Are you patched?

I'm sure by now you've heard of the Bash vulnerability Shellshock.  Not going to beat a dead horse, but if you haven't patched yet, stop reading this and do it now!  After you're done, check out shellshocker.net and see if you're still vulnerable.

The future of IT

Ran across this amazing video the other day where the self-described "NextGenHacker101" graciously shares his expertise in network forensic techniques:

Poor kid should stick to a Mac.

Get your bugles ready - it's Taps for WInamp

Now before you say anything, I know Winamp isn't native to Linux (and yes, you can run it under Wine), but like most Linux users our there, you've probably had to run either a dual boot or dual systems with Windows boxen at some point.  Back in the 90's I did just that.  I spent many hours listening to tunes served up off of a Slackware box to my desktop using Winamp.  Granted, I haven't used Winamp in years, but I was still sad to read today that it's going the way of the dodo.  Apparently AOL (yes, they are still around, too!) managed to foul something else up and drove them into the ground.  I think the only positive thing that AOL will ever be remembered for was their endless supply of free floppy disks and beer coasters.

After 15 years of llama-whipping, AOL shuts down Winamp for good

What happened to the SourceForge that we used to know?

One can't mention open source software and not think of SourceForge, the once de facto haven for almost any major FOSS project.  There are others that have sprung up over time and lured developers away whether due to better features or the lack of an ever increasing onslaught of ads, but SF has still managed to survive.  Now there is another nail in the slowly creaking coffin  - bundled "crapware."  Take a look at this article from The Register.

GIMP flees SourceForge over dodgy ads and installer

Mounting SMB shares with spaces in the name

I had a situation pop up recently where I needed to mount an SMB (CIFS) share from a WIndows server on an Ubuntu based machine via the fstab, but hit a small snag - spaces in the share name.  Why in the name of all that is good Windows admins insist on doing this is beyond me, but I did find a good blog post on how to deal with it without involving ammunition.


fstab mounting cifs shares with spaces in the name

Simple character substitution... nice!

On the subject of DDoS...

I suppose it's the theme for the day.  Another really cool discovery I made recently is the Digital Attack Map:



It pretty much speaks for itself.  I'll put a permanent link to this handy page in the Resources section.

Google rolls out Project Shield DDoS attack mitigation service

I noticed on Engadget the other day that Google has rolled out a new service named Project Shield which is aimed at small static websites targeted by DDoS attacks.  This is a pretty cool gesture for those who have something to say but may very well fall victim to attackers who want to silence them.  Take a look at the article for more info.