Lewis' Blog Tales from the trenches of information technology

4Dec/170

Navigating Coinbase’s customer support

A company with which I am involved recently reconfigured its Coinbase account. This was precipitated by a change in the Stripe API, where Stripe shifted away from Coinpayments.net to another exchange for handling cryptocurrencies.

So, while this company had a prior arm's length arrangement with Coinbase, it never actually had to deal with the entity directly...until recently.

18Jan/131

Abduction! (Save As Image) mod for SeaMonkey

This is the support page for my modified packages of Abduction! (the successor to Save As Image). These versions are simply modified to install and (hopefully) work under SeaMonkey. I'm afraid I can't provide much functional support, but if you find something which doesn't work, I'm happy to look at the latest official build from AMO and see about updating my meager modifications as time permits.

11Nov/120

BetterPrivacy Mod for SeaMonkey

BetterPrivacyNettiCat has graciously granted me permission to modify (slightly) his BetterPrivacy extension to allow for installation and use under SeaMonkey. The current version (1.68.m, as of the date of this post) should install under SeaMonkey 2.0a1 and above.

For those not familiar with this extension, it goes beyond the built-in sanitizing functionality of Firefox and SeaMonkey to include clearing the Flash cookies, which may be stored for an otherwise indefinite period of time. For more on the actual feature set of BetterPrivacy, I would suggest reading the information available on the official home.

18Sep/120

Adjusting the Lightword theme for WordPress

I got a report today from a long time friend and colleague about some difficulty he was having with my blog. It seems that his view of the pages were lacking the date "tabs" to the left of the content column. He quickly confirmed that when I sent him a snippet of a screenshot (quick shout out to M. Evans, the author of Abduction!, which is an absolutely fantastic tool for capturing all or portions of browser content).

8Sep/120

Multiple default routes / public gateway IPs under Linux

I recently had the need to configure a server for a client with multiple public IPv4 addresses routing to the internet and the requirement to switch between them at will while browsing (http traffic only).

There are a number of articles available on the net dealing with this type of situation, mainly focused on using iproute2, ToS tagging, and Squid (see references, below). However, I bumped into an issue with openSUSE 12.1 where it would stubbornly refuse to accept certain (otherwise valid) ToS (DSCP) values (see https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=770785 for my bug report). This severely limited the number of possible values I could use, and thus, the number of possible public IP addresses.

12Jul/120

Random thoughts on Thunderbird’s current state

Well, like the Mozilla Suite before it, Thunderbird seems to have been given the Boot by MSF. This is hardly surprising for a group which single-handedly (single-mindedly?) decided that "nobody wants an internet suite anymore; people only want separate web browsers and email clients." Right...

22May/120

Warpstock 2012, Portland Oregon, USA

Embassy Suites Portland Airport

Well, after another round of considerations and deliberations, the Warpstock Board of Directors finally decided upon the Embassy Suites, Portland Airport for the site of this year's OS/2 & eComStation conference, August 17-19.

Full details are available on the Warpstock site, but meanwhile, here are a couple of highlights:

15Apr/122

On the ungrateful nature of users and the OSS development community

Nothing new, here, I'm afraid. It's a problem as old as the concept of "free stuff."

So what exactly is free stuff, anyway, and why do people seem to equate freely available to freedom from cost?

Recently, a contemporary of mine posited the idea that as the majority of Linux apps ported to eCS were built using GCC, they were somehow unstable, inferior, untested, or otherwise unworthy of use, and further, that developers porting these apps either did not care to - or simply did not - test them before releasing them on an unsuspecting public. This summoned the ire of one of the OS/2 community's most prolific - and talented, and approachable - porters, who reiterated what so many of us have said to and about this individual for some time: "There's the door."

12Dec/110

Egad! Why do people do their own web development?

WordPress 3.3 is now GA. Knowing better than to blindly upgrade without at least having a look at what may be not quite ready for prime time (though WP is quite good about reasonable beta cycles and such), I happened over to the WP fora to see what reports had been made (yes, I should have gone to the bugtracker, but I like to get a view from "on the ground," so to speak).

11Nov/112

Three good ways to thwart tracking attempts on the net

There is a lot of malicious junk floating about the net.I know; that's not a real surprise. Under normal circumstances, a good (standalone) firewall will keep one reasonably safe from the worst of it. However for those of us who travel, it's a constant challenge to keep up with personal firewall tweaking and such, and still, unless one is really running the kinds of stuff typically found in a UTM (Unified Threat Management) solution, just tweaking some firewall rules just isn't going to cut it.

[Shameless plug: Rosenthal & Rosenthal is an Astaro consultancy. If you know of anyone with a need for a truly solid firewall, email filter/scanner, VPN concentrator, etc., referrals are welcome.]

So, what can one do while traveling? Trust the hotel firewall? I think not. Here are three quick tips to help keep your system clean from would-be spoofers and such:

HOSTS file

A quick edit of your hosts file to loop back known bad sites to localhost (127.0.0.1) is a good start. To get started, have a look at the list compiled here. This will make some web pages look rather ugly, as the browser brings up the dreaded "cannot access..." in various iFrames and such, but it will speed browsing and keep that excess junk from cluttering the screen.

Squid proxy settings

Squid is great. You can do a lot of things with Squid, such as block entire IP ranges from getting in (or going out to them), which improves performance considerably. I'll post more on Squid configuration in a later article. For now, suffice it to say that Squid can be used as a pseudo-firewall (you just have to not defeat it by turning it off, but this is true of software firewalls, as well).

Privoxy

Another type of proxy is a privacy screen. Enter Privoxy to the scene. One of the annoying characteristics of most web surfing from modern browsers (and ancient ones) is that we tend to leave behind more than we take with us. To truly surf anonymously requires some type of anonymizer, and Privoxy is a good choice (this way, your travels don't follow you home, when you finally do get behind your warm and cozy hardware firewall). A couple interesting guides for chaining Squid to Privoxy (or vice-versa) may be found here and here. Again, I'll post more on this in a subsequent piece, but for now, suffice it to say that this is an excellent addition to your arsenal.

These are but three fairly quick and simple (well, they can be less complicated than others, at least) ways to browse more safely, and are of particular usefulness when away from home (or the office), where the bastion server is unknown and likely not to be trusted. In time, I'll flesh in more details and tips for configuring each of these solutioins.

Happy browsing.