I bought received Doom 3 for the PC as a gift, way back in 2004 and really dug it’s dark, brutal, visually twisted and genuinely scary vibe for an FPS game. I got stuck fairly close to the end and never managed to finish it and some time later, I bought an expansion for the game, but never installed it. Since I was running a dual-boot between Linux and XP (strictly for video games), I eventually backed up my save files and uninstalled it to make room for newer games and kind of forgot about it.

Yesterday, while sorting through some old shit for a trip to the storage center to grab some summer clothes, I found the game in a pile of CDs. Remembering that the Id Software guys were into supporting Linux with their titles, I checked to see if a install package for Doom 3 on Linux was out. Sure enough, there was one, so I decided to try it out.

I found this FAQ and following the instructions, downloaded the install package, ran it and installed the game to ‘/usr/local/games/’ and then copied a bunch of files off the game CDs I had to the same directory. I still had to enter the software key off the game’s jewel case, but the result is a very fine looking Doom 3 running under Xubuntu. Totally fucking sweet.

I still have a Windows partition on my laptop and there are some games installed on it, but I rarely have the patience to boot it and rely mostly on my beloved Wii and PS2 for gaming fixes. The more Linux install packages I can get for PC games, the more money I’m going to
spend on the industry. I’m not really into paying a monthly fee for Cedega so I can run Windows games and I rarely have the patience to attempt to get a game running myself using Wine. I wish more game companies did this for Linux users.

I’ve been running Xubuntu Feisty Fawn on my desktop computer at home since Herd 4 (so… uh… at least a month I think…?) and I’ve found that there’s not much I can say about it that’s bad. In fact, it’s the first time I was able to upgrade via the “apt-get dist-upgrade” method without a whole mess, complete with a busted X server. I was able to do the upgrade and still have everything working, even Beryl.

Still as successful as the upgrade was, I generally prefer back shit up and to do clean install since I think that a lot of the fun of a distribution upgrade is seeing all the changes, bells and whistles as they appear fresh out of the box (or the ISO, in my case). A dist-upgrade can at times hide these things from my since it may upgrade a program but it still relies on my old config files for the most part.

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I’d forgotten how absolutely fucking horrific Windows is. Tonight, I dusted off an XP partition that I’ve not booted for months and was assaulted with outdated antivirus warnings—more like threats actually, since my update subscription had long, long since expired. Symantec’s happy to tell you how dangerous the world of virii can be, but unless you’re waving cash, they’re not about to make it a safer place for you. They’ll just annoy the fuck out of you with “YOU’RE IN DANGER!!!” warnings that seem unable to be turned off and in themselves seem to be awfully a lot like adware bullshit. Not only will they not protect you’re fragile computer, they’ll hold it hostage with annoying pop-ups until you pay. Note to self: uninstall that pile of shit the next time you have the intestinal fortitude to boot Windows again.

On top of the antivirus bells going off, I had the obligatory Windows security patches and Genuine Advantage (oxymoron-speak for Genuinely fucked software validation tool) update. I had something like 13 patches to slog through. All this just to satisfy my occasional, every-other-month or so World of Warcraft fix. Memo to the board of directors: Get that game running on Linux or stop fucking playing it.

All in all, Windows didn’t have it’s pants up, belt tightened, cowlicks slickened and engines ready to go for a full thirty-plus minutes after the initial boot (I had to reboot like three times to apply the various updates). Finally, ever so far down the road, I’m ready. Except I no longer give a flying fuck. I’m so annoyed, frustrated and pissed off at this masochistic clusterfuck of a shitty OS, I CTRL-ALT-DELETE right the fuck out. Fuck that noise. I’ll smash Orcs some other time.

Thank God for Linux. Thank God for OSX. Thank fucking God that there’s a an alternative to being anally raped by Redmond, WA. To think of all those people out there, who use Windows every single day, so inured to being fucked that they can’t feel the bed-rail clenched between their teeth, even as the mascara stings their eyes and the rancid sweaty breath of Steve Ballmer churns their stomach as he grunts away, taking his turn while Gates scrounges for more axle grease.

Death to Windows.

Image credit: youngdoo

I’ve been using Kubuntu for about a year and a half, having switched over from the basic Ubuntu setup. Over that time, I’ve really come to prefer KDE over Gnome. It’s some funky shit—I dig it.

However, a few months ago, I got into Beryl and quickly became addicted to having it. My desktop is a Pentium 4 with a 128 meg Nvidia GeForce 5200 and 768 megs of RAM. As such, the addition of Beryl has made KDE programs kind of slow, clunky and prone to weirdness. My laptop hasn’t really suffered at all much as it’s much more powerful and I guess at some point I’ll slap in a new graphics card and some more RAM into my desktop, but as an experiment, I decided to try Xubuntu with its Xfce desktop environment, to see if it made any difference in performance with Beryl.

After a quick test of installing the xubuntu-desktop package onto my existing Kubuntu setup and getting promising results, I decided to clean my slate, wipe and install Xubuntu solely and see if I could survive on Xfce and Beryl, get a nice looking desktop and have everything I like about KDE, but using GTK+ alternatives. The plan was (is) to get this setup going and try it out, just on my desktop for a few months…say till the Feisty Fawn release hits and then decide, or whatever.

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I’m exceptionally pleased with myself after finally figuring out how to successfully hack my TiVo, transfer television shows to my Linux box and decrypt the .tivo file format into a friendly MPEG 2 so I can watch it on Linux or any other operating system for that matter.

Basically I point a browser at my TiVo using this address:

https://[YOURTIVOADDRESS]/nowplaying/index.html

You’ll get an authentication prompt where you should enter ‘tivo’ as the user and for the password, enter your Media Access Key (MAK), which you can find if you navigate to your TiVo settings. This will bring you to a page listing everything on your TiVo’s hard drive, with a link to download any of the files. I’ve read that getting them with wget causes problems. Most people recommended using cURL, but I was able to navigate and download the files just using Konqueror. I tried it with Firefox as well, but found that the browser would consistently crash after just a fraction of the way through a download each time I tried.

After transferring a file to my Linux box, I installed this command-line application. After I compiled the program, I tested it out like so:

tivodecode -m [Media Access Key] -o outputfile.mpg sourcefile.tivo

The result worked wonderfully and I am now watching Aqua Teen Hunger Force, kicked back in the bedroom with my laptop, running Kubuntu. I’ll be sure and transfer several episodes of Law & Order SVU for the airport wait and flight time when I take a vacation next week. Hot shit.

I’ve decided to try and give up using Firefox for at least one week. In it’s place I plan on using Konqueror and in some cases where I’m using OSX, Safari or perhaps Camino. The real test for me though is to see if I can make Konqueror do everything I’m used to doing (and worry that I can’t live without) with Firefox.

I’ve been falling slowly out of infatuation with Firefox for a while now. Version 2.0 left me mildly underwhelmed and dealing with much of the same-old including an annoying memory leak. Since I use KDE as my desktop environment, I’ve always had Konqueror kicking around and have been very impressed with it’s abilities as a file manager. In my job, where I often have to migrate many files from server A to B, Konqueror’s view splitting features kick serious ass. As a web browser that I’ve had access to for almost two years, I’ve probably used it a handful of times, mainly because of my dependence on Firefox extensions.

This reliance on extensions bothers me. The fact that enough people use it now that exploits are starting to show up isn’t great news to me either. Granted, they’re generally addressed pretty fast, but whatever. Really cool people use fringe, obscure browsers like Konqueror or Lynx.

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I just read this article on security advice by Kevin Mitnick and I’m equal parts pissed and laughing at it. It’s a classic case of ignoring the elephant in the room and it really makes me wonder where Mitnick’s integrity is since I don’t think he’s a particularly stupid person.

He starts the article with the old “We live in dangerous times. Evil hackers can attack you with their viruses!” line and then proceeds to outline ten steps he feels will increase your safety and security. Some are common sense recommendations that I agree with:

1. Back up everything
2. Choose strong passwords
3. Be diligent with applying security updates
4. Use encryption for sensitive data
5. Disable unused services
6. Use a firewall/router to restrict/limit access to your machine
7. Encrypt your wireless networks with uber-strong passwords using WPA

All these points I agree with. All are basic, simple, common sense things everyone should do, but often do not. His other recommendations are what give me pause:

8. Use commercial antivirus products
9. Use one or more anti-spyware applications
10. Avoid Internet Explorer and disable scripts in your email client

This is where I completely disagree. Recommendations 8-10 can be simplified to one step:

1. Stop fucking using Windows already

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When I was a kid, Christmas was never really a big deal for me. What got my blood pumping came about a month early, when all the presents would be wrapped and hidden somewhere. I was on the prowl, hunting them down carefully lifting the Scotch tape, sliding off the paper and playing with them.

Nothing stopped me. Once, when I knew that behind a locked closet door was a brand-spanking new Nintendo game system, after unsuccessfully picking the lock, I just took the door off the hinges, hooked up the system and played it every day, putting the door and everything else back before anyone came home. Subsequently, when Christmas morning came, I had to look surprised at the gift even though I’d managed to win Super Mario Bros. several times over already. I was a horrid child.

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Several times a day, computers somewhere in India or China (usually) launch brute force and dictionary attacks on my server to try and get SSH access. To anyone running their own server who regularly browses their SSH logs (/var/log/secure or /var/log/auth.log, depending on your distro) this is old news. Checking my logs, I’d see 80-100 failed login attempts from a single IP address trying a whole ass-load of non-existant user names and passwords.

I have SSH locked down fairly well, with remote root logins off and disabling password authentication in favor of RSA based keys. However, I opted to leave SSH on the default port 22, which undoubtedly accounts for all the attacks. Usually, I’d place the offending IP in my /etc/hosts.deny file, banning it for eternity with an “ALL:[bad IP address]“. Still, this meant that I banned them after the fact.

So, I installed DenyHosts. It’s a python script that can run as a daemon, monitoring my /var/log/auth.log for login attempts using non-valid users and/or passwords. After a few failed or invalid logins, the attacking IP is automatically added to /etc/hosts.deny, nipping a prolonged attack in the bud—just the way I like it.

DenyHosts is highly configurable, letting you you specify all types of rules such as how many failed logins are allowed before banning, specifics of what services to ban and for how long (hours, years, eternity). You can have DenyHosts email reports to you and also have it synchronize against a master list of bad IPs that’s bolstered by over 4,000 users. It’s pretty damn cool. In one day, I had three separate attacks, promptly caught and banned.

I’ve been running Tor, the anonymous proxy service championed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, on a remote server I rent. I wanted to chip in to the Tor project and effort and I thought that one of the easiest ways to do it would be to run a Tor server and help strengthen the network. For a brief but detailed explanation of what Tor is, how it works and why you should use it, check this.

So, I set it up, letting Tor run as an exit node, meaning that my server was allowed to be one of the exits among the chain of servers that work together as the Tor network. To paint a picture, this means that if someone in China requests a web page through the Tor network, my server could be one of several out there that make that request at the end of the chain and delivers the page into the network and ultimately, back to the person. Hence, my server’s IP address would show in the logs of the site hosting said page as having requested it.

Over the past few months, it’s been fine. Tor runs along, does it’s thing and I pay it no mind. I received one polite email from a guy in Germany concerned that someone had used my server to abuse his message board, but after clarifying that I run Tor and occasionally someone might abuse the proxy service, I keep no logs and therefore cannot be responsible, nor provide any information about who did what, when and whatnot. The likelihood of the offending person coming back to his message board for further mischief, using my server was very unlikely given the way Tor works. He replied that he checked his logs and yes, it did look like the person used Tor and further scrutiny showed that he had in fact come back a few times, using other Tor servers. I recommended that if he was concerned and didn’t want to deal with it, he could block Tor users from his site. it ended amicably and all went back to normal.

Yesterday, I came home to find a terse email from my server host, telling me my account was in jeopardy of being shut down due to abuse complaints received. Slightly alarmed, I read through and noticed that the complaints were attached.

Apparently, some guy in the UK is complaining that someone with my server’s IP address (I don’t think he realizes it’s a server and thinks it an end-user…basically me) “hacked” his website and downloaded some of the products he sells without paying. The guy demanded that I be banned immediately or “legal action will ensue”. Here, read it yourself:
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