Apr 102012
 

If you have not heard of the new Raspberry Pi yet, then you surely will soon enough. The new budget computer has just passed its Conformité Européenne testing, so now it can be stamped with the commonly seen CE mark and sold throughout Europe. A limited number of units were sold before the device was certified, and distribution was halted until the Pi passed the quality control tests. The distributors of the Raspberry Pi also took the time to make sure that the device meets all the regulations enforced by Australian, Canadian, and US supervisory bodies. So now the new Raspberry Pi, starting at the mere price of $25, is ready to be unleashed upon the world, but what does this mean for Linux users and developers?

Quite a lot actually, because the Raspberry Pi has been designed to use with Linux operating systems. The people behind the development of this cheap but powerful device always wanted it to be as accessible to the masses as possible. They knew an open source operating system was the only way they could keep the costs down, but there was a bigger reason behind their support of Linux. Their ambition with Pi is to get kids interested in computer programming again.
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Apr 052012
 

While reading an interesting Blog I discovered a new treasure: TRESOR, in short TRESOR is a secure implementation of AES which is resistant against cold boot attacks and other attacks on main memory.

If like me you wonder what a cold boot attack is, Princeton University can help us :

Contrary to popular assumption, DRAMs used in most modern computers retain their contents for seconds to minutes after power is lost, even at operating temperatures and even if removed from a motherboard. Although DRAMs become less reliable when they are not refreshed, they are not immediately erased, and their contents persist sufficiently for malicious (or forensic) acquisition of usable full-system memory images. This phenomenon limits the ability of an operating system to protect cryptographic key material from an attacker with physical access. We use cold reboots to mount attacks on popular disk encryption systems — BitLocker, FileVault, dm-crypt, and TrueCrypt — using no special devices or materials. We experimentally characterize the extent and predictability of memory remanence and report that remanence times can be increased dramatically with simple techniques.

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Apr 042012
 

For a customer i was in need of a quick way to send an email every time his system (centos) stop, reboot or simply boot.
I’ve found an useful article http://www.syntaxtechnology.com and most of this article is based on that.

To get an email at both start up and shut down we need to write an init script. The tips below are specific to a Red Hat based system (Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS, etc) but should be fairly similar to others, depending on the boot system you’ll have to change slightly the script.
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Apr 022012
 

William E. Shotts, Jr., published a few years ago a useful ebook entitled “The Linux Command Line”, a guide to learn and know more about the Command Line Interface (CLI) on GNU / Linux. The ebook is still available for download and is released under a Creative Commons license.

Although most distributions have graphical environments and interfaces for applications, the command line continues to be a useful tool to do various tasks while using the system. Even the combination of GUI and command line interface, well used, can help you to perform the tasks that you need quickly and accurately.
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Apr 012012
 

Publish news this day is always risky, so I will just do the best wishes for a happy April 1 and point out some very interesting news that i’m sure you’ll like.

1) Chrome Multitask Mode lets you browse the web with multiple cursors at the same time, so you can get more done, faster. Welcome to the ambinavigation revolution. Continue reading »

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