Mixed links


From the Notes & Thoughts blog: a new AV blog – the Avira blog. An other reason for linking to them is that it is impossible to find it from Google 🙂 (probably because they used “techblog” instead of “blog”).

Keryx Tutorial: Bringing Updates Home – Keryx is a cross-platform tool to download Ubuntu packages (with all the dependencies). The current cross-platform story isn’t all that well worked out (you have to manually install Python and PyGTK wxWidgets on the target machine), but it’s an interesting project nevertheless. – correction: the project already does provide prebuild binaries, so it is a nice way to get your Ubuntu updates/packages offline!

An analysis of the Gnome DVCS survey. It is an interesting read, given how DVCS’s are the “hip thing” these days.

Via Technorama: photos of freezing bubbles – very cool.

From Paranoid Linux Ninja Geek: BumpTop (if the site is down, check out the YouTube video directly) – very cool demos, however I’m not convinced at all. IMHO, if you want to work fast, learn the shortcut keys of the applications.

From ComputerDefense: Access Wikipedia via DNS queries. The Windows equivalent of the command is: nslookup -querytype=TXT foobar.wp.dg.cx.

This is a little old, but Google Reader has a new look. Besides the fact that I find it much slicker than the old one, it is also faster according to the post, because it did away with all the rounded corners.

From the LinuxWorld site: Phoenix offers faster boot times for laptops – although the business model is questionable, this is interesting because AFAIK it is developed by Joanna Rutkowska of invisiblethings.org

On the Errata Security blog: Rats, foiled. It is nice to see that at least some companies try to do something about security, and that the employee reacted correspondingly to being questioned (that is, declining politely to answer).

From the “it will maybe be useful in the future” department comes the List of Security Checklists 🙂

The ‘net was full with the buzz of some high-profile Twitter accounts being taken over. From what I’ve read the an administration interface (which was exposed to the ‘net) was hacked by bruteforcing it using a dictionary. This of course could have been prevented by (a) not exposing it to the web and/or (b) using stronger passwords and/or multi-factor authentication. Links:


4 responses to “Mixed links”

  1. Thanks for linking to the Keryx tutorial I wrote!

    You are correct in pointing out that using the GUI on the target machine requires the installation of some dependencies. However, though older versions of Keryx did indeed use GTK (which worked out of the box on any Gnome desktop), the program now uses wxWidgets, which requires that the python-wxversion package be installed. The motivation for this decision is that wxWidgets provide for easier cross-platform development. Python is installed by default on all Linux distros.

    In the next release of Keryx, we will be including pre-compiled binaries for Linux and OSX, just like we already do for Windows. This means that no matter the OS, the user will be able to bring up the GUI without installing any dependencies, making the program much more portable.

    Also planned for the next release is automated installation of Debian packages on the target machine, plus internationalization/translation support.

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