Grey Panthers Savannah

Author: gpanther

  • Nmap online

    Some brave people have put online a service where you can scan an arbitrary computer with Nmap using their server to do the scanning on your behalf. One can say that this is the grownup version of Shields Up!. I was worried that their service could be abused in an attack-by-proxy (or in this case…

  • Threaded vs. Flat discussions

    This post from Coding Horror talks about a subject near and dear to my heart: the usability of the discussion boards. Here is my take on what constitutes an easy to use environment: Flat discussion works best if few replies are expected for a given topic. You can make sure of this by splitting up…

  • Things I read / listen to – part2

    While going through the motions of checking for new items on Google Reader, I realized that many great blogs / podcasts were left out from the last list I published. For example Casting from the server room which is a (great) podcast similar to In The Trenches (and not surprisingly they are both members of…

  • If you dot’ succeed at first…

    try harder. I was trying to get Ubuntu (6.10) to hibernate, without much success (remember, I’m a Linux newbie). One of the side effects of the experiment was that Ubuntu did not recognize my swap partition any more (probably because during the hibernation-attempt it was overwritten with some random data from memory). If you find…

  • Things I read / listen to

    After getting mentioned on a great security/forensics blog, I thought I list of the feeds I watch. This is not a comprehensive list (I have at least twice as much in my Google Reader), but these are the ones with which I try to keep up: 2600.com – Off the hook radio show. While sometimes…

  • You can make a difference!

    Just a quick post: if you find something on the global ‘net that you don’t like, blog about it! It is amazing how quickly (a) you find out that you were wrong at the thing you criticized should be actually so or (b) get a response from the person that they are actually working on…

  • Cutting off user-mode

    With every release Microsoft tries to separate user-mode and kernel mode more and more. Some say that this is a temporary solution, however it is still important. These hacks were probably done in the name of efficiency back in the days, but this is largely irrelevant today with as much computing power as we have…

  • Hack the Gibson – Episode #67

    This will be a short post, because the podcast (sorry, the netcast) was very on the spot. Also this was the first time I’ve heard that Steve included an errata. Things are definitely improving. I hope that I made a small contribution to this. One fun fact: the GRC.com website is running on Windows with…

  • Stopping waves

    I came across a very nice article over at the SploitCast forums about stopping waves by being calm and not by trying to create a counter wave. My interpretation of it: loose the hype! You won’t create any long-lasting effect with it. If you truly are out to improve security, be calm and explain over…

  • Fixing Open Source

    Before you all jump over me: I won’t be talking here about a silver bullet which would take the open source movement in the right direction, ensure its competitiveness or something like that. What I’ll talk about is the joy that you can have by fixing open source scripting libraries. To be specific: in one…