Iron Wil

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has released a program that allows you to check if your ISP is using anti-P2P filtering software. Vnunet published the story here get the tool here.

Are your downloads getting filtered and kicked?

iron wil

Congrats to Morgan Webb and her team at Webb Alert, they have hit the 1 year mark [August 2nd technically].

I have to admit that since day 1 I have looked forward to their morning news.

iron wil

This How-To will show you how to set up a Volume on a Flash Drive. I will publish a PDF this weekend that will include this post and the TrueCrypt Container post. Open the application and click create volume. Next select Create a volume within a non-system partition/device.

Next select Standard TrueCrypt Volume.

You need to now select the device you want to encrypt.

You then get a warning about creating an encrypted volume.

You will now see confirmation that your volume has been selected.

Select your encryption.

You will be shown information about the device’s size.

Next you need to give your volume a password.

You will be given a warning about password strength at this point.

The next step is to format the device.

TrueCrypt will tell you the Flash drive will be formatted.

When TrueCrypt is finished it will you will get a notice telling you that the device will mount twice. Once via the OS and then after you mount it with TrueCrypt.

Your Volume has been created and is ready to use. You will need to mount it at this point to access it.

Once you have mounted the drive it will show up in My Computer or on the Desktop for Mac Users.

You can format the volume from the Disk Utility or Windows format tool.

iron wil

A friend came to me this week wanting to know the difference between a TrueCrypt Container and a Volume.

This How-To will show you how to set up a Container. I will publish a PDF this weekend that will include this post and the TrueCrypt Volume post that will follow shortly.

Let’s begin. First download and install TrueCrypt from here.

Now you will launch TrueCrypt and select Create Volume.

This is a bit misleading because this is how you will create both container and volume. Next you will need to choose Create a File Container.

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Dwight Silverman over at the Houston Chronicle posted a nice little story about malware moving to Macs. I have to admit that he makes a few good points. One point I disagree with is, “many of the people who are now using Macs are people who don’t learn from their mistakes”. 2 of the 3 switchers that I know are all well aware of malware in it’s many forms; and the 3rd probably will have her husband install any software she needs.

I also know that this is 1 of 2 ‘wild’ malware programs on the net; while there are hundreds of thousands for Windows. Just based on the odds, OS X is in less danger than XP or Vista of getting hacked. Yes, it is true that as Apple market share grows so will the number of viruses, spyware, and trojans for OS X.

With this in mind, we also need to remember that Apple has released it’s Leopard Security Guide and has announced that Snow Leopard will focus on increasing the security in OS X.

No software is perfect, in fact, according to Steve Gibson from GRC.com and Security Now, “code wants to be wrong”.

The War is coming to OS X, but we can be prepared and educated.

iron wil

I recenlty refered a friend to DBAN because she needed to clean an old hard drive and reinstall Windows. In making this recommendation, I needed to check through my site and realized that i had not posted this before.

I have used DBAN and find it to be a very useful disk, I keep one in my tool [CD] case.

get your here.

iron wil

WOW, and I don’t mean the game.

Can I say wow again? I just got home from watching ‘The Dark Knight‘. I have to give you some background at this point. When I was about 12 or 13 my father introduced me to the comic books that he was reading, which happened to be Ironman and Superman. I quickly found that I liked other characters.

I landed squarely on Batman and I hit that spot hard. I became a huge fan and started reading every Batman comic book printed every month. He became an ideal, a dream, and Hero. In some ways, I grew up with him.

I was very critical of the 4 Batman movies made with Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer, and George Clooney. None of them lived up to the Dark Knight of the comics. Michael Keaton came close with his grim approach and so they are okay. The last 2 don’t exist - at all.

Batman Begins was a great start and addition to the Batman of my youth. The Dark Knight continues that story and really shows the non-fanboy the true face of Joker. No offense to Jack Nicholson; but he just wasn’t it. My wife was creaped out by Heath Ledger’s performance. I have to say that I was very impressed.

I give it 5 Stars.

iron wil

p.s. Batman: Gotham Knight, you need it.

p.p.s. - one of my poems.