GranneBlog

Ramblings & ephemera

His employer’s misconfigured laptop gets him charged with a crime

From Robert McMillan’s “A misconfigured laptop, a wrecked life” (NetworkWorld: 18 June 2008):
When the Commonwealth of Massachusetts issued Michael Fiola a Dell Latitude in November 2006, it set off a chain of events that would cost him his job, his friends and about a year of his life, as he fought criminal charges that he [...]

Posted on October 11th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Webster U: InfoSec Management, law, security | No Comments »

What Dell learned from Wal-Mart

From Fake Steve Jobs’ “Why Dell will not bounce back” (11 May 2008):
On the manufacturing side, Dell figured out faster than the others in its space how to squeeze component suppliers and play them off each other. They brought in loads of former Wal-Mart people to refine this practice. One example: If you want to [...]

Posted on May 11th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, business | No Comments »

Find out a hard drive’s UUID

If you want to add a device like an external hard drive to your /etc/fstab file, it helps if you know the hard drive’s UUID. If you use K/Ubuntu, the following command will display the UUID, along with other useful information.

$ sudo vol_id /dev/sdo1
Password:
ID_FS_USAGE=filesystem
ID_FS_TYPE=ext3
ID_FS_VERSION=1.0
ID_FS_UUID=4857d4bb-5f6b-4f21-af62-830ebae92cff
ID_FS_LABEL=movies
ID_FS_LABEL_SAFE=movies

Ubuntu Edgy changes to fstab
Remove EXIF data from JPEGs
I for one [...]

Posted on July 26th, 2007 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Tech Help, Technology | No Comments »

Change the AMD K8 CPU without authentication checks

From Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram Newsletter (15 August 2004):
Here’s an interesting hardware security vulnerability. Turns out that it’s possible to update the AMD K8 processor (Athlon64 or Opteron) microcode. And, get this, there’s no authentication check. So it’s possible that an attacker who has access to a machine can backdoor the CPU.
[See http://www.realworldtech.com/forums/index.cfm?action=detail&id=35446&threadid=35446&roomid=11]

Why disclosure laws [...]

Posted on June 16th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, Webster U: InfoSec Management, business, security | Comments Off

Remote fingerprinting of devices connected to the Net

Anonymous Internet access is now a thing of the past. A doctoral student at the University of California has conclusively fingerprinted computer hardware remotely, allowing it to be tracked wherever it is on the Internet.
In a paper on his research, primary author and Ph.D. student Tadayoshi Kohno said: “There are now a number of powerful [...]

Posted on June 16th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, Webster U: InfoSec Management, security | Comments Off