c0d3 :: j0rg3

Okay, so you’re running Whonix, Tails or, at least, TorBrowser.

What’s next? You may wish to consider using a VPN. In simple terms, it’s somewhat similar to what Tor offers. That is: you connect to the VPN and your connection passes through them such that the site that you are visiting will see the VPN’s IP address rather than yours. Of course, that means that you can chain them.

That is: (You)->VPN->Tor->Exit node->Web site

The reason that you might feel compelled to take this step is that a party which is able to see your traffic into and out of Tor could still identify you. The thinking is that the parties who wish to interfere with your privacy could be compelled to run Tor bridges, relays and exit nodes. If traffic from your IP address could be matched to requests coming from the Tor exit node then you could, effectively, be identified.

Some people hold that using a VPN to access Tor does not improve your anonymousness. I am not among them. In particular, you will find that IPVanish offers VPN service for under $7 per month and is popular among users of the Tor network. Which means that in addition to the fact that IPVanish is not logging your traffic, there’s an excellent chance that other users are going from IPVanish into Tor, helping to reduce the uniqueness of your traffic.

By the way, I’d suggest poking around the web a little bit. While their prices are already great you can find some even deeper discounts: https://signup.ipvanish.com/?aff=vpnfan-promo

IPVanish’s site offers instructions for installing the VPN in Ubuntu so we’re going to take a look at using IPVanish in Kali — including an interesting and unanticipated snag (and, of course, how to fix it).

Let’s grab the OpenVPN configuration:
wget http://www.ipvanish.com/software/configs/ca.ipvanish.com.crt; wget http://www.ipvanish.com/software/configs/ipvanish-US-New-York-nyc-a01.ovpn

We will need the OpenVPN package for Gnome:
apt install network-manager-openvpn-gnome

Click on the tray in the upper right corner, then the wrench/screwdriver icon:

Select the ‘Network’ folder icon:

We’re choosing ‘Wired’ (even though we’re using wlan0 interface):

We’re setting up a VPN, of course:

Import from file:

Choose the configuration file that we downloaded previously:

Enter ‘User name’ and ‘Password’:

We are connected!

Verified at IPVanish’s site: https://www.ipvanish.com/checkIP.php

And this is where I had anticipated the installation instructions would end.

I just wanted to check a few more things. And I would love to tell you that it was simply my thoroughness and unbridled CLI-fu that led to discover that I was still making ipv6 connections outside of the VPN. Seems that it wasn’t noticed by the test at IPVanish because they deal only in ipv4. I was able to prove my ipv6 address and geolocation by using: http://whatismyipaddress.com/

Further, we can establish that the test at IPVanish is not ipv6-compatible with a quick test.

The easy fix here is to disable ipv6 locally. It is plausible that this could cause unintended consequences and, to be thorough, it would be best to handle your VPN at the firewall. Having support for OpenVPN, you’ll be able to get this running with a huge variety of routing/firewall solutions. You can grab any number of tiny computers and build a professional-quality firewall solution with something like pfSense. Maybe we’ll take a look at getting that configured in a future post.

But, for now, let’s shut down ipv6 in a way that doesn’t involve any grandiose hand-waving magic (i.e., unexplained commands which probably should work) and then test to get confidence in our results.

Let’s use sysctl to find our ipv6 kernel bits and turn them off. Then we’ll load our configuration changes. As a safety, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to look in /etc/sysctl.conf to verify that there aren’t any ipv6 configs in there.

We’ll back up our config file then turn off everything ipv6 by listing everything with the words ‘ipv6’ and ‘disable’:
cp /etc/sysctl.conf /etc/$(date +%Y-%m-%d.%H-%M-%S).sysctl.conf.bak && \
sysctl -a | grep -i ipv6 | grep disable | sed 's/0/1/g' >> /etc/sysctl.conf && \
sysctl -p

To explain what we’re doing:
List all kernel flags; show uonly those containing the string ‘ipv6’; of those that remain, show only those that contain the string ‘disable’:
sysctl -a | grep -i ipv6 | grep disable
Replace the 0 values with 1, to turn ON the disabling, by piping output to:
sed 's/0/1/g'
That all gets stuck on the end of ‘sysctl.conf’ by redirecting stdout to append to the end of that file:
>> /etc/sysctl.conf
Then we reload with:
sysctl -p

Then as a final sanity-check we’ll make sure we can’t find any ipv6 packets sneaking about:
tcpdump -t -n -i wlan0 -s 256 -vv ip6

At this point, assuming our tcpdump doesn’t show any traffic, we should be ipv6-free with all of our ipv4 traffic shipped-off nicely through IPVanish!

Hello friends.

While the overall telos of this blog is to, generally speaking, convey code snippets and inspire the personal projects of others, today we’re going to do something a smidgeon different.

This will be a layman’s look at varied dimensions of information security from a comfortable distance. Over the years, I’ve secured servers, operating systems, medical data, networks, communications and I’ve unsecured many of these same things. The topics are too sprawling to be covered in a quick summary — but let’s find a point of entry.

Those of us who are passionate about information security are well aware of how daunting is the situation. For newcomers, it sometimes seems rather impossible. Pick any subject and there are probably well-informed and convincing experts in diametric equidistance from any “happy medium”.

Let’s imagine that (like most of us) you don’t have anything spectacular to protect. However, you dislike the idea of our ever-dissolving privacy. Therefore you want to encrypt communications. Maybe you begin to use Signal. However, there are criticisms that there is a “backdoor” (there is not). Further, there are accusations that open source projects are coded by those who can’t get real jobs. Conversely, open source projects are widely open for peer review. If it worries one enough they are free to review code themselves.

PGP can encrypt content but concerns surround algorithmic selections. Some are worried about metadata crumbs. Of course, there’s nothing preventing the frequent switching of keys and email addresses. You could use BitMessage, any number of chat solutions or drop at paste bins.

Let’s leave those concerns aside for when you’ve figured out what you’re intending to protect. These arguments surround any subject in information security and we’re not going to investigate them on a case by case basis. Least, not in this post.

At the coarsest granularity, the question is analogous to the practicality of locking your doors or sealing your post envelopes. Should I take measures toward privacy?

My opinion is rather predictable: of course you should!

There’s a very pragmatic explanation. If there ever comes a day when you should like to communicate privately, that’s a terrible time to start learning.

Take the easy road and start using some of the myriad tools and services available.

Should you decide to take InfoSec seriously, you’ll need to define a threat model.
That is: What am I protecting? From whom am I protecting? (e.g. what are probable attack vectors?)

That’s where you need to make choices about trusting products, protocols, methods, algorithms, companies, servers, et cet. Those are all exciting subjects to explore but all too often brushing up against them can be exasperating and cause premature burn-out.

That in mind, let’s employ the philosophy that any effort toward security is better than none and take a look at a few points where one might get wetted-toes.

If you have questions or want specific advice, there are several ways below to initiate a secure conversation with me.

Secure your browser:

Secure communications:

Explore alternate nets (e.g., Deep Web, Dark Net):

Have fun and compute safely!

Recently, I read a rather excited attention-catching piece about how Wickr is the super-secure version of Slack. Attention caught in part because I feel like Wickr has been around for a while. I’d not seen anyone raving about its security in places where I normally interact with those who are highly informed about such subjects.

Good is that it seems the folk at Wickr did a fine job of making sure valuable data aren’t left behind.
The bad: closed-source, not subject to independent review; crazy marketin’-fancy-talk without a thorough description of how it does what is claimed.
Any time I’m looking at a product or service that boasts security, I sort of expect to see a threat model.

[ Update: At the time I was working on this project, the folk at Wickr were, evidently, opening their source. That’s spectacular news! Check it out on Github. ]

This began as an exercise to provide another piece of security-ish software in a Docker container. Anyone who has used a live distro (e.g., Kali, TAILS) with any regularity knows the ritual of installing favorite tools at each boot, data stores on removable media.

For me, there is tremendous appeal in reducing that to something like:
git clone https://georgeglarson/wickr
cd docker-wickr
./install.sh
wickr


Let’s dig in!

Having created a number of Docker containers my workflow is to queue up the base OS and go through the steps needed to get the software running while keeping careful notes. In this case, I had originally tried to install Wickr on a current copy of Kali. It was already known that Wickr, based off of Ubuntu 14.04, needed an older unicode library. So we begin with Ubuntu 14.04.

Grab a copy of Wickr and see what’s required:
dpkg -I wickr-me_2.6.0_amd64.deb

new debian package, version 2.0.
size 78890218 bytes: control archive=4813 bytes.
558 bytes, 14 lines control
558 bytes, 14 lines control64
10808 bytes, 140 lines md5sums
Package: wickr-me
Architecture: amd64
Section: net
Priority: optional
Version: 2.6.0-4
Replaces: wickr
Conflicts: wickr
Depends: libsqlcipher0, libuuid1, libicu52, libavutil52|libavutil54, libc6, libssl1.0.0, libx264-142, libglib2.0-0, libpulse0, libxrender1, libgl1-mesa-glx
Recommends: libnotify-bin, gstreamer-plugins0.10-good, gstreamer-plugins0.10-bad, gstreamer-plugins0.10-ugly
Maintainer: Wickr Inc.
Installed-Size: 200000
Description: Secure Internet Chat and Media Exchange agent
Wickr is a secure communications client


Okay. The CLI should do most of the work for us, giving a formatted list of dependencies.
dpkg -I wickr-me_2.6.0_amd64.deb | grep -E "^ Depends: | Recommends: " | sed -e "s/ Depends: //" -e "s/ Recommends: //" -e "s/,//g" -e "s/ / \\\ \n/g"

libsqlcipher0 \
libuuid1 \
libicu52 \
libavutil54 \
libc6 \
libssl1.0.0 \
libx264-142 \
libglib2.0-0 \
libpulse0 \
libxrender1 \
libgl1-mesa-glx
libnotify-bin \
gstreamer-plugins0.10-good \
gstreamer-plugins0.10-bad \
gstreamer-plugins0.10-ugly \


Attempting to get those with apt-get reports that it cannot find the gstreamer bits.

Let’s find:
apt-cache search gstreamer | grep -i plugin | grep -E "good|bad|ugly"

gstreamer0.10-plugins-good - GStreamer plugins from the "good" set
...
gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad - GStreamer plugins from the "bad" set
...
gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly - GStreamer plugins from the "ugly" set


So, there’s the format we need to get the gstreamer dependencies. We know that we’ll also want SSH and wget. That should be enough for our Dockerfile.

We’ll pull down Wickr:
wget https://dls.wickr.com/Downloads/wickr-me_2.6.0_amd64.deb

Then install:
dpkg -i wickr-me_2.6.0_amd64.deb

Okay! We are, in theory, ready to run Wickr. We’re about to see we aren’t yet there — but these sorts of problems are pretty commonplace.
wickr-me

wickr-me: error while loading shared libraries: libxslt.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Huh! We need libxslt. Let’s fix that: apt-get install libxslt1-dev

Now we can run it.
wickr-me

This application failed to start because it could not find or load the Qt platform plugin "xcb".

Available platform plugins are: eglfs, linuxfb, minimal, minimalegl, offscreen, xcb.

Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.
Aborted (core dumped)


One more: apt-get install xcb

Okay. That really was the last one. Now we have a complete list of dependencies for our Dockerfile:
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y \
gstreamer0.10-plugins-good \
gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad \
gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly \
libsqlcipher0 \
libuuid1 \
libicu52 \
libavutil52 \
libc6 \
libssl1.0.0 \
libx264-142 \
libglib2.0-0 \
libpulse0 \
libxrender1 \
libxslt1-dev \
libgl1-mesa-glx \
libnotify-bin \
ssh \
wget \
xcb \
&& apt-get clean \


We now have Wickr in a Docker container and, because we are the curious sort, need to peek into what’s happening.

A natural first step is to set Wireshark atop Wickr. At a glance, seems to be communicating with a single IP address (204.232.166.114) via HTTPS.

Unsurprsingly, the client communicates to the server whenever a message is sent. Further it appears to poll the same address periodically asking for new messages. We see that the address resolves to Rackspace in San Antonio, TX.

We can easily establish the link between this IP address, Rackspace and the application.

Well, that’s enough. Right?

Good!

Wait.

What?

We’re still a little curious.

Aren’t we?

I mean, what’s the big question here? What happens if there’s a man in the middle? Persons so eagerly connect to any free WIFI, it is clearly a plausible scenario. Well… One way to find out!

Here’s what we learned. Server-side, the application is written in PHP. The IP address is resolved by the URI ‘secex.info’.

When we send, it calls ‘postMessage.php’:

When we receive, ‘downloadMessage.php’:

And it calls ‘newMessageCheck.php’ to, y’know, check for new messages.

Other analyses have forensically examined artefacts left behind; there are published descriptions of the encryption methods used for the local database connection. We didn’t go into more aggressive efforts such as disassembly because we are too lazy for that jazz!

My opinion, we didn’t learn anything wildly unexpected. Overall, Wickr seems an okay solution for convenient encrypted messaging. That’s always the trade: convenience vs. security. Least we ended with a Docker container for the software!

Github | Docker

Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of work from a laptop running Kali. Engaged in pursuit of a new job, I’m brushing up on some old tools and skills, exploring some bits that have changed.

My primary desktop rig is currently running Arch because I love the fine grain control and the aggressive releases. Over the years, I’ve Gentoo’d and Slacked, Crunchbanged, BSD’d, Solarised, et cet. And I’ve a fondness for all of them, especially the security-minded focus of OpenBSD. But, these days we’re usually on Arch or Kali. Initially, I went with Black Arch on the laptop but I felt the things and ways I was fixing things were too specific to my situation to be good material for posts.

Anyway, I wanted to get Bitmessage running, corresponding to another post I have in drafts. On Kali, it wasn’t going well so I put it on the Arch box and just ran it over the network. A reasonable solution if you’re in my house but also the sort of solution that will keep a hacker up at night.

If you’re lucky, there’s someone maintaining a package for the piece of software that you want to run. However, that’s often not the case.

If I correctly recall, to “fix” the problem with Bitmessage on Kali would’ve required the manual installation an older version of libraries that were already present. Those libraries should, in fact, be all ebony and ivory, living together in harmony. However, I just didn’t love the idea of that solution. I wanted to find an approach that would be useful on a broader scale.

Enter containerization/virtualization!

Wanting the lightest solution, I quickly went to Docker and realized something. I have not before built a Docker container for a GUI application. And Bitmessage’s CLI/daemon mode doesn’t provide the fluid UX that I wanted. Well, the easy way to get a GUI out of a Docker container is to forward DISPLAY as an evironment variable (i.e., docker run -e DISPLAY=$DISPLAY). Splendid!

Except that it doesn’t work on current Kali which is using QT4. There’s a when graphical apps are run as root and though it is fixed in QT5, we are using current Kali. And that means we are, by default, uid 0 and QT4.

I saw a bunch of workarounds that seemed to have spotty (at best) rates of success including seting QT’s graphics system to Native and giving Xorg over to root. They, mostly, seemed to be cargo cult solutions.

What made the most sense to my (generally questionable) mind was to use X forwarding. Since I had already been running Bitmessage over X forwarding from my Arch box, I knew it should work just the same.

To be completely truthful, the first pass I took at this was with Vagrant mostly because it’s SO easy. Bring up your Vagrant Box and then:
vagrant ssh -- -X
Viola!

Having proof of concept, I wanted a Docker container. The reason for this is practical. Vagrant, while completely awesome, has substantially more overhead than Docker by virtualizing the kernel. We don’t want a separate kernel running for each application. Therefore Docker is the better choice for this project.

Also, we want this whole thing to be seemless. We want to run the command bitmessage and it should fire up with minimal awkwardness and hopefully no extra steps. That is we do not want to run the Docker container then SSH into it and execute Bitmessage as individual steps. Even though that’s going to be how we begin.

The Bitmessage wiki accurately describes how to install the software so we’ll focus on the SSH setup. Though when we build the Dockerfile we will need to add SSH to the list from the wiki.

We’re going to want the container to start so that the SSH daemon is ready. Until then we can’t SSH (with X forwarding) into the container. Then we’ll want to use SSH to kick off the Bitmessage application, drawing the graphical interface using our host system’s X11.

We’re going to take advantage of Docker’s -v --volume option which allows us to specify a directory on our host system to be mounted inside our container. Using this feature, we’ll generate our SSH keys on the host and make them automatically available inside the container. We’ll tuck the keys inside the directory that Bitmessage uses for storing its configuration and data. That way Bitmessage’s configuration and stored messages can be persistent between runs — and all of your pieces are kept in a single place.

When we generate the container /etc/ssh/sshd_config is configured to allow root login without password only (i.e., using keys). So here’s how we’ll get this done:
mkdir -p ~/.config/PyBitmessage/keys #Ensure that our data directories exist
cd ~/.config/PyBitmessage/keys
ssh-keygen -b 4096 -P "" -C $"$(whoami)@$(hostname)-$(date -I)" -f docker-bitmessage-keys #Generate our SSH keys
ln -fs docker-bitmessage-keys.pub authorized_keys #for container to see pubkey


Build our container (sources available at Github and Docker) and we’ll make the script to handle Bitmessage to our preferences. #!/bin/bash
# filename: bitmessage
set -euxo pipefail

# open Docker container:
# port 8444 available, sharing local directories for SSH and Bitmessage data
# detatched, interactive, pseudo-tty (-dit)
# record container ID in $DID (Docker ID)
DID=$(docker run -p 8444:8444 -v ~/.config/PyBitmessage/:/root/.config/PyBitmessage -v ~/.config/PyBitmessage/keys/:/root/.ssh/ -dit j0rg3/bitmessage-gui bash)

# find IP address of new container, record in $DIP (Docker IP)
DIP=$(docker inspect $DID | grep IPAddress | cut -d '"' -f 4)

# pause for one second to allow container's SSHD to come online
sleep 1

# SSH into container and execute Bitmessage
ssh -oStrictHostKeyChecking=no -oUserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null -oIdentityFile=~/.config/PyBitmessage/keys/docker-bitmessage-keys -X $DIP ./PyBitmessage/src/bitmessagemain.py

# close container if Bitmessage is closed
docker kill $DID


Okay, let’s make it executable: chmod +x bitmessage

Put a link to it where it can be picked up system-wide: ln -fs ~/docker-bitmessage/bitmessage /usr/local/bin/bitmessage

There we have it! We now have a functional Bitmessage inside a Docker container. \o/

In a future post we’ll look at using eCryptfs to further protect our Bitmessage data stores.

  Project files: Github and Docker

Happy new year! New year means new servers, right?

That provides its own set of interesting circumstances!

The server we’re investigating in this scenario was chosen for being a dedicated box in a country that has quite tight privacy laws. And it was a great deal offered on LEB.

So herein is the fascinating bit. The rig took a few days for the provider to set up and, upon completion, the password for SSHing into the root account was emailed out. (o_0)

In very security-minded considerations, that means that there was a window of opportunity for bad guys to work on guessing the password before its owner even tuned in. That window remains open until the server is better secured. Luckily, there was a nice interface for reinstalling the OS permitting its purchaser to select a password.

My preferred approach was to script the basic lock-down so that we can reinstall the base OS and immediately start closing gaps.

In order:

In this post, we’re focused on the first two steps.

The tasks to be handled are:

We’ll use ssh-keygen to generate a key — and stick with RSA for ease. If you’d prefer ECC then you’re probably reading the wrong blog but feel encouraged to contact me privately.

The code:

We just run this script soon as the OS is reinstalled and we’re substantially safer. As a Deb8 install, quickly pulling down fail2ban and PortSentry makes things quite a lot tighter.

In another post, we’ll visit the 2017 version of making a DIY script to batten the hatches using a variety of publicly provided blocklists.

Download here:
    ssh_quick_fix.sh

Prereqruisites: Docker, Git, SSHFS.

Today we’re going to look at using Docker to create a WordPress installation with the Project Largo parent theme and a child theme stub for us to play with.

Hart Hoover has established an image for getting a WordPress installation up and running using Docker. For whatever reason, it didn’t work for me out-of-box but we’re going to use his work to get started.

Let’s make a place to work and move into that directory:
cd ~
mkdir project.largo.wordpress.docker
cd project.largo.wordpress.docker


We’ll clone the Docker/Wordpress project. For me, it couldn’t untar the latest WordPress. So we’ll download it outside the container, untar it and modify the Dockerfile to simply pull in a copy:
git clone https://github.com/hhoover/docker-wordpress.git
cd docker-wordpress/
ME=$(whoami)
wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
tar xvf latest.tar.gz
sed -i 's/ADD http:\/\/wordpress.org\/latest.tar.gz \/wordpress.tar.gz/ADD \.\/wordpress \/wordpress/' Dockerfile
sed -i '/RUN tar xvzf \/wordpress\.tar\.gz/d' Dockerfile


Then, build the project which may take some time.
sudo docker build -t $ME/wordpress .

If you’ve not the images ready for Docker, the process should begin with something like:
Step 0 : FROM boxcar/raring
Pulling repository boxcar/raring
32737f8072d0: Downloading [> ] 2.228 MB/149.7 MB 12m29s


And end something like:
Step 20 : CMD ["/bin/bash", "/start.sh"]
---> Running in db53e215e2fc
---> 3f3f6489c700
Successfully built 3f3f6489c700


Once the project is built, we will start it and forward ports from the container to the host system, so that the Docker container’s site can be accessed through port 8000 of the host system. So, if you want to see it from the computer that you’ve installed it on, you could go to ‘HTTP://127.0.0.1:8000’. Alternatively, if your host system is already running a webserver, we could use SSHFS to mount the container’s files within the web-space of the host system.

In this example, however, we’ll just forward the ports and mount the project locally (using SSHFS) so we can easily edit the files perhaps using a graphical IDE such as NetBeans or Eclipse.

Okay, time to start our Docker image and find its IP address (so we can mount its files):
DID=$(docker run -p 8000:80 -d $ME/wordpress)
DIP=$(docker inspect $DID | grep IPAddress | cut -d '"' -f 4)
docker logs $DID| grep 'ssh user password:' --color


Copy the SSH password and we will make a local directory to access the WordPress installation of our containter.
cd ~
mkdir largo.mount.from.docker.container
sshfs user@$DIP:/var/www $HOME/largo.mount.from.docker.container
cd largo.mount.from.docker.container
PROJECT=$(pwd -P)


Now, we can visit the WordPress installation and finish setting up. From the host machine, it should be ‘HTTP://127.0.0.1:8000’. There you can configure Title, Username, Password, et cet. and finish installing WordPress.

Now, let’s get us some Largo! Since this is a test project, we’ll sacrifice security to make things easy. Our Docker WordPress site isn’t ready for us to easily install the Largo parent theme, so we’ll make the web directory writable by everybody. Generally, this is not a practice I would condone. It’s okay while we’re experimenting but permissions are very important on live systems!

Lastly, we’ll download and install Largo and the Largo child theme stub.
ssh user@$DIP 'sudo chmod -R 777 /var/www'
wget https://github.com/INN/Largo/archive/master.zip -O $PROJECT/wp-content/themes/largo.zip
unzip $PROJECT/wp-content/themes/largo.zip -d $PROJECT/wp-content/themes/
mv $PROJECT/wp-content/themes/Largo-master $PROJECT/wp-content/themes/largo
wget http://largoproject.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/largo-child.zip -O $PROJECT/wp-content/themes/largo-child.zip
unzip $PROJECT/wp-content/themes/largo-child.zip -d $PROJECT/wp-content/themes
rm -rf $PROJECT/wp-content/themes/__MACOSX/


We are now ready to customize our Project Largo child theme!

The other day, I was updating one of my systems and I noticed that it had decided to communicate with me in Chinese. Since I don’t know a lick of Chinese, it made for a clumsy exchange.

It was Linux Mint (an Ubuntu variant), so a snip of the output from an ‘apt-get upgrade’ looked like this:

I’m pretty sure I caused it — but there’s no telling what I was working on and how it slipped past me. Anyway, it’s not a difficult problem to fix but I imagine it could look like big trouble.

So, here’s what I did:
> locale

The important part of the output was this:
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=zh_CN.UTF-8


If you want to set your system to use a specific editor, you can set $EDITOR=vi and then you’re going to learn that some programs expect the configuration to be set in $VISUAL and you’ll need to change it there too.

In a similar way, many things were using the en_US.UTF-8 set in LANG, but other things were looking to LANGUAGE and determining that I wanted Chinese.

Having identified the problem, the fix was simple. Firstly, I just changed it in my local environment:
> LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8

That solved the immediate problem but, sooner or later, I’m going to reboot the machine and the Chinese setting would have come back. I needed to record the change somewhere for the system to know about it in the future.

> vim /etc/default/locale

Therein was the more permanent record, so I changed LANGUAGE there also, giving the result:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
LC_NUMERIC=en_US.UTF-8
LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE=”en_US.UTF-8”
LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES=”en_US.UTF-8”
LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8
LC_NAME=en_US.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=en_US.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=en_US.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=en_US.UTF-8
LC_ALL=

And now, the computer is back to using characters that I (more-or-less) understand.

In this writer’s opinion, it is vitally important that we take reasonable measures now to help insure anonymity, lest we create a situation where privacy no longer exists, and the simple want of, becomes suspicious.

Here’s how to configure your browser to automatically use a search engine that respects your privacy.

Chrome:

1. Click Settings.
2. Click “Set pages” in the “On startup” section.
3. Enter https://ixquick.com/eng/ in the “Add a new page” text field.
4. Click OK.
5. Click “Manage search engines…”
6. At the bottom of the “Search Engines” dialog, click in the “Add a new search engine” field.
7. Enter
   ixquick
ixquick.com
https://ixquick.com/do/search?lui=english&language=english&cat=web&query=%s
8. Click “Make Default”.
9. Click “Done”.

Firefox:

1. Click the Tools Menu.
2. Click Options.
3. Click the General tab.
4. In “When Firefox Starts” dropdown, select “Show my home page”.
5. Enter https://ixquick.com/eng/ in the “Home Page” text field.
6. Click one of the English options here.
7. Check box for “Start using it right away.”
8. Click “Add”.

Opera:

1. Click “Manage Search Engines
2. Click “Add”
3. Enter
   Name: ixquick
   Keyword: x
   Address: https://ixquick.com/do/search?lui=english&language=english&cat=web&query=%s
4. Check “Use as default search engine”
5. Click “OK”

Internet Explorer:

  _     ___  _ __        ___   _ _____ ___ 
 | |   / _ \| |\ \      / / | | |_   _|__ \
 | |  | | | | | \ \ /\ / /| | | | | |   / /
 | |__| |_| | |__\ V  V / | |_| | | |  |_| 
 |_____\___/|_____\_/\_/   \___/  |_|  (_) 

(This is not a good strategy for privacy.)

Congratulations!

You are now one step closer to not having every motion on the Internet recorded.

This is a relatively small measure, though. You can improve your resistance to prying eyes (e.g., browser fingerprinting) by using the Torbrowser Bundle, or even better, Tails, and routing your web usage through Tor, i2p, or FreeNet.

If you would like more on subjects like anonymyzing, privacy and security then drop me a line via email or Bitmessage me: BM-2D9tDkYEJSTnEkGDKf7xYA5rUj2ihETxVR

I have finished (more-or-less) making a demo for the Xdebug togglin’ add-on/extension that I’ve developed.

One hundred percent of the feedback about this project has been from Chrome users. Therefore, the Chrome extension has advanced with the new features (v2.0), allowing selective en/dis-ableing portions of Xdebug’s output. That is you can set Xdebug to firehose mode (spitting out everything) and then squelch anything not immediately needed at the browser layer. The other information remains present, hidden in the background, available if you decide that you need to have a look.

The Firefox version is still at v1.2 but will be brought up to speed as time permits.

If you want that firehose mode for Xdebug, here’s a sample of some settings for your configuration ‘.ini’ file.

The demo is here.

Documentation for this one seems a bit hard to come by but it is one of the things I love about Zsh.

I’ve seen many .bashrc files that have things like:
alias www='cd /var/www'
alias music='cd /home/j0rg3/music'


And that’s a perfectly sensible way to make life a little easier, especially if the paths are very long.

In Zsh, however, we can use the hash command and the shortcut we get from it works fully as the path. Other words, using the version above, if we want to edit ‘index.html’ in the ‘www’ directory, we would have to issue the shortcut to get there and then edit the file, in two steps:
> www
> vim index.html

The improved version in .zshrc would look like:
hash www=/var/www
hash -d www=/var/www


Then, at any time, you can use tilde (~) and your shortcut in place of path.
> vim ~www/index.html

Even better, it integrates with Zsh’s robust completions so you can, for example, type cd ~www/ and then use the tab key to cycle through subdirectories and files.

On this system, I’m using something like this:
(.zshrc)
hash posts=/home/j0rg3/weblog/posts
hash -d posts=/home/j0rg3/weblog/posts

Then we can make a function to create a new post, to paste into .zshrc. Since we want to be able to edit and save, without partial posts becoming visible, while we are working, we’ll use an extra .tmp extension at the end:
post() { vim ~posts/`date +%Y-%m`/`date +%Y%m%d`.$1.txt.tmp }

But, surely there is going to be a point when we need to save a post and finish it later. For now, let’s assume that only a single post will be in limbo at any time. We definitely don’t want to have to remember the exact name of the post — and we don’t want to have hunt it down every time.

We can make those things easier like this:
alias resume="vim `find ~posts/ -name '*.txt.tmp'`"

Thanks for visiting my little spot on the web. This is a Blosxom ‘blog which, for those who don’t know, is a CGI written in Perl using the file-system (rather than a database).

To the CLI-addicted, this is an awesome little product. Accepting, of course, that you’re going to get under the hood if you’re going to make it the product you want. After some modules and hacking, I’m pleased with the result.

My posts are just text files, meaning I start a new one like: vim ~posts/`date +%Y%m%d`.brief.subject.txt

Note: the back-ticks (`) tell the system that you want to execute the command between ticks, and dynamically insert its output into the command. In this case, the command date with these parameters:

1. (+) we’re going to specify a format
2. (%Y) four-digit year
3. (%m) two-digit month
4. (%d) two-digit day

That means the command above will use Vim to edit a text file named ‘20130507.brief.subject.txt’ in the directory I have assigned to the hash of ‘posts’. (using hash this way is a function of Zsh that I’ll cover in another post)

Toss in a line that identifies tags and, since Perl is the beast of Regex, we pick up the tags and make them links, meta-tags, etc.

Things here are likely to change a lot at first, while I twiddle with CSS and hack away at making a Blosxom that perfectly fits my tastes — so don’t be too alarmed if you visit and things look a tad wonky. It just means that I’m tinkering.

Once the saw-horses have been tucked away, I’m going to take the various notes I’ve made during my years in IT and write them out, in a very simple breakdown, aimed at sharing these with people who know little about how to negotiate the command line. The assumption here is that you have an interest in *nix/BSD. If you’ve that and the CLI is not a major part of your computing experience, it probably will be at some point. If you’re working on systems remotely, graphical interfaces often just impede you.

Once you’ve started working on remote machines, the rest is inevitable. You can either remember how to do everything two ways, through a graphical interface and CLI — or just start using the CLI for everything.

So let’s take a little journey through the kinds of things that make me love the CLI.