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Why I’m Crazy: Part 1

Posted at April 16, 2008 12:50 am | In Personal | By: Ben Woodruff

Right, so my life currently in a nutshell.

I recently accepted an offer by Agile Web Solutions to start helping out with their support email. I’ve been doing that for about a week and a half and I love it. Their product, 1Password, is amazing. I use it all the time, and it saves me a lot of frustration and headache.
Basically the idea is you store all of your passwords in it (mainly website logins, but it also handles whatever other text data you want to secure) and it encrypts them all using OS X’s built-in keychain.
So I’ve been answering support emails for them, and continuing to help out on the support forums. I finally set myself up with a proper avatar, haha. (more…)

Comments (1)
Tags: Personal, Security, Software, Work

Research Papers: Topic Summaries

Posted at March 17, 2008 2:35 pm | In Research | By: Ben Woodruff

I’ve attached some of the research that I’ve done for my Advanced Networking Security class. Included are topic summaries on NAT, OSPF, and RIP.

Topic Summary: Network Address Translation
Topic Summary: Open Shortest Path First Routing
Topic Summary: Routing Information Protocol

If you notice any errors (especially in citations - I want to give credit where credit is due) send me a message or leave a comment.

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Tags: NAT, Networking, OSPF, Research, RIP, Security, Technology

Use DenyHosts to Allow More Secure SSH Access

Posted at February 7, 2008 4:40 pm | In Research | By: Ben Woodruff

The FLOSS project DenyHosts is designed to make it safer to allow SSH access to hosts. The basic idea behind it is that when there are X number of unsuccessful login attempts from an IP/host it will block that host from connecting via SSH.
(more…)

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Tags: Networking, Research, Security

NoScript Provides Additional Security

Posted at December 16, 2007 12:16 am | In Software | By: Ben Woodruff

The popular NoScript addon for Firefox, which used to be primarily used for blocking Javascript (for security reasons) now allows easier blocking of Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime, Sun Java, and Microsoft Silverlight content. This used to be possible using the Flashblock addon, but the catch 22 with that is that it only works on pages which you have javascript enabled for (which obviously defeats the point). (more…)

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Tags: Firefox, Security, Software, Web Browsers

Allow Non-admin Users to Update Firefox

Posted at December 15, 2007 12:06 pm | In Software | By: Ben Woodruff

We recently noticed a problem where Firefox would prompt users (who are not administrators on their workstations) to update to the latest version (ie, from 2.0.0.8 to 2.0.0.9). If they tried to complete the update however, it would fail, giving the error “Software Update Failed”.

We decided the best solution was to come up with a way to let users update Firefox themselves, without being made local admins. The reason we wanted them to be able to do this is that IT doesn’t get around to everyone’s workstation often enough to keep up with the latest version of Firefox, and we felt that it was important for them to have that (for security reasons). (more…)

Comments (7)
Tags: Active Directory, Administration, Firefox, Hacking, Networking, Security, Software, Web Browsers

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