Computers and Tech

pfSense > Sophos UTM

I tried out Sophos UTM as an experiment for work today. I learned something about the product: as much as I wanted to like it (and there were a number of good features to like), it’s moniker for “Home Users” was very poorly placed. Sophos UTM’s default configuration is like a Republican congress with a Democratic president – the land of ‘no’. After spending nearly two hours with it, I could not get it to let any real nonstandard traffic out the door. HTTP worked fine, but remote desktop on a nonstandard port? Nope. Getting the new replies in misc.legal.moderated using Agent? Nope. Syncing my phone with my NAS? All aboard the Nope train to Nopeville! It didn’t matter what rule I put into that thing, that traffic was NOT happening. I never thought there would be a software-based firewall that would make me pine for a SonicWall, but a ‘deny any any’ rule in a default config for outbound traffic? Not fun.

pfSense? From CD to working default config in 20 minutes. I can be okay with this. I’m also looking forward to seeing what happens with my transparent proxy; hopefully it will speed up load times on my poky DSL line.

December 21, 2015 by Computers and Tech Microblog 0

Products vs Protocols

I was thinking today about the tech industry and its trends. More and more, I see attempts to make a ‘vertical market’, which I’m certain is recommended in management and marketing school. Unfortunately, vertical markets are incredibly profitable – Apple/iOS, Facebook, Oracle…If you can make everyone dependent on exclusively your product, your company makes more money than the other companies doing the same.

The problem is that these things only last as long as they are profitable. There was no meaningful way of accessing Myspace messages aside from Myspace, so any messages sent on that platform are probably gone now. If you had any music that used PlaysForSure or got stuck with a Sony music player that used SonicStage, I’m guessing that you too had a pretty bad day a few years ago; my apologies for drudging up the bad memories. The stories that sound like this go on and on, in a near cyclical format, throughout computer history.

Protocols, on the other hand, are a different matter altogether. They’re generally not terribly profitable for anyone who makes them (unless there’s some sort of licensing system in place), but protocols tend to stand the test of time much better. The roots of HTTP go back to 1991 – HTTP is the protocol that allows you to be reading this blog right now. Also happily powering this blog, though not a protocol in the strictest sense, is SQL, which is the database language standard that powers the back end of this site. SSH allows me to do some back end management, and was first released in 1995. SMTP, the protocol that allows e-mail to work, hit the streets in 1982, and no matter how much Google tries to kill it with fire, Gmail still ultimately uses the 30 year old protocol. MIDI, the protocol that allows some of my DJ gear to work, and a number of live musicians to change their keyboard sounds in real-time using their laptop, was first standardized in 1983. If you’ve been to a theatrical performance with any lights that moved, you’ve seen the result of DMX512, the protocol that allows the lighting guy to control the lights, and introduced to the world in 1990. 802.11 has been through a few revisions (b, a, g, a few flavors of ‘n’, and a few flavors of ‘ac’), but that protocol is better known by its common name of “Wi-Fi”, that allows your Netgear router to talk to your Apple iPhone, your Dell laptop, and your Samsung TV.

Designing a protocol isn’t terribly sexy, and isn’t terribly profitable, but without protocols being developed, we see the problems of incompatibility between vertical market vendors prevent users from using the products that meet their requirements best. It’s not in the user’s best interest. Unfortunately though, we live in a world where ‘facilitating end users to do what they need to do” is a solid secondary-at-best consideration in comparison to the need for the customer to be locked into the products.

And this is why all the nice things are results of the 80’s and 90’s.

November 23, 2015 by Computers and Tech Philosophy and Faith 2

What is liberty worth?

One of these days, I do hope to write a full-fledged article on the topic. Until then, I must simply pose the question in a very concise manner.

From my perspective, it looks like the world we live in values three things above all else: safety, convenience, and celebrity. Between “safe” and “rewarding”, we usually choose ‘safe’. Between “convenient” and “controllable”, we usually choose ‘convenient’. Between “famous” and “altruistic”, we follow the famous.

Is there no value in having full control over what we purchase? If we were, Volkswagen would have been able to fudge the numbers on their emissions tests. Chrysler vehicles wouldn’t have needed a recall over a software hack that would enable the vehicle to be remotely commandeered. Our phones wouldn’t receive ads based on the products we’re standing next to. We wouldn’t be worried about FitBit devices losing data or selling it. Smart TVs wouldn’t require tracking of viewing habits in order for the Netflix and Youtube clients to work.

Presently, my blog has about five readers, if that (aside from the Russian bots who attempt to turn this blog into a malware-serving zombie). None of them have rooted phones, and only one has a rooted tablet (and she hasn’t the foggiest idea how to leverage it). Some argue that giving users complete, low level access to their devices is asking for trouble, and 30+ years of computer viruses are certainly highly compelling evidence to support that claim. Here is my counterargument: Every computing device – every smartphone, every tablet, every laptop, every desktop, every server – every one of them has a root password. Every one of them has a set of credentials that the device will recognize as the signal to unquestioningly obey every command given to that device. Someone, somewhere, has those credentials. If the owner has those credentials, they not only have the ability to use them personally, but to allow a known, trusted person to do so. When a device owner doesn’t have those keys, and somebody else does (be it Google, LG, Apple, Verizon, Chrysler, or whoever else), then it is up to that person, not the device owner, who can and cannot access the device’s software and information. Then again, some argue that the person who has root access is the real owner of the device…and I can’t say I disagree.

I posed the question regarding what liberty is worth. Famously, Patrick Henry and Nathan Hale believed that liberty was more important than life itself. Would we, as a society, be willing to make a choice to avoid devices to which we cannot acquire complete access and ownership? Is liberty worth that? Is liberty worth having to spend a little time ensuring that data lives only on one’s own devices? Is it worth reading privacy policies? Is it worth convenience, or perhaps paying a bit more for our groceries? Is it worth a warranty on your phone? Is it worth an afternoon researching these matters instead of what the Kardashians are up to?

Some days, I feel that I am alone in my concern for these matters.

November 11, 2015 by Computers and Tech Philosophy and Faith 1

VMTurbo: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is

Saw an ad for VMTurbo, which promised monitoring for Virtual Machines in an environment. I missed the fine print that indicated that it required vCenter, so it doesn’t work on ESXi.

“Free VM Monitoring” is prominently displayed on the front page. “Doesn’t work with ESXi” is on a forum post that requires a Google search.

If I’m spending money on the virtual environment I’m building, I’m spending it on Veeam.

November 2, 2015 by Computers and Tech Microblog 0

More RAM

Though misattributed to Bill Gates, in the mid-1980’s it was stated that “640k of RAM should be enough for anybody”. The first new home computer my dad got came with 16MB of RAM, which was later upgraded to 48. My first three laptops all had 192MB of RAM; I edited many a video on them. My first new laptop had 512MB of RAM, back in 2004. I got 2GB in the next one, then 4, then 6 (later upgraded to 12), and now I’m at 16GB of RAM, eyeballing a bit of a bump, because five copies of Windows at a time tends to run a bit sluggish when I’m doing virtualization.

Times change.

October 12, 2015 by Computers and Tech Microblog 1

That time when “Making a Slide Show” involved the phrase “Open Powershell…”

If you don’t know what PowerShell is, you probably don’t need it, and never will.  But, I’m me.

I take you back to 2006. George W. Bush was halfway done doubling down in the White House, My Nissan Xterra was rolling off an assembly line, I was still in college, Netflix still mailed DVDs, Daniel Powter’s “Bad Day” was earning him bank, along with Shakira’s apparently-honest hips. The iPhone was a mere rumor, Myspace was still the de facto social network, and everyone’s computer was running Windows XP…unless you were too cool for school and were either running a beta copy of Windows Vista or still riding on Windows 2000. It was in this year that Microsoft said, “Y’know what we need? A new way to administer a server on a command line!” “Great idea, Frank! Bonuses all around!” And thus, PowerShell was born.

The particular command run in PowerShell was:

for f in *; do ext=$(echo "$f" | sed 's|\([^.]*\)||'); mv "$f" "$(uuidgen)$ext"; done

What does that do? It allows me to randomly name all of the photos in a folder. This way, images are sufficiently shuffled in a slide show that I’m presently amidst producing.

…Because that is the exact use case that Microsoft had in mind when they made it…right?

August 14, 2015 by Computers and Tech Microblog 0

Most secure Windows yet – thanks, Israel!

http://www.businessinsider.com/expert-builds-secure-version-of-windows-2015-8?r=UK&IR=T

The security of memory randomization is nothing new. However, elements of this system were added to standard varieties of Windows since Vista, so it’s not an unknown technique. I’d most certainly run Israeli Windows, given half a chance, but I see a handful of problems. First, our friend Backwards Compatibility. Want your older versions of your programs to work? They may not fare well with randomized memory. Even modern applications aren’t guaranteed to work properly with randomized memory. Next, memory randomization is all well and good if you’re sure you’ve got access to the bare metal, something that Blue Pill and other virtualization-based rootkits make challenging to confirm. We also need to discuss the concept of being “secure” in this context. Most people have a “do what I mean” mentality when it comes to using a computer, which is perfectly reasonable. However, computers themselves run on a “do what I say” ideology. Memory randomization isn’t going to help prevent ad-serving software that was “opted in by the user, pinky promise…”, which most people tend not to want running on their computers.

Finally, there’s the question of what Microsoft’s response to this is. In software development circles, “randomize your memory” is somewhat similar to “use a 15-character password that uses letters, numbers, capitalization, and symbols, and use a different one for every website, and don’t write them anywhere, just remember them all.” A great idea for people who don’t have annoying things like “deadlines” and “imperfect memory” and “actual work to do”. Microsoft is clearly aware that it is a more secure method of writing software, so the fact that this guy was able to do it is not like someone at Microsoft said, “hark! nobody has ever thought of this before!!”. On the contrary, Microsoft’s own software development environment has had this since 2008. If this guy made it work in such a way that doesn’t cause compatibility or stability issues, then he may well have something. The more concerning thing, especially for Microsoft, is that either he accomplished this without the source code to Windows, or he, in fact, has the source code. Either way, Business Insider is accurate in that Microsoft is very likely to have their eye on him.

Either way, if this ever gets released, and it’s actually compatible with the software I use, I’m most certainly in favor of using this over the usual stuff that comes out of Redmond.

 

August 6, 2015 by Computers and Tech 0
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