Geeky Friday: Running Windows with No Services

From the good folks at SysInternals, " Running Windows with No Services" in which the author discovers to his own surprise and to the surprise of Microsoft's VP of the Core Operating Systems Division that Windows XP can actually run without any services running. You can even surf via Internet Explorer. There are some little things that are impossible -- like logging out. Don't try this at home without dong a backup first.

"The bottom line is that this stripped-down Windows configuration is not practical..." but some of the readers' comments point out possible practical applications such as providing a more certain method of cleaning up infected computers.

If you haven't already known about SysInternals, they provide some top quality, free utilities for windows computers for monitoring TCP ports, process status, file status, etc. The kind of stuff that linux and mac os x come with for free but windows seems to be lacking.

Technorati tags: windows sysinternals

I'm witty

Via borklog, I took the The 3 Variable Funny Test and according to the results my humor style is

the Wit
(60% dark, 8% spontaneous, 16% vulgar)

your humor style:
CLEAN | COMPLEX | DARK

You like things edgy, subtle, and smart. I guess that means you're probably an intellectual, but don't take that to mean you're pretentious. You realize 'dumb' can be witty--after all isn't that the Simpsons' philosophy?--but rudeness for its own sake, 'gross-out' humor and most other things found in a fraternity leave you totally flat.

I guess you just have a more cerebral approach than most. You have the perfect mindset for a joke writer or staff writer. Your sense of humor takes the most effort to appreciate, but it's also the best, in my opinion.

Also, you probably loved the Office. If you don't know what I'm talking about, check it out here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/theoffice/.

PEOPLE LIKE YOU: Jon Stewart - Woody Allen - Ricky Gervais

Ricky Gervais? Oh, that Ricky Gervais... from the BBC serices "The Office"... which I haven't seen, but I've been told more than once that I'd probably enjoy it.

John Stewart Recapitulates The Rove Leak

In case you aren't following the story about Karl Rove allegedly leaking the name of a CIA operative, John Stewart has a nice review of the story -- it's quite informative, it's funny, and they managed to work in a video clip of monkey cleaning a cat.

Geeky Friday: Attacks on Film

A few months ago a computer I deal with had an uninvited visitor who got in with the help of a weak password and installed a bunch of nasty stuff -- including a program called "vadimII". I googled for this and found a discussion in which a user said:

Ok. Your goal will be to reformat your drive and then reinstall Linux from scratch. Sorry, ain't no other way.

Eventually, the machine did have to be completely rebuilt. Since then I've had a heightened interest in how these things happen.

Last weekend, slashdot had an article linking to a story on brute force ssh attacks. While we guessed that this was what had happened to us, one user's comment showing an excerpt of attempted logins convinced me that our guess was correct.

Driving home the issue even further, via TinyApps.Org's blog, are these movies (flash) demonstrating how quickly and easily these attacks work. I've only watched a couple of these and for linux/unix geeks, it's spookier than anything Hollywood could produce. You see one step then another and then you realize what's going to happen and there's nothing you can do to stop it.

p.s. These movies demonstrate the Whoppix/Whax tool. If an admin of this site has found this post, please take a moment to add a brief "About this tool" to your site. It wasn't until I googled my way to distrowatch.com that I learned that

Whoppix is a stand-alone penetration-testing live CD based on KNOPPIX. With the latest tools and exploits, it is a must for every penetration tester and security auditor. Whoppix includes several exploit archives, such as Securityfocus, Packetstorm, SecurityForest and Milw0rm, as well as a wide variety of updated security tools.

Technorati tags: security ssh whax

Geeky Friday: Nightmare recovery story

I think there are some lessons to be learned in this story of recovery of a server that was down... not only down, but down for a couple hours before it was noticed.

Technorati tags: linux nagios monitoring

E-books and corrections

My recent post on the comparative size and weight of digital versions of Amazon's Penguin Classics collection, got a nice mention over at TeleRead. Apparently the bloat in the Adobe Reader file format is nothing new.

I'd never seen this blog before, they cover ebooks in pretty good depth. There are more articles there about the Librie I mentioned, but the big gadget hype seems to be about the forthcoming Nokia 770

Also a reader of TeleRead pointed out that I had some math problems in my file size table. I've recalculated and included links to the sources. There are duplicates of some of the Palm file formats -- MemoWare has two separate pages for The Pickwick Papers

Format	Total	Per page
MS Reader	0.72	0.87
iSilo	0.74	0.89
iSilo	0.80	0.97
Doc	0.85	1.03
PalmReader	0.85	1.03
TomeRaider	0.86	1.04
Doc	0.87	1.05
ASCII	1.72	2.08
Adobe Reader	3.17	3.83

Note that the table is now sorted by size. The full half million pages of the Penguin collection would range from 0.41 - 1.83 GB.

Technorati tags: ebooks nokia 770