Bill Ryan's Other Blog

<p><!–adsense–></p>I was in Charleston earlier this week for my company’s orientation.  Got to admit, it was actually pretty cool.  I got to meet a ton of cool people including one of our vice presidents who’s a Pittsburgh native (and a CMU graduate at that).  I’ve been pretty busy but a few things of note…

I didn’t post a date for my Windows 7 Launch Party yet.  It’s next Saturday.  If you’re interested, I still have a few seats open and well, Microsoft has given me some quality swag.

My friend who works on the same team I do drives a 3 series BMW.  I was heartbroken to learn that b/c he’s very cool and as we know, cool people don’t drive BMWs .  Ok, I’ll give out a waiver for red convertible 3 series – everyone else sucks.  But he more than makes up for it with a vintage RX-7 Twin Turbo he keeps in his garage. It’s a true work of art and has been maintained meticulously.  And what’s even better is that he’s getting married , buying  a house and will be looking for extra money soon.   And I’ve got first dibbs on the RX7 Twin Turbo.

Speaking of Mazda RXs, I recently had some performance mods to mine.  I wanted to have some fun on the way home from Charleston so thanks to my Passport 8500 and my beloved RX-8, I was able to have quite a bit of it on the way home.  Top Speed was 138 and I was able to stay right above 100mph for most of the trip.  I made it from our Office on Daniel Island to my crib in Duncan in 2:35 which was pretty bad ass.  And yes, as always, I’ve got video which I’ll post on YouTube when I get a chance.  If you’ve ever gotten a speeding ticket, be proactive and get a Passport -  BTW, if you have a ticket and haven’t went to court yet and live in SC, please let me recommend Ray Lord. 

My Zune HD crapped out earlier this week. We have several Zune‘s in the family but only one HD for now.  It has been both really impressive and really frustrating – enough for another post.  Syncing the new one has been a lesson in EPIC Fail so far.

Debating buying some of those Buds Earphones from Dr Dre and Jimmy Iovine. 300.00 for headphones is  a bit steep (especially after I wasted almost that much on crappy Bose headphones – the most overrated things on earth).  If you have them already, I’d love to hear what you think.

Well, tonight we’re taking the girl and some of her friends to a haunted house in Gaffney. I forgot the name but we went last year and it was way cool.  I’m doing the family guy thing all weekend so not much more to report.

Oh yeah, ROUbot (Ryan. Omnipresent. Ubiquitous. BOT)  is up and running.  I’ll post the details tonight when we get back from the Haunted House.

As always, this post is for amusement only.  I rarely take myself seriously so you’re a fool if you decide to

This post and all others on this site are subject to the current Copyright as well as the Sites Terms of Use. Any reproduction, duplication or publication without express written permission from the author is strictly prohibited.

[tags]Passport 8500, Escort Radar Detectors,Attorney Ray Lord, Mazda RX-8, Mazda RX-7 Twin Turbo, Windows 7 Launch Party, Buds by Dr. Dre, ROUbot[/tags]<p><!–adsense–></p>

I just got back from Wal-Mart forgetting that today was Latin American Street Gang Appreciation Day there,  and sure as heck, I not only saw several MS 13 souljas staking out the joint, but I saw Senor Chingo Bling himself.  La Familia was there, so were Los Zetas.  They’ve each got a separate part of Walmart under their turf (can you believe Los Zetas got stuck with the Toddlers Clothing section, I would think that would be run by La Familia?  WTF) Greer just isnt’ what it used to be. When they noticed the Supreme All Knowing Counter Proliferation Mullah, they panicked and spread out like rats.  Nothing makes people tremble in their shoes than seeing a Counter Proliferation Expert show up.

As I walked in, one of the MS 13 members said “Hey cuzz, ain’t you teh one related to that Cop that got us arrested for following her around the parking lot last time? You know cuz, Dude looks like a lady , or lady lookin like a dude, ya dig?”  I simply replied, “You think I’m related to that Puta de mierda?  Are you f***** kidding me?  No cuzzz, I ain’t related to no one like that.  So anyway, is Chingo here? I wanted to see if I could get a copy of They can’t deport us all?”  He replied “You ain’t got me convinced, if you wuz real, you’d have said ‘You think I’m related to that Fea Puta de mierda”.  All I could say was “My bad – you got me there homie”  It’s hell only knowing Cuban Spanish – outside of Miami it does me little good.  Oh well, at least MS 13 didn’t have me whacked.  Guess I’ll be shopping at Target from now on.
This post and all others on this site are subject to the current Copyright as well as the Sites Terms of Use. Any reproduction, duplication or publication without express written permission from the author is strictly prohibited.
[tags]Transnational Gangs, Latin American street gangs, Drug Gangs, MS-13, La Familia, Los Zetas,  Counter Proliferation[/tags]

I’d like to thank my new internet friends from Greenville to tipping me off to this.  My EvilDevilCuckooBot totally missed it and he’s supposed to be looking for such things.  No Thai fud and Kratom for him tonight!  Well, the Bots are back, including my beloved EvilDevilCuckooBot. I’ve almost finished the ROUbot (Ryan Omniscient Ubiquitous Bot), the PrivicyBot and a new FemBot (hard to develop this one b/c my wife isn’t exactly a fan of FemBots)

 Hey, if I can control what appears on Google Adsense ads, I’m certainly powerful enough to find a profile, right?  Reading between the lines isn’t always easy, but it can be very enlightening.

This post and all others on this site are subject to the current Copyright as well as the Sites Terms of Use. Any reproduction, duplication or publication without express written permission from the author is strictly prohibited.

[tags]Bots, FemBots, ROUbot, EvilDevilCuckooBot[/tags]

The rest is history.  Having seen it in action, I must say it’s impressive (although I think there’s probably more appropriate words that I could use b/c impressive doesn’t have a nefarious connotation to it).  The only tricky part is getting it on the computer in the first place. If you own the computer, that’s no problem.  You can just install it directly or if it’s networked, push it down via an install script.  If you don’t have access to the computer, then you’re going to need someone that does.  If they can legitimately get on the computer, they can install the stuff for you.

After that you just need to sit back and enjoy being an agent of chaos – b/c that’s pretty much what this stuff enables you to become.  Imagine someone who’s not exactly friendly to you being able to see everything you did on your computer?  Yah, it might not be legal in a court of law, but they’d learn so much about you they could really cause you some misery. They’d know where the bodies were buried so even though they couldn’t directly use the results as evidence, they’d know what to subpeona and exactly where to find it. That alone could save you a boatload of money.

So after seeing this in use as well as several other spyware programs, what would I recommend to protect yourself from this?  That largely depends on how much security you need.  I’ll outline what you can do without crimping your style much for really sensitive information you want to ensure never is seen by anyone you don’t approve of.  You could conceivably do all of your internet surfing and emailing using this approach without interfering with your life too much, but it’s overkill. Moreoever, the goal is to not even let people know what you’re doing any of it.  So if they get on your computer and search it, they’ll find nothing  and go away. If they know you have all sorts of intense countermeasures, they’ll try a lot harder:

Virtual Machines and a USB drive are the key:

•  Encrypt the usb drive, recycle it frequently and guard the hell out of it in the interim.
•  Password protect it to with a password that you don’t use anywhere else (or anything close to it), that’s totally random and that’s strong.  Take great care to never reuse the password, not even parts of it [For instance, think of a book or newspaper you like.  Spell it backwards and take the first and last letters off of it.  Take the last 2 digits of your birth year and add 10 to it, and then do the same subtracting 5.  Add those to the front of the reversed name you just created and  the second number to the end.  This allows you to not have to remember the password, you just remember the algorithm used to generate it.  The more distant the words you use or the numbers you use are from you are, the better) .  Add special characters to the beginning, middle or end regularly and each time you log in from a machine that you have concerns about.  Even if a keystroke logger got your password, if you change it regularly they'd have little time to act on it. And to act on it, they'd have to get your USB drive, nail the right image and successfully log onto it.  Unless you're running from the mob  or the KGB - you'll be more than fine.  
• Don't log onto any untrusted networks with that image (you may want to keep a few images on that drive - one 'public' one so you can use free wifi and hop on unknown networks and one that's private which you use only on trusted networks.  Using this approach, just be damn sure that you keep anything that you don't want known out of the equation.  Drop your public one regularly and replace it with a copy. Copy/pasting is cheap and you can easily get a drive that'll hold a few images and still fit in your pocket) 
• Use a base image and make plenty of copies. 
•  Use Pocket Firefox and Tor (aka the Tor Bundle) - loaded in a USB drive or install them on the base image so that you can reuse them.
• If you're using a public email service, enable SSL/Https.  Yes, this will slow things down ever so slightly but it's worth the minor hassle in most cases.
• For really sensitive material - make sure you encrypt your files (PGP works great) and don't leave the plaintext originals anywhere.  If you really want to be cool you can use Steganography.
• Wipe your internet files regularly.  Delete all the content that's collected.  This will be a slight inconvenience when you log into sites you go to a lot, but you'd be amazed at how much information can be gathered just by looking at someone's history and temp files (and this in particular is something I see done all the time.  I had a coworker who loved to go through fellow coworkers temporary internet files if they ever left their notebooks unlocked.  He'd frequently come across Pr0n or similar stuff.
• Consider a 3M Privacy Filter [I was astounded at how many people were annoyed by me using a Privacy Filter when I first got it.  I had a good friend/coworker who openly admitted that if your email was up on the screen, he was reading it.  He'd say "I'm a nosey bastard - I can't help it.  I don't mean any harm and I don't ever talk about what I see, but when I see email up, I'm reading it".  So I got one just to screw with him.  Shortly afterward I heard person after person say "I can't see anything on your screen."  Then I'd show them the filter and responses were either "Cool, where can I get one" or "WTF man, why would you put that on your machine."  Needless to say, they work splendidly and if you're subtle about it, most people won't even know what it is)
• MOST IMPORTANTLY.  Don't talk about it. Don't tell people "I use Tor and Pocket Firefox".  Don't brag about how kick a55 your security procedures are.  Shut up about it totally and to the best of your ability, don't let anyone see what you're doing.  I mainly work out of a Virtual Machine shell anyway b/c of all the different configurations I need. If I didn't tell anyone, most people would have no idea I was using a VM just by walking by.

Run through those and mix and match until you strike a balance between your security comfort level and convenience threshold.  That'll protect you from pretty much any software based snooping other than a keystroke logger (although to be effective, the logger would have to be a darned goood on and already be on the machine you'ure typing on) and it'll severely limit what they can collect on you if they did somehow get spyware or a logger on your imaged drives. 

I live a very dull life and don't have much of interest on my machines.  I encrypt all my senstive stuff just b/c it's a habit. Back in college I thought it was cool to PGP everything and I just kept the habit afterward.  The Virtual Machine approach has many benefits (only downside is needing a little extra disk space - which is cheap these days - and it eats RAM).  It keeps you isolated so that if you do get spyware or a virus on your machine, the attack vector is small.  If you install beta software, you can keep it from screwing up your machine.  You can also start off with a clean machine each time you want to try something new. This is very helpful for debugging.  You can have several different operating systems and service pack levels, so you can thoroughly test your software on each configuation a client might have.  There's a trillion other reasons too. I'm not trying to sell you on virtualization just making the point that there's a lot of upside to using it.

I'm currently under contract to write a series of  articles on safe computing and online privacy.  In prepping for it, I've run through and done all of the things I mention above and they aren't hard to do.

This post and all others on this site are subject to the current Copyright as well as the Sites Terms of Use. Any reproduction, duplication or publication without express written permission from the author is strictly prohibited.

[tags]Spyware, Malware, Encryption, PGP, Internet Security, eblaster.com, Secure Email, Pocket Firefox, Tor, Microsoft Virtual PC, Hyper V[/tags]