Comment Disable the contactless feature in your cards (Score 1) 221
I did some research this week. I found that on most of my UK credit and debit cards (Santander, MBNA, Barclays, etc) you can effectively disable the contactless feature by damaging the antenna. This is very easy and will NOT affect the Chip-and-PIN feature that s relied upon for ATMs and in-store purchases. (DON'T FOLLOW THOSE STUPID YOUTUBE VIDEOS THAT DRILL OUT THE VISIBLE CHIP!!!).
All you need to do is use a pair of scissors, make a small vertical cut of around 7mm at the top-middle of the card - just above the magnetic stripe. If you look very carefully into the cut you will see 4 or 5 very small wires that have been severed. Job done.
Without the antenna loop, the contactless chip cannot energise and communicate.
See my blog post on this in more detail: http://linuxcentre.net/disabling-contactless-cards
Comment Dans Guardiand + Squid + extras (Score 1) 646
I've just been doing this using dansguardian and squid with some extra blacklists+voodoo for a primary school (ages 5-11) these last two weeks. See http://linuxcentre.net/wiki/index.php/Web_Content_Filtering . Personally I find this kind of filtering not completely effective - even the best commercial filters out there are no better in 'protecting' the kids. This was a lot of effort for 100+ children. You probably wouldn't want to go to so much trouble for a home setup. However, the above link does represent a real-life setup and not just a theoretical setup.
Comment Ubuntu locked down for a school environment (Score 3, Insightful) 387
I worked on this project for a Primary school. It's worked well for >2 years for 120 pupils.
http://linuxcentre.net/wiki/
The parts about automatically resetting the homedir after reboot is probably of interest to you.
http://linuxcentre.net/wiki/index.php/Detailed_Maverick_Meerkat_OS_Netbook_Customisation below Home_Directory_Synchronisation
Graphic Map of Linux-2.6.36 25
Embedded Linux 1-Second Cold Boot To QT 141
AMD Puts Out Radeon HD 6000 Open-Source Driver 138
Linux 2.6.37 Released 135
Comment Re:New? (Score 2) 286
xrdp on Linux works for me - not quite as fast as NX but certainly better then VNC variants I have tried.
Comment Dovecot + Maildir (Score 1) 385
Yes, me too. Been using dovecot and Maildir files for years now. Before that I used a different open source IMAP servers (courier, cyrus, and UW imap) but since I used Maildir file format the transition was automatic (I used mbox format before that with UW imap server and conversion was really simple using the mb2maildir perl script). I have used IMAP servers etc for 18 years worth of email. I organise the 250,000 emails into different folders for each year as that makes searching much quicker. It's never let me down yet.
Comment Acer Revo (Score 1) 697
I've used an Acer Revo Intel Atom based nettop. It sucks about 20-30W... I use it as my main desktop which also runs samba, bind, dhcpd, ssh, dovecot and postfix. Works a treat with Fedora11. I had exactly the same motivations and now am saving around $150 per year. The system cost me around $270 including extra 2GB DRAM.
Submission + - Clean-room RTMPE spec created from rtmpdump (lkcl.net)
Submission + - Last.fm User Data Was Sent to RIAA by CBS (techcrunch.com) 1
Now we've located another source for the story, someone who's very close to Last.fm. And it turns out Last.fm was telling the truth, sorta, when they said Erick's story wasn't correct.
Last.fm didn't hand user data over to the RIAA. According to our source, it was their parent company, CBS, that did it.
Here's what we believe happened: CBS requested user data from Last.fm, including user name and IP address. CBS wanted the data to comply with a RIAA request but told Last.fm the data was going to be used for "internal use only." It was only after the data was sent to CBS that Last.fm discovered the real reason for the request. Last.fm staffers were outraged, say our sources, but the data had already been sent to the RIAA.
We believe CBS lied to us when they denied sending the data to the RIAA, and that they subsequently asked us to attribute the quote to Last.fm to make the statement defensible. Last.fm's denials were strictly speaking correct, but they ignored the underlying truth of the situation, that their parent company supplied user data to the RIAA, and that the data could possibly be used in civil and criminal actions against those users.
We believe Last.fm and CBS violated their own privacy policy ( http://www.last.fm/legal/privacy ) in the transmission of this data. We also believe CBS and Last.fm may have violated EU privacy laws, including the Data Protection Directive, and should be investigated by the appropriate authorities.
TechCrunch : http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/22/deny-this-lastfm/
World's Oldest Marijuana Stash Found 108
Comment Re:BBC iPlayer (Flash) stops streaming when paused (Score 1) 268
It's not DRM - just Adobe's RTMP streaming - just plain obfuscation with little open source support yet. get_iplayer script will actually download video on-par with the normal quality flash service btw.