Fred Avolio's Musings

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Tue, 04 Jul 2006
The Missing Manual

David Pogue's Mac OS, The Missing Manual: Tiger Edition, is an interesting, enjoyable, and useful read. At 845 pages, it might not cover everything one needs to know about the latest Mac OS, but it filled in the gaps for this new Mac user.

One might have done through this book with computer on lap. I did not. I read it a bit at a time, and dog-eared pages that I thought were of special interest. Then I went back, with computer on lap, trying the things he suggested.

I like Pogue's style and the book, more than a manual, held my interest. Buy it, enjoy it. You can get it from O'Reilly, but if you order from Amazon, below, I get a few cents.

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Laptops and PII Losses (UPDATED)

This has been a bad summer, so far, for laptop loss. In January 2005, in blog entry Lost Laptops, I talked about this problem and some solutions.

In June alone we've read about the loss of laptop or notebook computers from

Prevention is easy. Enterprises can encrypt or password lock hard drives. They must write policies and procedures backing those up. This is an old problem with solutions that keep on getting better.

Wake up out there!

I've turned on FileVault on my home directory on my PowerBook. It seems to create an encrypted virtual volume. So, this is practicing what I preach. But, I've noticed something strange (that I think is related): I can no longer create anything in the top-level of my home directory (/Users/fred).


$ pwd
/Users/fred
$ touch jnk
touch: jnk: Operation not permitted
$ cd Documents
$ touch jnk
$ ls -l jnk
-rw-r--r-- 1 fred fred 0 Jul 4 12:34 jnk
$ ls -ld . .. ../..
drwx------ 26 fred fred 884 Jul 4 12:34 .
drwx------ 38 fred fred 1394 Jun 6 15:15 ..
drwxrwxr-t 7 root admin 238 Jul 4 11:56 ../..

I do not know if this is related. I cannot backout of FileVault without deleting a bunch of files, although how much can I trust this. Look at what it says for the needed disk space. I have 60G disk. Hmmmm.

image

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USB Attacks

This is an interesting, if obvious, attack. It harkens back to the historical—something we neglect more and more in network security. (And I have mentioned this too many times for me to repeat it here. Search for "history" in the search window of my blog site.) History will remind us that the viruses were originally spread on floppy disks. The obvious successor, with some twists, is the USB Flash Drive or "thumb drive". The twists include:

  • Many computers are configured to Autorun removable devices when inserted into the computer
  • USB thumb drives are still attractive enough that most people will pick them up, carry them off, and insert them into a computer the first chance they get.

Someone might do the second to see who owns the disk to return it, out of curiosity as to what is on it, or as a precursor to reformatting the drive.

Read more at:

What would you do with a thumb drive you found on the street? What would your CEO do? And what does your security policy say about this?

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