Recently in Hardware Category

Got my Asus EEE PC delivered today! It's a nice little mini notebook which runs Linux out of the box and best of all only costs £219 !

Initially there's a pretty simplistic interface provided (It's targetted at school kids rather than power users) but there's a great wiki and forum over at eee User and it's not too tricky to get shell access and start modifying stuff!!

First off for me has been shutting down the network ports that are listening. Not sure why they thought everyone would need portmapper and samba server running on their laptops, but to me that's a no brainer to remove straight off !

Then it's off to add the debian repositories to the apt setup on it and before you know it it'll be a great little network security machine :)

An interesting blog entry on Locking Down The Obvious: USB

I think it's a point well made. Essentially companies need to look at USB ports in the same way they look at CD-ROM's and floppy drives. If CD's and floppies are locked down then USB ports should be as well... although it is more challenging technologically as USB ports have wider range of functionality than CD-Drives, which makes it more likely that they will need to be enabled.

It also looks like software products are coming into the market to manage this kind of functionality where required. For example Reflex disknet pro looks like an interesting way of controlling access to removable media, including USB keys....

well I think ive finally found the right handheld computer for me... A sharp Zaurus c860. Its linux based, has lots of good security software available, can take SD and CF cards, has an excellent 640x480 display and isnt too bulky or heavy.

also the keyboard is fairly good... as Im writing this entry using it.....

First off I'm thinking of a ethernet style tap not a water one ;op

I was thinking today, more and more people are connected to broadband these days, if I was selling information appliances, by which I'm thinking about dedicated pieces of hardware which process information (like the Amstrad emailer), I'd want to be able to tap into the broadband connection, but I wouldn't want to try and guide non-technical users through the hassle of setting up some form of internet connection sharing (NAT) be it software or hardware.

So, what if I just tapped into the connection.... If you attached a network bridge to the ethernet side of a ADSL modem (between the PC and the ADSL modem) you'd be able to see all the traffic as it goes by...

Then use UDP to send traffic upstream to your server, that way it doesn't matter if you don't have an IP address for your device, UDP data is stateless so no problem...

Then there's the reverse, i.e. can the server send to the device? That part would require the device to work out what the IP address of the PC it's installed next to is, but given that it can see traffic as it goes by, it can just pull the address from the packet stream. So once it's got the address it gives that to its server and then if the server sends UDP traffic to that IP address (obviously on a port that the PC isn't listening on) the tap will pick it up and be able to use it....

The advantage to all this is that you can send traffic on a users broadband connection without disturbing their existing environment at all..

there are some downsides though. You'd need to put all the intelligence in things like authentication into the application level of the device (otherwise you'd be a great target for forged traffic from unscrupulous types)