Adobe Air and Ubuntu

Now my linux box is slowly becoming more functional I’m starting to add my usual features. First step is twhirl, my favorite twitter desktop program that runs on Adobe Air.

Download the AdobeAIRInstaller.bin file from http://get.adobe.com/air/ make sure you change the operating system to linux. Save this file where you know where it is

Open a terminal and go to the file containing the .bin file and type
chmod +x AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
sudo ./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

This will run the AdobeAIR installer. All .air files are then recognised and installed normally.

Nice and easy! =)

EDIT: It seems installing this program leads to this problem after restart. Please quickly check to make yourself familiar if you are following this.

“Your session only lasted less than 10 seconds…”

After installing some new programs an error such as this may occur after logging in. This seems appear when a KDE program is installed onto Gnome. It is a simple fix. The permissions of .ICEauthority in your home directory need to be changed.

To do this first;

CTRL+ALT+F1 to change xsession will take you to a terminal

then type (replacing x to be your username)
sudo chown x:x /home/x/.ICEauthority
sudo chmod 600 /home/x/.ICEauthority

Restart, log back in and you should be working fine again!

DVD Playback in Ubuntu

Once Ubuntu is installed DVD playback is not automatically included.

This may not be the best method and I have seen other examples which are shorter but this certainly fixed the problem for me so I wanted to include it. In a terminal type

sudo aptitude install libdvdnav4 libdvdplay0 libdvdread3

sudo aptitude remove –purge totem totem-gstreamer

sudo aptitude install totem-xine

finally need to downlaod libdvdcss which I got from below or here
and open with GDebit Package Installer. You then end with working DVD playback

	Ubuntu 8.04 i386 [ubuntu804_deb] [114 KB]
	Ubuntu 8.04 amd64 [ubuntu804_deb] [115 KB]

I do admit this may not be the tidiest or even best way to solve the problem. I would love to hear different solutions from anybody. But this just did the trick for me so I thought I might as well post it

Installing Ubuntu on a PC with an Nvidia Graphics Card

Having spent the past 5 hours setting a new desktop on Ubuntu I figured I would note down my procedures. May help somebody in the future and for my reference as well. Simple senario. Install Ubuntu. My set up is:

ASROCK motherboard, Intel CPU, NVIDIA gefore 7600 gt graphics card, ethernet connection to router. The problem is you cannot use the GUI install without the graphics driver installed. This needs to be done, then run the install itself.

There was an obvious problem with the graphics compatability,  loading was very slow and always crashed. This turns out fairly easy to fix, lot less daunting then I thought.

On a working computer. Go to the NVIDIA site, download drivers. Select your make and model. You get sent to a .run file. Save this file onto a usb pen drive.

You then need to run linux and install the Nvidia drive. Select to just run linux from the CD. Once ubuntu has finished starting (no more orange bar, you just get a blank creamy coloured screen) quickly press CTRL + ALT + F1, before the computer tries to load any graphics and crashes. This takes you to another x window which is basically a terminal.

Plug your USB drive into the USB port. To locate the usb drive type

cd /dev

ls sd*

This will bring a list of the drives in the computer, including USB and HDD. sda is typically the HDD. the list continues sdb,sdc etc. Typically as the USB drive was the last item plugged in it will be the last sd(letter) in the list. Mine, in this example is sdc. To access the actual files on the USB drive you need to see a number after the sdc. Mine for example is sdc1, the number correlates with partitions.

We now need to mount the USB drive so you can access the .run file on it. Do do this you will need to type

sudo mkdir /mnt/sdc1

sudo mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/sdc1

now access the files by typing

cd /mnt/sdc1

Now the drive is mounted you need to exit the current x-window sessions in able to update it. This is done by typing

We then need to install build-essential so your machine can run the .run file to do this type

sudo apt-get install build-essentail

You will need to be connected to the internet to do this (simply has an ethernet cable from the machine to a working router, wireless is not really an option at this point)

sudo init 1

You will see lots of checks flash by and you end up in a menu. You need to select Drop to Root Shell Prompt.

move back to your mounted USB drive (cd/mnt/sdc1)

run an ls to check the .run file is there

finally type

sudo sh NVIDIA********.run (whatever the full file name is fills the *’s) This will take you a through a series of instructions and install the drivers.

Now the driver is installed we are ready to install but we first must unmount the USB drive. Otherwise errors will occur during installation. To do this run

umount /dev/sdc1, maybe killing the sh process, should the device still be busy.

Make sure /mnt/sdc1 is empty to garuntee the drive has been unmounted and remove device.

Return to the original x-window by retarting it typing

sudo telinit 3

Then run the install file as normal.

Once ubuntu has been installed it may still start up in low graphics mode. To get around this go to System -> Administration -> Hardware Drivers. The NVIDIA driver should appear there but not in use. Unselect and reselect the “Enabled” check box. This will then finally run a quick program which will leave you with a fully working NVIDIA driver on a Ubuntu Machine!!

Please comment to let me know if this has been useful or if you have any problems.

Recent Findings

Two interesting things have really sprung out at me recently. The 1st of this is this video here Its a recent proof made showing how the electromagnetic rays given off keyboard connections such as PS/2 and USB can be read by an antenna 20 metres away in a different room. This in itself is just awesome! Whether its something that can really be used to illegally obtain information would be interesting but the proof of concept itself is unbelievable. It keeps proving over and over again that attacks are always being found everywhere! There is no doubt this could be implemented and used in an illegal manner if somebody really wanted to put their mind to it. Just outstanding.

The second article I found is a few write ups of the cyber war that was carried out between Georgia and Russia during their recent spat.

Project Grey Goose (opens PDF) is an Open Source Intelligence initiative investigating how Russia conducted attacks against Georgia

The Georgian Government (also opens PDF) have also released their own reports on their analysis. I have not sat down to read either yet but they both look really interesting and something I shall look through with in the next few days.

Data for sale! Bargain prices!

This story is brilliant! Not only do banks and goverment manage to unbelievably leave laptops containing confidential information lying around on public transport, or can be overheard discussing secret plans but have now been found for literally giving them away!!

RBS, Natwest and American Express all had data stored on a hard-drive that was sold with a computer on ebay. Fortunatly and as unpredictably as ever, the computer was sold to an IT manager who paid a cool but heavily disputed £77 or is it £35? for the device. So the data managed to fall into the lap of someone who knew what he was doing and who also knew who to contact (The Daily Mail).

Along with the announcement of this the banks involved wonderfully try to remove themselves from the incident as much as possible by saying

“The IT equipment that appeared on eBay was neither planned nor instructed by the company to be disposed,”

I like that, like some how, in an unexplained manner, somebody walked out, not with a laptop, which would have made this whole incident slightly less rediculous, but with a whole computer! Only to then decide to come to the conclusion to sell it on ebay! There could only be three possible senarios for this situation to come about.

1) Man walks out of bank with computer, thinks he can get some money for this, and puts it straight on ebay (Stupidity Level 99%) (Slightly reduced due to seller may have not known what actually was on the Hard-Drive, however he did take it from a bank!)

2) Man walks out of bank with computer, uses it for a few months, then decides to sell on ebay (Stupidity Level 100%) – I wonder if it was purchased off ebay with all this data and a copy of The Sims 2 installed?!

3) Man walks out of bank with computer, forgets about computer, later finds computer and decides to sell on ebay, failing to remember it was stolen from a bank! Now, i don’t know about you but I sure would remember if I ever walked out of a business building with  computer that belonged to that business under my arms!

Either way this does not make sense, especially in the time we live in where protection of data is becoming more and more written and understood by the public media. One day all these businesses will respond, one day something just way to important will be stolen or accidentally left around. It just shows that even in the times we live in now, people still don’t think about computer security, how can it be neglected, when so many people are out there after any data they can get! I also believe stories like this still get quickly glanced at by many people, just like disasters in foriegn countries, it is sometimes hard to really relate when you can’t see it. Just like this, it all could seem so removed and I think that’s how security breeches like these can easily appear to the public.

I would like to turn our attention to the other business which is mentioned in this story, Ebay. Any story like this and ebay makes extra business from it’s name. I bet anybody selling a computer on ebay at the moment must have noticed a hike in interest from people wanting to purchase it, just to see what is on those hard-drives, hoping to strike it lucky. These sort of stories are simply free advertising for them! I find that amusing. Here’s to the many more that are bound to come.

Forg

Super Secure IE8!?!

Just seen news that Microsoft will be making IE8 extra secure by making sure it won’t allow any Cross Site Scripting (XXS) attacks.

This attack has obviously been a big hole for websites for a good couple of months now and only FireFox’s No Script plug-in seemed to be a decent fix, until now, apparently.

“When the filter encounters a script that is hosted on a site other than the one being visited, a heuristics engine is started that inspects the URL and POST data of the requested page and uses regular expressions to identify possible XSS vulnerabilities. The filter scours the URL for suspicious characters such as script tags. When suspicious characters are found, the filter kicks into action by inspecting the HTTP code and generating a signature.”

This is all sounding nice and generous by MS but lets look at the bigger picture here. The attackers will know how this filter works and will no doubt, I’m sure, within a short space of time be able to create a work around. XXS is generally such a nice attack running script on websites attackers will work endlessly until they find their work around, and there will be one, this is microsoft! Once again everybody then will resort back to Firefox’s Plug-In and we all go back to remembering the best way to be secure is to simply not be on the internet! Or more favorably, not allow the vulneabilities to possibly exist.

From having a look around IE8 appears to try to address some other browsing vulnerabilities and esitmated with a November release. I admit it sounds a nice push by MS, IF and only IF it actual works! but seriously, they’ll never get closer to the attackers, they’ll keep ahead.

I think it’s also worth questioning how MS will get us to download IE8. Will it be released like Service Pack 3 and quite simply not tell a soul!!!! So many big updates are released fairly quietly, I think I stumbled across Firefox 3, but love it. So if they don’t push it at us, how will most people be able to use these security features. It’ll be interesting to see how it all pans out.

Forg