Felipe Alvarez's blog

The hacks are troubling in that they appear to have rendered useless supposedly sophisticated Defense Department tools and procedures designed to prevent such breaches. The department and its branches spend millions of dollars each year on pricey security and antivirus software and employ legions of experts to deploy and manage the tools.

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Equally troubling is the fact that the hacks appear to have originated outside the United States. Turkey is known to harbor significant elements of the al-Qaida network. It was not clear if “m0sted” has links to the terrorist group.

Idiot newspaper.

Hushmail, a Canadian company providing email security using PGP, has released to the US government unencrypted email communications. This respresents a violation of users’ trust in the company. I had an account with them, I will delete all my mail, and close that account. I will only trust my own computer for safe email sending/receiving. No longer will I trust the ’security’ and ‘privacy’ of a third-party.

The DEA agents received three CDs which contained decrypted emails for the targets of the investigation that had been decrypted as part of a mutual legal assistance treaty between the United States and Canada.
The news will be embarrassing to the company, which has made much of its ability to ensure that emails are not read by the authorities.

Typically, when you ‘delete’ a file, you are only detaching the link from your filesystem to the actually binary data on the physical platters of your hard drive. The data aren’t really gone. The filesystem declares this space as ‘free’ or ‘available’, and so only goes away when that space is overwritten by new data.

If you’ve ever desire to truly delete a file, then download file shredder. It allows you you select and right click any file, and it automatically overrights them with random data, stuffs it full of zeros, and then deletes it. This prevents anyone from ever recovering that file with forensic software. Larger files take longer to shred, but are usually shredded in under 1 minute. If I coulf find the author’s email, I’d ask him/her to add a right-click to “shred all files in the recycle bin.”

We’ve been getting used to the public transit system here. We hopped onto the train at Geebung station and rode it all the way to Toowong station, where we got off. We headed to ProRentals, where were added some important letters of reference to our already-submitted applications.

RENATA TAKE NOTE. You were my previous landlord (only me), as was Kevin Turino.

We looked at another place yesterday at 72 Warren Street, St Lucia, only two blocks away from UQ (University of Queensland) where EV is going to study. She doesn’t need to take a bus to school. But I may have to take a bus to work, if I can find a job outside of St Lucia (like Toowong or something). If I find word in St Lucia, I may be able to walk or bicycle. I wonder if a small gas-powered scooter will be less money than a montly bus pass …

Well, we submitted the application to 72 Warren St, as well as one week deposit. If we change our minds, we lose the deposit, but we want to show we are seriuos about the place — which we are. So we gave them $185 for week 1, and submitted two letters of reference from previous landlords (Renata Moreno and Kevin Turino), as well as a supporting document from parents Rocio and Ruben, all of which will greatly help strengthen our application, and imporve our chances of getting into that room. $185/week isn’t bad. Divide by two and we only pay $92.5 per person/week. This will probably be paid fortnightly (every two weeks) via automatic payments from Chequing account.

In addition to finding places to live and work, I’ve been doing some (free) computer repairs. Because they are keeping me here for free, I thought I could contribute back for free. They have all been very nice to us. First was EV’s cousing Aaron. His notebook was crashing before even presenting a windows desktop. We loaded openSUSE LiveCD on it, and it brought us to a nice GUI with networking etc. We backed up his important pictures and music to my 500GB drive I bought in Canada just before leaving. To my surprise, there was a recovery partition on the drive, which allowed me to resinstall Windows XP Home to factory settings easily. Anti-virus, spybot S&D, spywareblaster, K-lite Codec Pack, firefox, CCleaner, Service Pack 3, windows updates — and she was good as new (long list!).

Then came Uncle John’s HP mini-note 2133 pre-installed with vista. Because of the VIA C7-M processor inside, vista ran slower than frozen molasses on the minute gravity of a small moon (meaning it was really slow). HP 2133 Guide was an invaluable resource to help me install Windows XP on the little netbook. Some “chinese” copies proved useless since they were all pre-SP2 which was an explicit pre-requisite. I dug out a copy from a binder I had brought with me, and it installed relatively easily after that. I am creating an install guide to help others in the future make the “upgrade” easier.