Walter Soldierer’s Blog

Wir hatten uns vor Monaten entschlossen, den alten 1&1 Vertrag auf DSL 6000 zu erhöhen, auch wenn man dafür auf dem platten Land mit 5 Euro mtl. Zusatzkosten bestraft wird. Jetzt habe ich endlich die Zeit gefunden, meine neue FRITZ!Box Fon WLAN 7270 zu installieren. DSL 6000 funktioniert noch nicht 100%. Anscheinend wird die Bandbreite auf 3456 kBit/s gedrosselt. Ich habe den 1&1 support gebeten, das zu korrigieren. Die FRITZ!Box hängt im Netzwerkschrank im Keller.  Tolles Gerät mit vielen features. Endlich haben wir den beiden großen Kindern auch ihre eigenen Rufnummern und DECT Telefone verpasst. Kein stundenlanges Blockieren der Leitung mehr. (more…)

Whenever I take a look at our web server log files, I am amazed how many robots are trying to hack their way into our machines every day. And whenever I help a friend or neighbor to fix a computer problem, I need to explain even the most essential safety measures as most PCs are infected with some trojan or virus already. Computer and network security is a big issue, don’t underestimate the risks. I first noticed this years ago when I installed a free personal firewall on my PC. Only seconds after the program started to do its job, it alerted me of suspicious activity on ports and protocols that I even didn’t know existed. Steve Gibson calls this activity Internet Background Radiation. Much of this is not merely junk but malicious traffic. To protect my personal computers, data, and privacy, I have taken a number of simple security measures which I want to share with you. (more…)

In an effort to meet accessibility requirements, I was looking for tools to check whether users with a variety of color blindness conditions can actually use our websites. Posters and brochures can already be difficult to read for color blind people. On web sites another dimension is added to this problem because certain features may be rendered useless by choosing a bad color palette. Colored links for example, if not underlined, may not be seen as links because they appear to be of the same color as all other text.

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I am a PGP user since 1996 and I still use Ståle Schumacher’s international DOS version 2.63i to encrypt files on my USB flash drives. All I need is PGP’s small exectutable file (pgp.exe, 237.737 kb). On first use, PGP will create a second small file that contains some random seed data for the encryption. With this minimal setup, PGP will warn you about a missing configuration file, but this does not affect the strength of encryption. The USB drive on my key ring contains an encrypted passwords file and pgp.exe, providing easy access to the many cryptic passwords I use. All I need is one strong master pass phrase to decrypt the file and get instant access to more passwords than I could ever remember.

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If a mobile device provides a good browsing experience, users will use it to access the web. This statement is clearly supported by Net Applications’ operating system market share data for devices accessing the web in February 2008. Apple’s iPhone outperformed Windows mobile (CE) devices more than 2 times. This is particularly impressive because only about 4 million iPhones compete with 20 million Windows CE devices. In addition there are hundreds of millions of Nokia phones, for which the market share (Series60 OS) is reported to be only 1/7 of the iPhone figure. In other words, 4 million iPhones access the web almost 2 times more often than all Windows mobile and Nokia devices together. (more…)

All data on my laptop’s hard drive is encrypted. If the machine gets stolen, no one will be able to boot the operating system without entering the correct pass phrase beforehand. Nothing on the drive looks like a file of has any readable information. My letters, photos, and all other private information are no more than an cryptic stream of random bytes.

I also set up encrypted hard disk drives for private data on my desktop machines at home. I once had to send a defective hard disk back to the manufacturer for repair. A nosy mechanic would not have found anything other than a boring C: drive with Windows XP and some programs on it.

On the USB mass-storage device that I always carry on my key ring at least one file is encrypted. It contains many different login passwords and other secret information that I need to have access to no matter where I am.

Great free software is available to encrypt entire hard disks, partitions, folders, files, and emails. This is the first post of an encryption series that will explain what software I use on my Windows XP machines. The programs I use are available for Linux and Macintosh computers, too. And they are all open source which to me is the most important reason for not using commercial software for encryption. I trust that many cryptographers have already inspected the code to make sure that it does not contain any weaknesses or backdoors.

Free encryption software (2): File encryption on USB flash drives
Free encryption software (3): Hard disc encryption
Free encryption software (4): GNU Privacy Guard