It’s 11pm on Sunday night and I’m finally winding down my weekend. And the weekend began with the 4th of July on Wednesday! I had a few people over, barbequed, and then walked down to GasWorks Park, one of the most popular places to watch fireworks in Seattle. A couple people were stuck at my place afterwards, so after a couple games of pool we moved on a game of Scrabble that lasted until the wee hours of the morning.

I got a call from all my old friends back in Chicago that were having a little reunion of people from where we all first worked and met. It was great to hear them all and I wish could have been there. I definitely miss them all like crazy. I relaxed Friday night (oh wait, no I didn’t…hehe) and woke up early Friday morning for a hike down to Reflection Lake by Mt. Rainier. It was a beautiful day with the sun shining bright except for a brief moment when we passed through Tacoma and the sky turned grey…weird. It was a great hike, a total of 8.12 miles, which you can see below:

Upon returning to Seattle, we promptly cleaned up and went and got some spicy tots(!) at a local dive bar. We tried to wind down the night by watching a movie but I’m pretty sure we all passed out on the couch after ten(?) minutes. I can’t say for sure because I was toast after five, hehe.

Sunday was another great day, but I had to spend most of it reorganizing my computers in the basement. Unfortunately, one of them died during the move. :-( Bummer. I also wandered around the Fremont Sunday Market for a good couple hours. It was such a nice day, I just didn’t want to go back to the basement…but it had to be done.

Finally, I ended my weekend with a soccer game. I played goalie tonight since our normal one couldn’t make it. I only let in two goals and our team tooke care of the rest scoring four to give us the win!

And now, a few things left to do (like shower!) before I crash and start a new week.

Interesting ports on 192.168.x.y: PORT STATE SERVICE VERSION 41425/tcp filtered unknown 62078/tcp open unknown

Hrm, what could this mystery port be?

w00t

More later! :-)

I came across an article yesterday about blocking spam with Postfix using blackhole lists. This is something that I haven’t previously set up and I get a decent amount of spam, so I figured it couldn’t hurt. I followed the directions and in the past day and a half that’s in been in place, over 700 spam emails have gotten blocked…not too shabby! :) 173 still got through, so that’s a pretty darn good ratio in my opinion.

I just saw a post about some of the browser capabilities of the new iPhone, and there was one feature that caught my eye:

- new telephone links allows you to integrate phone calls directly from your webpage. remember this is only on safari.

The first thing I thought of was, “Wow, I hope that you can’t somehow execute those links automatically via JavaScript…”. Can you imagine if you browse to a page and your iPhone automatically dials the number of an attacker and listens in on a conversation you might be having? Combine an XSS vulnerability on a high-profile website and a couple of high-profile CEO’s that we know have an iPhone and you could get some pretty interesting dirt!

That would be kind of bad…

Update: Hehe, see.

One of my cousins and her husband were passing through Seattle today, and I was lucky enough to have the chance to meet up with them for lunch at Pike Place Market. We chose to eat at the Athenian Inn, which is where Tom Hanks ate during one of the scenes from Sleepless in Seattle. It was a cool place and I sat at the same stool he did for a moment. I ordered an open-faced Dungeness Crab Sandwich with melted cheese on top. There were nice big chunks of crab in the sandwich and it was oh-so-delicious.

It was awesome to see my cousin though and after a brief show from the fisherman at the market, we unfortunately had to part ways. I made my standard recommendation to out-of-towners to visit the Fremont Troll, which I hope they were able to do. Thanks for giving me a call!

It’s been quite the crazy week that continued right into the weekend as well. I was in Dallas, TX this past week for work and had a great time down there. Unfortunately, I checked my luggage for the first time in a while since my co-worker was, and of course the airline lost it. Thankfully it did come in the next day, but not until after I had already left for the client. I would have to say the best part was the food, particularly a lovely BBQ joint called Bone Daddy’s that had a population of about 92% male patrons during lunch…it’s Texas, I’ll let you figure out the rest. ;-)

I also bought a PSP while in Dallas, spurred on by the fact that my co-worker had one and it’s a pretty great little device. I just wish the games weren’t so expensive so I could get some more.

I returned Friday night, promptly passing out as I knew Saturday was going to be a long day. I awoke relatively early and cleaned up my place in prepartation for a BBQ later that evening. Before that, though, I had a picnic to attend for my dance studio. It was a great time with some volleyball and ultimate frisbee, with the pleasing absence of the “pieing incident” that occured last year that lost me a shirt to my garbage can. Then it was directly off to my championship soccer game, which we unfortunately lost, 3-2. But not to worry, a rainy BBQ was to follow where most members of the team met up at my place for a wonderful evening of a few beers, some great burgers, and a whole evening of getting to know each other better.

Today, Sunday…I am doing absolutely nothing except wishing my Father a Happy Father’s Day. Without him, I would not be where I am today - one of the most valuable things I learned from him was a good, hard work ethic. Without that, I wouldn’t be sitting comfortably in my great home right now. So for that simple little thing, thanks Dad!

Awesome - just when I solve the issue of VMWare breaking nmap on OS X, Parallels comes along and does it again. The error is slightly different, however, so the root cause of the problem is likely somewhat different as well.

Starting Nmap 4.20 ( http://insecure.org ) at 2007-06-14 15:07 CDT getinterfaces: Failed to obtain MAC address for ethernet interface (fw0) QUITTING!

Thus far, I’ve tried disabling the fw0, en2 and en3 interfaces, with no luck. If I bring down fw0, though (sudo ifconfig fw0 down), I get a different error message similar to the VMWare one.

Starting Nmap 4.20 ( http://insecure.org ) at 2007-06-14 15:11 CDT getinterfaces: Failed to open ethernet interface (fw0). A possible cause on BSD operating systems is running out of BPF devices (see http://seclists.org/lists/nmap-dev/2006/Jan-Mar/0014.html). QUITTING!

It seems there’s been a similar problem with Cisco’s VPN software, but the suggested remediation doesn’t work for nmap. I filed a bug report, as I’m sure many others have, so hopefully it will be addressed in a recent update. If I come across a solution, I’ll update this entry…but until then, the only way I can use nmap is by uninstalling Parallels.

Update! After some more detailed information from the Parallels Team, I discovered a way to run nmap successfully. I thought I had tried this approach before, but apparently not. Removing the interface with a <strong>sudo ifconfig fw0 remove</strong> prior to executing nmap seems to allow nmap to run successfully. I seem to have to do this every time as an ip address gets re-assigned to the interface, but it does appear to work!

Update (07/26/2007) The most recent build of Parallels (4560) appears to have fixed the issue metioned above, but another one has manifested itself. Scanning a specific host was able to complete succesfully, but when scanning a network where dead hosts existed would result in a nexthost: failed to determine route error. Specifying the proper interface using the -e parameter seems to address the issue.

So I’ve seen some recent “news” about the ability to “crack” any Windows system using the Vista recovery cd. I ignored it a couple times, but then I saw a post about it on F-Secure’s blog. And I just have to sigh in exasperation. Surprise - if you have physical access to a machine, you can read the hard drive! I realize that Mr. Rousku is trying to point out that the Vista recovery CD makes this super easy…but honestly, there are other easy methods to do this. How about a Knoppix boot CD? Is that not easy? Is a GUI browser like Konquerer more difficult to use to navigate a hard drive than the DOS command prompt? How about physically removing the drive and putting it in an external USB enclosure. OK, sure, it requires the use of a screwdriver and an extra piece of hardward, but anybody that’s going to be able to navigate a disk using standard DOS commands will probably be able to manage the necessary mechanical skills necessary to remove a hard drive. I mean come on people, seriously. You’re making a big deal out of a “recovery tool”. Out of functionality that is required for recovery and can be achieved using any number of CD’s or previous Windows/MS-DOS boot disks that have been out there since I’ve been a toddler. Why is this such an issue?? Seriously, if Microsoft “fixed” this issue, I could simply download an MS-DOS boot disk and boot to a command prompt and have instant command line access as well. I’m repeating myself, so allow me to quickly rehash his assumptions:

Most computers which use Microsoft Windows OS are vulnerable to local penetration, if a cracker has full access to computer’s hard disk and knows how to use Vista Installation-DVD System Recovery functions.

Sir - ANY computer is vulnerable to local penetration if a cracker has full access to the computer’s hard disk.

As a security expert, I believe this is a major security risk found in Microsoft OS.

Again, this is not a Microsoft OS problem - this is simply a risk of having physical access to ANY device with ANY operating system.

Even before Vista, different methods were available for attacking Windows OS security, t.ex. using programs which could be downloaded from the internet. However, these methods have been either difficult to use or too demanding for normal users.

So, booting to an MS-DOS boot disk is more difficult than booting from a Vista boot disk? Knoppix is difficult to use? I’m sorry, I don’t see how navigating through five different menus is more difficult than putting a floppy in and being dropped to a command prompt.

Vista Installation-DVD enables anyone to crack Windows OS easily in minutes.

This isn’t “cracking”. This allows somebody with enough knowledge to navigate around a command prompt and use other common tools you mention are too difficult to use to take advantage of having physical access to a device. I could re-install the OS and not overwrite the drive and similarly have administrative access over the previous files.

I’m sorry, I just don’t think this is as big a risk as it’s being made out to be. Could Microsoft password protect the recovery tool? Sure…but…I don’t see what good it’s going to do, not to mention it would make “recovery” rather difficult. And honestly, what’s the benefit?? And to counter another point regarding free encryption software, allow me to quote MS Knowledge Base Article 223316: “The Microsoft Windows operating systems (2000/2003 and XP) include the ability to encrypt data directly on volumes that use the NTFS file system so that no other user can access your data.” Yes, I realize it’s not full disk encryption, but an option exists. And as you mentioned, Microsoft is moving to making full-disk encryption readily available - these changes don’t happen overnight. And let me also mention that you don’t have SYSTEM-level access as you say, despite the ability to change ownership, which may be very well based on who the original owner of that file was not the file-system permissions that are in place on that file.

I’m done here - I can’t rant anymore. I’m tired of people continually bashing Microsoft. ANY computer in the world with ANY operating system has this issue. I probably should have formulated a well-thought out rebuttal, but seriously…this just frustrates me.

I have two types of saline that I use, one of which contains 3% Hydrogen Peroxide. Just the other day, I was thinking to myself “Wow, it would suck if somebody ever got these mixed up”. You guessed it, I did! And boy did it hurt when I put that contact in my eye. I can only hope that is the culmination of what has proven to be a very long month. Between that, some laptop “technical difficulties”, and the all-consuming housing search, I haven’t had much time to live my life this past month. But I’m back now! And I’m hungry, so I’m going to cut this post short with the news that my landlords are not asking me to move out anymore!! I don’t have to move!! There is definitely some good housing karma going around. :-)