The Author – Bart Busschots
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Nov
23
TTT Part 24 of n – Ethernet & ARP
Filed Under System Administration, Computers & Tech on November 23, 2014 | 4 Comments
In the previous instalment we took a big-picture look at how TCP/IP networking works. As a quick reminder, the most important points were:
- Networking is complicated!
- Our computer networks use a stack of protocols known as TCP/IP
- We think of the stack of protocols as being broken into four layers:
- The Link Layer – lets computers that are on the same network send single packets of data to each other
- The Internet Layer – Lets computers on different networks send single packets of data to each other
- The Transport Layer – lets computers send meaningful streams of data between each other
- The Application Layer – where all the networked apps we use live
In this instalment we’ll take a quick look at the lowest of these four layers – the Link Layer. Specifically, we’ll look at MAC addresses, the difference between hubs, switches, and routers, and the ARP protocol.
Nov
10
XKPasswd.net Updated
Filed Under Security, Computers & Tech on November 10, 2014 | 10 Comments
After quiet a few months of work, I’ve just re-launched my secure memorable password generator – www.xkpasswd.net. The entire interface has been re-designed, and under the hood the site now uses version 2 of my XKPasswd.pm perl module.
The interface has been completely re-designed with an eye to making it easier to understand what the various configuration settings mean. The configuration is sections, and each section is headed by an English description of the current settings. You can read down through the headings to get a very good understanding of the configuration. Additionally, there is now a diagram showing the structure of the password that will be generated, and whether or not it will contain mixed case, digits, and symbols.
You can now generate multiple passwords at once, people often like to generate a few and choose one that speaks to them, so while not make that easier! Once passwords are generated, their strength, or Entropy, is reported, and colour-coded – green is good 🙂
I’ll be adding some more features over the next few months. I’ll mainly be focusing on adding more dictionaries, and allowing users to create their own custom dictionaries by mixing and matching separate word lists. What I have in mind is a set of base language dictionaries like English, and French, and so on, and then a selection of special dictionaries like place names, scientific terms, scifi characters and places, animals, fore names, and so on. I’m also planning to add the ability to store your own custom presets locally using HTML5’s local storage feature.
If you have any comments or suggestions, please do share them.
Nov
9
Why I’m No Longer Recommending FileZilla or SourceForge
Filed Under Computers & Tech, Software Development on November 9, 2014 | 2 Comments
I haven’t been a full-time Windows user in a long time, but I do have to use it from time-to-time, and I am often asked for recommendations for nerdier software like FTP clients by Windows users. For many years my stock answer was the same, if you’re on Windows and you need a free FTP client, get FileZilla. This week that advice bit me, and the person I gave it to, in the backside badly.
FileZilla’s project page directs people to a .exe installer hosted on SourceForge. Trusting that I would not recommend malicious software, the person who asked my advice downloaded the installer without reading the fine print and installed FileZilla – they got a lot more than they bargained for! That .exe installer did do what you would expect, and installed FileZilla, but it did more than that, it hijacked their browser and installed adware. Suddenly they were getting popups with ads telling them they could optimise their PC, and websites which don’t host ads suddenly started to contain ads!