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Hi everyone. My sincerest apologies for what has amounted to a year-long delay in publication. The break was due to a combination of factors - my job making it tough for me to write about tech matters away from the office and a failure to update payment information with my DNS provider. Im sad to say that as of this moment "joshwieder.com" is being held ransom by bulk domain purchasers. Best of luck to them; I can't speak for any of the other Josh Wieders out there but this one has about ten bucks he is willing to spend for the privilege of not using a subdomain. What this means is that we will be stuck using joshwieder.blogspot.com for the time being, unfortunately. Ill try to update the search engines and broken links to the best of my ability to do so. FYI every other part of the URL structure remains the same, so joshwieder.com/pagename would become joshwieder.blogspot.com/pagename and not joshwieder.blogspot.com/crazy/new-path.php or something.

I'll have some new content up soon. Thanks to all of the readers who have posted feedback - Ive published all the comments that were left in hiatus. It really makes my day to know I've been able to help!

Memories

Gorillas in QBasic

Aalto Univesity - Linus Torvalds Discussion

Linus Torvalds speaks at Aalto University. The high point of the talk is when Nvidia is called out as the "worst company [Torvalds] has ever worked with". F bombs are dropped. Its amazing.

I Don't Want Your Code - Linux Foundation Keynote, Greg Kroah-Hartman

Canonical / UbuntuForums.Com Compromised

The Ubuntu Forums maintained by Canonical have been hacked. Canonical has been incredibly transparent and are forwarding all HTTP requests to a statement regarding the attack.

Many people are impacted by this attack. Hopefully, the impact is negligible as people shouldnt be using shared logins. In the real world, though, lots of people need to change their email passwords as quickly as possible.

Of all the people whose day you could ruin ... Ubuntu?

Command Line is Not a Crime - SSH via ICMP

There is a great way to bypass network security policies for penetration testing or to just use a free wireless connection with draconian filters. Make your SSH connection look like pings.

Remember: Command Line is NOT a Crime

Check out Daniel Stodle's university page for a very helpful SSH via ICMP client.

Networking Fact of the Day

The default starting port in UNIX traceroute is 33434. This comes from 32768 (2^15, or the max value of a signed 16-bit integer) + 666 (the mark of Satan).

Thank you to Richard Steenbergen of nLayer Communications, Inc. for today's fun fact! You can learn more about traceroute, the deceptively simple and easy to misunderstand diagnostic tool, from Mr Steenbergen's presentation notes on the subject here.