Valleyschwag has delivered! There for a couple days I was worried as the middle of the month went by without a word, but on Friday, word went out that the schwag shipped. And today, just four days later, it has arrived.
I’ll admit, I was a bit unsure about this idea at first, but now that I’ve got my hands on this pile o’ goodies, I’m hooked. Not only is Valleyschwag a great marketing idea, but so far has proved to be a great service. Here’s a breakdown of the goodies:
For $14.99, this is a great deal, the hat alone made it worth it (the hat is definitely my favorite piece). Yeah, it’s official, I’m a fan.
I installed Vista last night twice; the first was an upgrade from XP Pro on my laptop, the other a fresh install on my desktop. The experience was quite interesting for both; here are a few thoughts about the process:
Laptop My laptop has a fairly modest configuration, 1.73GHz Pentium M, 512MB, 80GB hard-drive, and Mobil Intel 915 64MB for the graphics. It’s been running Windows XP Pro, last night I went through the upgrade process to Vista Business.
While facing an interesting research challenge, digging into the inner working of Windows, I realized that I needed to change a registry value. That’s simple enough, I fire up RegEdit, make the change, then politely as RegEdit knows how, it told me that I couldn’t change the value! Being one that hates when my computer tells me I can’t do something, I had to find another option.
So after some research, I found my answer: sc.
During a recent discussion about the DarkMatter CA on a Mozilla mailing list, it was found that their 64-bit serial numbers weren’t actually 64 bits, and it opened a can of worms. It turns out that the serial number was effectively 63 bits, which is a violation of the CA/B Forum Baseline Requirements that state it must contain 64 bits of output from a secure random number generator (CSPRNG). As a result of this finding, 2,000,000 certificates or more may need to be replaced by Google, Apple, GoDaddy and various others.
For the second year I am publishing a year-in-review – something I had generally avoided in the past, as the tone of these posts is typically just cynicism and negativity. Looking back at 2015, it wasn’t all positive (what year is?), but there was certainly some good, and there are great things to look forward to.
In a season filled with empty marketing pitches, worthless predictions, and pointless projections – it’s important to look at the good and avoid the cynicism overload that is all too common.
As it turns out, it’s quite easy to make your Android phone NSA-proof. It’s a simple method, and anyone can do it – all you need is a few ounces of thermite!
Too extreme?
Tools & Tips Let’s shoot for something a little more attainable – spy resistant. We can’t stop every attack, but we can reduce the attack surface a bit. Here are a few tools that I’ve been using recently to do just that.
