure - prototype catch Alerts: 3
1:21347:3 BLACKLIST URI possible Blackhole URL - .php?page= Alerts: 1
1:13245:2 BACKDOOR troya 1.4 runtime detection - init connection Alerts: 2
1:21646:6 SPECIFIC-THREATS Blackhole landing page with specific structure - prototype catch Alerts: 2
1:11192:12 FILE-IDENTIFY download of executable content Alerts: 2
120:8:1 (http_inspect) INVALID CONTENT-LENGTH OR CHUNK SIZE Alerts: 1
1:20494:6 FILE-IDENTIFY PDF file magic detected Alerts: 1
1:21583:4 FILE-PDF Possible malicious pdf detection - qwe123 Alerts: 1
1:21556:3 POLICY-OTHER Microsoft Windows 98 User-Agent string Alerts: 4
1:648:12 SHELLCODE x86 NOOP Alerts: 3
1:21548:1 BOTNET-CNC Cutwail landing page connection attempt Alerts: 1
1:15306:16 FILE-IDENTIFY Portable Executable binary file magic detected Alerts: 2
1:21418:1 BOTNET-CNC Trojan.FareIt outbound connection Alerts: 1
1:22041:2 SPECIFIC-THREATS Blackhole landing redirection page Alerts: 1


I could be wrong. Don't think I am.

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8 Simple Tips to Secure a Mac from Malware, Viruses, & Trojans

8 Simple Tips to Secure a Mac from Malware, Viruses, Trojans:

As much as it pains me to put this on my blog, here is a link to a article over at OSX Daily.  Any article that recommends uninstalling Adobe, I'm down with.

Take a look.

Safari 5.1.4 now available

Safari 5.1.4 now available, fixes issues and improves performance | TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog:

• Improve JavaScript performance
• Improve responsiveness when typing into the search field after changing network configurations or with an intermittent network connection
• Address an issue that could cause webpages to flash white when switching between Safari windows
• Address issues that prevented printing U.S. Postal Service shipping labels and embedded PDFs
• Preserve links in PDFs saved from webpages
• Fix an issue that could make Flash content appear incomplete after using gesture zooming
• Fix an issue that could cause the screen to dim while watching HTML5 video
• Improve stability, compatibility and startup time when using extensions
• Allow cookies set during regular browsing to be available after using Private Browsing
• Fix an issue that could cause some data to be left behind after pressing the "Remove All Website Data" button

Path uploads your entire iPhone address book to its servers

Path uploads your entire iPhone address book to its servers

I guess my appropriate reaction here would be..

Well. WTF!?

Don't use anything by Path.

Let's make TCP faster - The official Google Code blog

Let's make TCP faster - The official Google Code blog

Interesting Article here.

Latest Snort provides alarm for industrial control systems

Latest Snort provides alarm for industrial control systems - The H Security: News and Features
:

Nice publicity for Snort 2.9.2. as result of years of work.