Are taxpayers being duped into paying for George Bush's reelection?

October 23, 2004

As the Internet has grown (into multiple internets according to a recent presidential malaprop) the White House has always had a site. Not surprisingly this is a site paid for by the citizens of the country. There are collections of information on the site. One of those documents includes this March 2002 press release in which President George W. Bush says about Osama Bin Laden, "I don't know where he is.  I  --  I'll repeat what I said.  I truly am not that concerned about him."

One might be tempted to look this up after the recent debate where the same President lied to the people once again and said that he'd never said such a thing. The problem is you would have a tough time finding it if you went to look at the March 2002 press releases. Here are three images from February, March and April 2002's Press Release pages on the website.

So it all boils down to a government official trying to change the story on what they did in the past.

OS X Rootkit - includes Opener script

October 22, 2004

There is a discussion going on over at Macintouch about what they are calling "Opener" Malware. I sent a comment but unfortunately it was below the threshold of what was published. The discussion is focused on the Opener script but mostly misses the critical point - that it is a part of the OSXRK - OS X Root Kit. All of the comments I read at Macintouch are at best mis-informed. While the Opener script itself does not "infect" computers as a part of the OSXRK it can be used to exploit machines. From the readme file:

###################################
# osxrk : OS X - Rookit
#
# the burning man - Public Release 0.2.1
# Sept. 2004
#
# by g@pple
#
# greets and thanks to Dim Bulb, Dr. Springfield, Jawn Doh!, B-r00t!,
# the fbsdrk & fbsdrootkit teams for inspiration.
#

This is the initial Public Release of the OS X RootKit. This type of rootkit should be easy to defend against if you really care about your computer. Keep your system up to date and patched.

Less lethal???

October 22, 2004

The Boston police department says they take full responsibility for the death of a 21 year-old college student who died after being shot in the face by a police officer. At the same time they are vowing to bring to justice the hooligans who they say are created the situation. People should be reminded what happened here. A police officer, charged with keeping the peace, aimed a gun at someone's head and pulled the trigger. Everyone should be outraged by the continuing use of misnomers like non-leathal projectiles. The police in our police state have run amok by a false sense that less discrimination needs to be used when using these modern projectiles.

Opener - OS X Rootkit

October 21, 2004

There is a note on Macintouch today about somebody being hit by the opener rootkit on OS X. The rootkit is available for download from a .mac account as osxrk. This kit has been in the 'wild' for over a month now. The opener file says it will move itself to /System/Library/StartupItems. The script is aware of LittleSnitch and kills it before making network connections to download tools for wiping out logs and gathering of passwords.

From the readme "rootkit that has a lot of standard tools included, adds a TCP backdoor via inetd, does data recon, and more."

Allow root to SSH in? No.

October 20, 2004

By default OS X ships with the root user set so you can't login. Many people know that you assign a password to the root user and viola you can now login. What is disappointing is that Apple by default does not configure SSH to prevent REMOTE login by root. It's a simple configuration change to the /etc/sshd_config file. There are two ways to do it. I prefer to add the following line:

AllowUsers      username

There is also the possibility of using DenyUsers and putting root in that list, but by using AllowUsers you further limit who has access.

An idea for Family Controls

October 20, 2004

According to MacinTouch today Apple's next OS, Tiger, will include Family Controls that give administrators more granularity over the abilities of applications. What isn't mentioned there but would be nice are time of day related controls. Something that would allow kids to chat via iChat at certain hours but would limit what times of day it's possible.

Local media

October 19, 2004

As I mentioned yesterday I attended a speech last night called Fighting for Air. The talk used radio as a example of what has happened with consolidation of media ownership and the potential dangers of the monoculture that is promoted by consolidation of media. With anecdotes including Minot, North Dakota where Clear Channel Communications' lack of staffing at all the local stations prevented emergency broadcasts from going out when a train carrying 10,000 gallons of anhydrous ammonia derailed and residents could not be warned to stay inside away from the toxic cloud.

Pages

Subscribe to