March 2013 | Linux Blog

White Paper - There's an App for That, But is it Secure?

"There's an App for That, But is it Secure?"

This Tech Dossier will outline proven best practices to mitigate risk and embrace mobility without trepidation.

Security has eroded over the past decade as companies strive to create applications for multiple platforms by farming design and development out to subcontractors. This trend has strained the processes and governance put in place to ensure application security.

Download your free copy of "There's an App for That, But is it Secure?" -- here

Display Dialog boxes from shell scripts - Whiptail

whiptail is a lightweight replacement for dialog, to provide dialog boxes for shell scripts. It is built on the newt windowing library rather than the ncurses library, allowing it to be smaller in embedded environments such as installers, rescue disks, etc.

Currently, these types of dialog boxes are implemented:
yes/no box, menu box, input box, message box, text box, info box, checklist box, radiolist box gauge box, and password box.

whiptail is designed to be drop-in compatible with dialog, but has less features: some dialog boxes are not implemented, such as tailbox, timebox, calendarbox, etc.

Whiptail Installation:
Open the terminal and type following command to install whiptail:

sudo apt-get install whiptail

Securely erase files and partition from magnetic media - Wipe

Recovery of supposedly erased data from magnetic media is easier than what many people wouldlike to believe. A technique called Magnetic Force Microscopy (MFM) allows any moderately funded opponent to recover the last two or three layers of data written to disk; wipe repeatedly overwrites special patterns to the files to be destroyed, using the fsync() call and/or the O_SYNC bit to force disk access. In normal mode, 34 patterns are used (of which 8 are random). These patterns were recommended in an article from Peter Gutmann (pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz) entitled "Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory". A quick mode allows you to use only 4 passes with random patterns, which is of course much less secure.

Encrypting a whole partition with cryptoloop, for example, does not help very much either, since there is a single key for all the partitions.

Therefore wipe is best used to sanitize a harddisk before giving it to untrusted parties (i.e. sending your laptop for repair, or selling your disk).

Convert webpages (HTML) to PDF using webkit - wkhtmltopdf

Wkhtmltopdf is a command line utility that can be used to convert a webpage / html to PDF.

Wkhtmltopdf Features:
* Convert web pages into PDF documents using webkit
* Adding headers and footers (static version only)
* TOC generation (static version only)
* Batch mode conversions
* (Linux) No longer requires an XServer to be running (however the X11 client libs must be installed)

Wkhtmltopdf Installation:
Open the terminal and type following command to intall Wkhtmltopdf:

sudo apt-get install wkhtmltopdf

Wkhtmltopdf Usage:
Wkhtmltopdf is command line utility, the following lists some usages for wkhtmltopdf
To convert a remote HTML file to PDF:

wkhtmltopdf http://www.google.com google.pdf

To convert a local HTML file to PDF:

wkhtmltopdf my.html my.pdf

You can also convert to PS files if you like:

wkhtmltopdf my.html my.ps

FLV Metadata Injector for FLV files - Yamdi

yamdi stands for Yet Another MetaData Injector and is a metadata injector for FLV files. It adds the onMetaData event to your FLV files. yamdi should run under *BSD, Linux and Windows and is published under the BSD license.

Yamdi features:
* Large file support
* H.264 support
* onMetaData, onLastSecond, onLastKeyframe events
* low memory footprint
* XML metadata output
* Binaries for Win32 and Win64 are available

Mount archives for read/write under Ubuntu Linux - Archivemount

Archivemount is a FUSE based file system for Unix variants, including Linux. Its purpose is to mount archives to a mount point where it can be read from or written to as with any other file system. This makes accessing the contents of the archive, which may be compressed, transparent to other programs, without decompressing them. The archive formats that archivemount supports are:

* Old-style tar archives, .
* Most variants of the POSIX “ustar” format, .
* The POSIX “pax interchange” format, .
* GNU-format tar archives, .
* Most common cpio archive formats, .
* ISO9660 CD images (with or without RockRidge extensions), .
* Zip archives. .

Rip Audio CDs in Linux with Sound Juicer

Sound Juicer is an application front-end to the Cdparanoia CD ripping library. It allows the user to extract audio from compact discs and convert it into audio files that a personal computer or digital audio player can understand and play. It supports ripping to any audio codec supported by a GStreamer plugin, such as mp3 (via LAME), Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and uncompressed PCM formats.

Sound Juicer is designed to be easy to use and to work with little user intervention. For example, if your computer is connected to the Internet, it will automatically attempt to retrieve track information from the freely-available MusicBrainz service. Sound Juicer is free and open source software and an official part of the GNOME desktop environment starting with version 2.10.

Sound Juice Features include:
* Automatic track tagging via CDDB
* Encoding to ogg / vorbis, FLAC and raw WAV
* Easy to configure encoding path
* Multiple genres
* Internationalization support

eBook - Free PC Security Handbook

"The Essentials of Information Security Kit: Includes a Free PC Security Handbook - 2nd Edition eBook"

Download this kit to learn everything you need to know about Information Security.

The Essentials of Information Security bring together the latest in information, coverage of important developments, and expert commentary to help with your Information Security related decisions.

The following kit contents will help you get the most out of your Information Security research:
* PC Security Handbook - 2nd Edition
* Research Report: How the Major Mobility Platforms Compare in TCO and Security
* Virtualization Maturity and Experience Breed Success
* Securing Your Journey to the Cloud

Download your free copy of "The Essentials of Information Security Kit: Includes a Free PC Security Handbook - 2nd Edition eBook" -- here

Media Streaming Server In Ubuntu Linux - GNUMP3d

GNUMP3d is a streaming server for MP3s, OGG vorbis files, movies and other media formats.

GNUMP3d designed to be:
* Small, stable, portable, self-contained, and secure.
* Simple to install, configure, and use.
* Portable across different varieties of Unix, the GNU Operating System, and Microsoft Windows platforms.

GNUMP3d Requirement:
You need to have apache installed and configured for GNUMP3d to work
For Apache installation and configuration - here

GNUMP3d Installation:
Downloaded the GNUMP3d source code - here
GNUMP3d installation should require no more than the following:-

tar -zxvf gnump3d-3.0.tar.gz
cd gnump3d-3.0
make install

Open Source Novel Writing Software - Storybook

Storybook is a free Open Source novel-writing software for creative writers, novelists and authors. Starting with the plot to the finished book — with Storybook you'll never lose the overview. Storybook helps you to keep an overview of multiple plot-lines while writing books, novels or other written works.

Storybook assists you in structuring your book
Manage all your data such as characters, locations, scenes, items, tags and ideas in one place. A simple interface is provided to enable you to assign your defined objects to each scene and to keep an overview of your work with user-friendly chart tools. With Storybook Memoria each object can be tracked in relation to time.

Install the latest Intel graphics drivers - Intel Linux Graphics Installer

Intel Linux Graphics Installer allows you to easily install the latest graphics drivers for your Intel graphics hardware. This allows you to stay current with the latest enhancements, optimizations, and fixes to ensure the best user experience with your Intel graphics hardware.

Supported Linux Distributions at 1.0
Ubuntu 12.04
Ubuntu 12.10
Fedora 17
Fedora 18

Ubuntu
Ubuntu's packages and repositories are signed with this GPG key.
In order to "trust" the Intel Linux Graphics Installer, you will need to add a key to Ubuntu's software package manager ("apt"). Open a terminal, and execute this line:

White Paper - Top 5 Myths of Website Security

Hackers are now focusing attacks directly on websites in order to stay one step ahead of the latest security techniques.

With over 70% of cyber attacks now occurring at the application layer, that means serious vulnerabilities for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs).

Download this Whitepaper to learn about the new security problems facing SMEs, starting with the facts behind some of the most common myths about website security.

This white paper includes recommendations to help businesses improve their website security. Get your complimentary 9-page Whitepaper now.

Download your free copy of "Top 5 Myths of Website Security" - here

Manage and Install Windows Application on Linux - q4wine

Q4Wine is a qt4 GUI for WINE, It will help you manage wine prefixes and installed applications. It currently support for both Linux and FreeBSD platforms.

Q4Wine was initially written by Alexey S. Malakhov aka John Brezerk. General idea comes from WineTools scripts which were initially written by Frank Hendriksen.

Q4Wine General features are:
* Can export QT color theme into wine colors settings.
* Can easy work with different wine versions at same time;
* Easy creating, deleting and managing prefixes (WINEPREFIX);
* Easy controls for wine process;
* Autostart icons support;
* Easy cd-image use;
* You can extract icons from PE files (.exe .dll);
* Easy backup and restore for managed prefixes.
* Winetriks support.
And more... Explore it! ;)

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