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Introducing BusKill: A Kill Cord for your Laptop
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My Search for The Best MP3 Player

I'm going on another cross-country cycling trip this summer, and I'm in the market for a good, solid MP3 player.

Disclaimer: I'm a software guy who likes my devices to be good quality and long lasting. I'm by no means an audiophile, hardware tech, or professional MP3 player reviewer. All of my research was done using Google, and the only MP3 player I've owned is the Sansa e260 v2.

Requirements

Note: These are my personal requirements. They effectively eliminated a *lot* of products in the MP3 market.

1. Rockbox Support

First and foremost, I need rockbox support. Rockbox is a must-have FOSS firmware for MP3 players with a fantastic feature list. You can buy an MP3 player with terrific hardware design, but your experience can be absolutely ruined by poorly designed firmware. My old Sansa e260 was this way, but once I installed rockbox, it was like the device was freed from a software prison. And, of course--another benefit of it being open source--you can completely customize the look+feel of your MP3 player with other user's custom rockbox themes.

Here is a list of MP3 players (targets) and their support status for the Rockbox firmware.

2. Rugged Components that
. . . → Read More: My Search for The Best MP3 Player

Iterative MITM Packet Sniffer

So, I got into a discussion with a friend of mine in my Computer Security class at UCF about this script. I'm posting this for historical and educational purposes only. As always, I never condone the implementation of any of my content for malicious intent. Moreover, this script has flaws that * would make it useless in such a scenario. Don't do it!

Here's a script I hacked up last semester when I was playing with MITM attacks and packet eavesdropping with ettercap:. This scripts will automatically:

fake its MAC Address get a new IP Address collect a list of hosts on the same subnet as itself iterate through and ARP poison: each of these hosts one at a time for 5 minutes each save all data collected in host-specific files in a timestamped directory repeat until the hard drive is full Michael Altfield

Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡

About Michael


. . . → Read More: Iterative MITM Packet Sniffer

Rockbox - Sansa e260v2

I bought a cheap, $30 refurbished MP3 player off of woot back in December '08: the
. . . → Read More: Rockbox - Sansa e260v2

Cheap PCI Sata Card - XWT-RC040

I recently setup a cheap terrabyte server with an old Dell 2450, 3 1TB Hitachi drives, and this cheap MnssCool XWT-RC040 4-port Sata 'high speed' PCI Controller Card.

The best thing about this card was that it was cheap. I got it for $30 off of newegg. The worst part was that it pretty much comes broken. You have to flash the bios to make it work well.

Michael Altfield

Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡

About Michael


. . . → Read More: Cheap PCI Sata Card - XWT-RC040

*Cheap*, Redundant, Multi-TB, Storage Solution

Storage is getting so cheap these days. So cheap, in fact, that multi-terabyte home servers are now economically feasible.

The emergence of cheap 1 terabye hard drives and ZFS perfectly compliment each other. Like others, I've embraced these two technologies to build myself a redundant, multi-TB disk array with 3x1TB drives running in a RAIDZ on OpenSolaris for about $300.

Michael Altfield

Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡

About Michael


. . . → Read More: *Cheap*, Redundant, Multi-TB, Storage Solution

Clone Xen RHEL5 (CentOS 5.2) VM

Hello world! I just updated my whole server environment and, my, things are looking good. Anyway, I had to run through these steps a half dozen times, so I thought I would post it here for myself and (maybe even) others.

Here's the commands I ran to turn a clone of my base RHEL5 (CentOS 5.2) Xen image into another working virtual machine on my RHEL5 (CentoOS 5.2) Xen Host:

Michael Altfield

Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡

About Michael

tech.michaelaltfield.net/

HP tx1000z dies--not suprisingly

Well, my HP tx1000z tablet laptop died today. Turns out that it's due to an overheating defective nvida GPU.

Michael Altfield

Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡

About Michael


. . . → Read More: HP tx1000z dies--not suprisingly

Resolved: OpenVPN

Jesus. It's only the second week of school and I've already pulled my first all-nighter. This time, however, it was not for school. I was determined to get my OpenVPN server properly setup so that I could finally browse the web securely from the dorms. I only expected this to take a few minutes, but I ended up spending over 7 hours of research, troubleshooting, and configuration changes.

This post will contain a slew of information about smoothwall, zerina, openvpn, and iptables. I'm mostly just going to throw all of my findings here without much of any logical flow.

Michael Altfield

Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡

About Michael


. . . → Read More: Resolved: OpenVPN

Smoothwall Update

A few weeks ago, I finally got around to downloading and installing 4 updates to my smoothwall box. Unlike Ubuntu upgrades, this process was farily painless except for one thing: my Zerina OpenVPN 'plugin' broke.

Michael Altfield

Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡

About Michael


. . . → Read More: Smoothwall Update

New Look!

Well, my old server died (I think the processor fried itself somehow). Due to school workload, I wasn't able to properly configure a new server until now, thereby this blog has been down for months (and, surprisingly, I've actually had people comment about it being down--mostly because they were unable to flame me, though *shrug*).

Anyway, I've finally got a new (actually, it's quite old) rack-mountable server (minus the rack) running FreeBSD as a replacement. Moreover, I've changed the theme, so this site had both a different software and hardware look!

Michael Altfield

Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡

About Michael

tech.michaelaltfield.net/