aRts is the old KDE Sound daemon which appeared around Version 2.0 of the KDE. Its purpose was mixing multiple music channels in real time – in other words playing a beep sound while playing music and so on as the common soundcard wasn’t able to do this. Later on hardware and drivers moved on and the main […]
Cracking passwords – status report
Fifty days have passed since John The Ripper started cracking on the password file. As you can see, not even one password was guessed by now: guesses: 0 time: 50:06:35:40 c/s: 972 trying: ns4k7y Regarding my password policy, which is changing my passwords every month, our attacker would have lost already. I’ll proceed with the cracking for a […]
Verify files using MD5
How can you verify the integrity of some files as simple as possible? How can you check for manipulations or transmission failures? The question is answered quite simple: Checksums. One of the most common checksum techniques out there is MD5 which stands for Message Digest Version 5. The fine thing about md5 is, that it’s just a checksum […]
Login with the USB stick
That I am lazy if it comes to typing much shouldn’t be a secret by now, but mentioning it here might be wrong too – but it was the main cause for doing some research for an alternative login method. Fingerprints may sound fun, but if it comes to security or if you need to pass on the […]
Microsoft Key-Changer
No, this is not a mistake: Microsoft offers a small tool for changing the product key of windows xp or vista. Ok, they call it ‘updating the product key’, but that’s just a different word for it. In general, I like the idea. The impact: More and more computers come preinstalled, having a recovery cd which is more […]
You know you’re a geek…
…if your first thaught at knocking over your drink is Ctrl + Z (Keyboard shortcut for “undo”)