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I was reading up on a USB Power problem, yes computer stuff, when I stumbled over this gem:

After much googling, I discovered there is no true solution on the internet.

This philosophical insight was written by schitzn on this forum.

If you have a story, or a lifestory, to share with dar webz, please submit it to Truckin'!

Pauly is actively seeking non-poker stories for the Truckin' 2009 issues, and if you have a draft, a note or even a recipe lying around, don't hesitate to send it in. Doesn't have to be funny, doesn't have to be genius, but either is preferred. NaNo excerpts are always welcomed. Stuff that you have blogged and are really content with is welcome. Deadlines are on the 25th of the month. Each month. Every year. Forever. UNLESS Pauly runs dry and Truckin' closes down. Which would make the pandas sad... and extinct. Think about the pandas.

If you're still hesistant to write or share your texts with the world, please do your bit to inform the public of our existence. Put the url in your blogroll, print it out and put it in an eggroll; I have the URL in my professional e-mail signature..! In any case, consider the pandas.

The URL is http://mcgtruckin.blogspot.com

You'll find all my previous accepted stories at the bottom of my archives page. As you may well know, I've been pretty busy sorting out my professional and private life lately, and believe it or not but it was planned all along! I've still got stuff to do before the end of the year, but I reckon I'll be back writing anytime soon. I just need to get myself a movable bamboo light wall and a palm tree. More later. Go write/submit!

I removed the Vundu trojan (plus several others) from a Vista user's laptop successfully recently, but met a snag not covered in any of the howtos. Since this virus was able to raise up a BSOD storm on the user's computer, I found its removal relevant for the webz. In my particular case the user had not installed Service Pack 1, and the BSOD didn't occur until 5-10 minutes after startup. This gives you some time to install the removal software needed before it crashes again. I suggest downloading the software to another machine and install them on the infected system using a pendrive. The simple steps:

1. Download & install: MBAM, CCleaner and ComboFix 
2. Boot up into safemode (F8 before the Vista logo appears) 
3. Run CCleaner 3-4 times (with interval reboots into safemode) 
4. Run MBAM's full scan first in safe then normal mode, remove problems found 
5. Lastly, run Combofix in normal mode 

When CCleaner or Combofix asks you if you'd like to make a backup, you really really want to make a backup. Each time. Remember that CCleaner has two types of scans . Run both of them. For ComboFix, read this HOWTO. Simple enough, ain't it? Well, it can take a lot longer when there are unknown factors. The version of Vundo this client had was seemingly aware of MBAM and consequently denied it to run. Very frustrating when a few sweeps are all there is between you and a relatively healthy OS. Luckily the virus only denies static filenames, so renaming the file(s) is all you need to do.

The MBAM installation file is called mbam-setup.exe. If you aren't able to install it as Administrator, then rename it to mbaladam-setup.exe or whatever.exe. In Safe Mode at first sweep, go to the MBAM program directory (usually in Program Files). There you'll find a chm (HTML Help file) with MBAM's commandline commands. Rename the mbam.exe file to something-else.exe, open cmd.exe as Administrator and run something-else.exe /fullscan to run a full system scan. Don't worry n00bz, the GUI will popup by itself. If this doesn't work, try copying the entire MBAM program directory to another directory and adjust/produce any required registry entries.

By the way, the simple instruction at the top needs three more steps:

• Back up your important data 
• Migrate to GNU/Linux, install and configure iptables 
• Enjoy your freedom 

Having almost a year Away From Keyboard, sort of, Kekepower finally got himself a new server up and running at kekepower.com. Using ddrescue he restored everything from the old server disks, meaning that my ol' "picture storage" is up again @ sigge.kekepower.com/extra.



This includes my 100 JESUS PICTURES! Enjoy.

Edit 20th November 2008
... bump! I guess he didn't specify just how long it was intended to stay up:)

Edit 12th April 2009
Jesus Pictures moved to http://www.sigg3.net/blogger/gsus/pictures/!

Dr. Pauly will be a guest at the Keep Flopping Aces radio show, which is hosted by noted poker author Lou Krieger, tonight at 9 pm ET (or 6 pm Vegas time). You can call 'em here: 810-496-3428.

A podcast should be available within 48 hours after the show. Good luck, Pauly!

You might have read about my excellent N95, only to hear that it was stolen from me. But my friends still only hear a constant sound of nothing. 'Cause I'm still without a phone! That's right. I must be the most laid back, stressed out little hamster you could ever imagine.

After receiving the legal papers entitling me to a new phone it took another three weeks for me to actually take the papers to the store and get it. I got the exact same model, now referred to as "the original N95", even though I could have had any phone on the planet. Ish. That's because the original has a lens cover which is quite essential to a camera, despite the fact that people buy new and better (!) phones today without them. The power of supply and demand. It's like using the same condom over and over again and still expect it to do the job.. And someone's demanding it.

I took it home, cradled it nicely on its own little pillow and went to sleep. The following morning it was fully charged and still not stolen. I took it to my entrusted laptop and began upgrading the firmware, which always keeps me at the edge of the seat until a bold Firmware Upgrade Complete signs light up, and the phone reboots. It went very well. I moved to the rear of the seat and proceeded to the backups. It also went well. Until I rebooted the thing, and it was bricked. It wasn't stolen, thank god, but it was as useful as a brick.
Bricks are useful when you build a house. Not to dial 911. Or an escort service.

It would boot up to that Nokia handshake, which always comforts me, because even though I don't have any idea who those two men on my screen are, they seem to agree about it. Whatever 'it' is. Could be a drug deal. Or human trafficking. Or a contract kill. Who knows? Maybe he just got a fake rolex to a great price and wants to shake on the deal? I just wait for them to agree so I can type in my PIN code. But they wouldn't allow me this time. There was an error message that the phone was in serious trouble, probably because of the handshake, and would refuse to cooperate until I took it back to the store. Damn.

So two weeks later I took it back to the store and complained about the Nokia restore software that didn't even have a warning about restoring backups from previous versions, but it was all fine and dandy, covered by the warranty and that; but if I took it to the store next door I could get it a lot faster than the x weeks they need at central command.
ITSATRAP! I thought. They want me to pay more. But time's an issue.
So I went along to the next store where I had to sit down and wait in line. For another two weeks. Then I got it back ALL FOR FREE with a British operating system instead of the Norwegian one, which is good because the Norwegian men. is. all. abbr. But now what?

I've been staring at it for weeks. The newly fixed phone has a v30 firmware. My backup is v21. I've been without a phone for 9 proper versions! If this pace keeps up I'm gonna have to train myself some carrier pigeons. Or brick it again.

Random tagline for another brilliant issue of Truckin'. Pauly writes:

Thanks again for wasting your precious time with Truckin'. The November issue features two new writers, Matt Moon and Jonathan Bennetts. We also have two veteran scribes returning in May B. Yesno and Betty After Dark. And yeah, that's a sultry dirty story from Betty! I also added a bit of fiction to the mix for this issue.

Jupiter Four by Pauly
Cal never had a chance. After one season of winter ball in the Dominican Republic, he walked away from baseball. He was miserable down there. His Spanish was bad. He caught a nasty parasite and his girlfriend constantly begged him to come home....

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To Conviviality by May B. Yesno
The voice crackles and chatters. The sum and substance of the call is an invite to play with resistors and transistors and bread boards, hot solder and imagination. One of the customers wanted company. His wife was off chasing her particular dreams of sustenance some six hundred miles away across two mountain ranges...

Luna Moth by Betty After Dark
Then you flipped me. On my back. Crawling on top of me. Hovering over me, you pushed my arms above my head. I imagined you had tied me up. You fumbled. We giggled...

The Green Chip by Jonathan Bennetts
In just over twelve months Alex had hit rock bottom and it seemed like he had been there forever. He plummeted headlong into being a hopeless drunk who'd lost everything; his sole reason for living now was to raise five bucks daily for his quart of Orillia Tiger Ruby Red Port wine...

Pizza and the Party by Matt Moon
tried talking and joking with Brittany but she was giving one-or-two-word responses. She was not digging me. She'd rather stare out the backseat window than associate with me. That was very unfortunate. I was really hammered and she had some cute aspects to her. I kept trying to progress the conversation but failed miserably every single time....

Since Pata Pata in 1977, the African singer Miriam Makeba has been known as "Mama Africa" due to her struggle against the Apartheid and for Africans' rights. I had the honor of enjoying her music live when I still lived in the North. She died last night, age 76, after she had had a heart attack on stage. Befitting her life and personality, she died during a performance supporting the fight against the Italian mafia. RIP.

My bruvva just tipped me off about a new rap release from NASA featuring none other than Tom Waits. It definitely adds some serious testosterone to the tune. Click the pic below to stream (note: you won't find Tom Waits in the picture).


Alternatively, click the link to Koew above to download it!
As Pitchforkmedia writes: It's well worth a listen even if just to hear Waits utter the words "ghetto booty."

Congratulations, USAE!
Congratulations, Obama!
Congratulations to the free world!

My brother just posted a "last three CDs I ordered" so why not update my sublet mortgage crisis credit frenzy?

• Michael Brecker - Tales from the Hudson 
• John Coltrane - Live at the Village Vanguard 
• Mercury Rev - All is Dream 
• Mercury Rev - Snowflake Midnight 
• Mercury Rev - Strange Attractor (click for free download) 
• Sun Ra and His Astro Intergalactic Infinity Arkestra - Space is the Place 
• Fat Boy Slim - You've come a long way, baby 
• Fugees - The Score 
• Lou Reed - The Raven 
• Depeche Mode - The Best Of, vol. 1 

Apparently there's some kind of election going on in the USAE, and my vote's for the Hawaiian guy. 'Cause people from Hawaii are hellakewl. And I think this particular Hawaiian has got what it takes to rid the USAE of its crippling lobbyism. Lady C was so frustrated the other day, because our media is filled with this election from morning 'til midnight (when BBC World Service takes over to cover the USAE election) and she is still not allowed to vote. This vote is important for Other Countries as well, you see, whether or not we like it. We don't like it, but there you have it.

And this morning I heard a specifically startling piece of news, when a commentator remarked that: "America's role as a moral authority has been in question for the last few years". For the last few years? How about the last fifty years?! And moral authority? Come on, you're talking about Big Mac country here. Where scientific theories that are widely accepted are still questioned on the basis of text-book religion. Where people store massive guns in their homes because the constitution has not been updated since it was created, and people wonder why crime's so high. Where freedom and peace are registered trademarks of the American way, and not, as was proposed, the outcome of a rational discourse between sovereign states in the League of Nations (UN). Where insight and knowledge are put aside for ignorant decadence. Where the dream of a dream once noble has been substituted with a consumer capitalism tainted with whimsical egocentrism. Where citizens salute a piece of cloth like the Romans saluted their god emperors, the Nazis their swastikas and soviet their Stalin; while a good goddamn is what's left for human worth.

America: you are a toddler! For once, choose the rational alternative.

It has been a long, long while since I last updated this "thread" of useful security-related applications for Windows and Linux, last time was when Torpark was still called Torpark, because I've purposefully withheld information that was sensitive at the time. You don't have to be an 1337 h4x0r to find out where I work, and why it could be a sensible stand given factors of varying nature. But enough shadow talk and secret whispering! There are a few applications that I use daily that I recommend to my peers who care enough about privacy. And whatever I reveal here is not sensitive for my work place. Today I want to tell ya'll about wiping.

Whenever you do something in the electronic world, you leave a trace. And whenever you delete a file, you leave a trace. Most systems don't even delete the file they just mark it as empty space, and it is free for anyone to undelete them completely. I will write on data recovery and forensics later.

But what to do then? Simply stop using computers? No. Even though you live in a cabin in a forest without any electricity, you can be sure that there are insecure systems out there who store information about you. The way to tackle this problem is a simple change of routines. Instead of deleting files and compromising the data whenever the storage device is a) returned for service or b) simply thrown away or c) stolen/accessed/cracked, is to wipe the files.
There are many ways to wipe but my favourite is The Hacker's Choice:

The deletion process is as follows:

1. The overwriting procedure (in the secure mode) does a 38 times overwriting. After each pass, the disk cache is flushed. 
2. truncating the file, so that an attacker don't know which diskblocks belonged to the file. 
3. renaming of the file, so that an attacker can't draw any conclusion from the filename on the contents of the deleted file. 
4. finally deleting the file (unlink). 

THC's Secure_Delete tool does exactly this. Using:

$ srm -v <filename>

or

$ srm -r -v <directory name>

you get a verbose output of the wiping process of the file or directory respectively. The nice thing about Linux is that you can include secure_delete in any bash script or cron job (scheduled task) that you wish.

Wiping, in any system, naturally takes some time. THC writes that in 1 second you can approximately overwrite 1 to 2 MB of data, depending on your harddrive performance. In totally insecure mode, a 100 MB file/free-disk-space takes about 15 seconds, while the totally secure and recommended mode takes approximately 60 minutes. Leaving the wiping to itself is probably the best way to save time, while you boot up your second machine to read the latest sigg3.net adventure.

The two file systems in use in the Windows world at the moment are FAT and NTFS, both of which is supported (somewhat) in Linux as well. FAT is a pretty old format, and data gets fragmented if you sneeze in the general direction of the chassis. Files stored in FAT are really easy to recover too. NTFS is a huge step in the right direction, because it dynamically utilizes the disk making data recovery harder over time, but still lags behind some of the better unix file system formats such as xfs, ext3 and reiserFS. In other words, data wiping is even more important in Windows than in Linux. So what applications can you use? I'll cover one commercial (but free) and one open sourced tool here.

Jetico's BCWipe
A very simple to use tool that integrates nicely into the Windows desktop. You download and install the free trial edition (embedded license) and you'll receive a right-click option for wiping, including: Delete (file or dir) with wiping, Wipe recycle bin and Wipe free space. The latter is brilliant, because by first deleting the file normally and then wiping the free space of that disk, any intruder will not be able to distinguish what has been a file and what has been empty space. By default, however, BCWipe uses the US Department of Defence 7-time wipe setup which is not what your privacy requires!
Instead select the Guthman method (35 wipes) or create your own custom wipe. If you're about to wipe large amounts of data over a few days Windows may give you some trouble. Disable hibernation and standby or else the wiping file can be made inaccessible to BCWipe and the process will halt waiting for user input. BCWipe allows you to choose what to do when the desired operation is completed, such as show log, restart or shut down the computer.

Heidi's Eraser
Heidi, fronted by a gal looking suspiciously like a number 6 cylon agent, has made a wiping tool for windows that is open sourced and released under the GNU General Public License. It was Irongeek who tipped me about it because I didn't like the bcwipe license. Similar to BCWipe it features a nice context-menu option but also has a scheduler feature, which is always nice. In contrast to BCWipe, Eraser uses the Guthman standard by default. I have only tried it once, but my feeling's that they both get the job done (though Heidi has a nicer license).

Making a habit of wiping sensitive data or traces thereof will do you no harm at all. In fact, it may save you from losing face (or your job) one day. All those embarrassing photos of celebrities, for instance, would have been avoided if the camera or cellphone memory had been wiped before it was turned in for repairs. And what about the external USB-cabled hard drives that you use for backups, when you send them in for replacement. Did you wipe'em first? I hope you did, or else you'll have people like me checking out your data. I'll cover forensics at a later time. In the meanwhile, do as your mother told you and remember to wipe.