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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Last week, I bought a new laptop. It’s a great machine and I was able to get Kubuntu running on it with nearly zero hitches in the time it took me to ride the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan. I may be the first person ever to install Linux on a subway train—I’m not sure. I figured that since this new machine was fully pumped and equipped with a graphics card, I’d keep a small windows partition for the occasional video game quickie.

It’s been about a week and yesterday, in a fit of boredom, I decided to futz with Windows, which is something I usually loath doing. I booted into that nasty soup of unneeded and bloated programs and started uninstalling all the stupid free shit that came with my default install. It’s amazing to see the first boot difference between a fresh Kubuntu install and my fresh from the factory Windows install. Kubuntu is blazing while XP, on a dual processor with a gig of RAM and a 128 meg Nvidia card is slow as fuck, bogged down by a ridiculous mess of programs all set to run automatically. Nearly all of these programs are crap to me. You’d think they’d want to show off how fast their machines are by not crippling them at boot. I just don’t get it.

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Yesterday, I was given a free CD of the band, “Velvet Revolver“. Pansy-ass cock-rock is absolutely not my thing, but I figured I’d listen to it just for kicks. As I was peeling off the plastic wrapping, I noticed that SONY/BMG was the publisher of the album. Antennas fully perked, I checked out the fine print and sure enough, I had one of those completely fucked up, root-kit installing, DRM-up-the-wazoo CDs of doom and destruction.

Now, since I run Linux, I’m immune to the evil these CDs inflict. On the flip side, I may be immune, but it doesn’t really matter since the CD won’t even play on my computer since I don’t use Windows or Mac which work with DRM. As a result, this CD went straight to the fucking trash bin. No way am I going to sell it or even give it away. It’s fucking poison and the only reason I’m not rip-shit mad about it is that I got it for free and I could give a rat’s ass about the band.

Call me crazy but I’m sure as fuck not going accept or pay money for a CD that will infect my computer with DRM enforcing software and leave a back-door that can open me up for a viral infection and compromise my personal data just to listen to a fucking music album. Furthermore, I’m not going to use an OS who’s terms of use stipulate that in order to use my computer, my rights go out the window and I have to drop panties and bend over my keyboard and self-sodomize myself with my mouse in order to appease the corporate gods because while I may have purchased my computer, the operating system and the CD, they own my soul and have patents on my DNA and therefore all rights and ownerships are forfeit.

Fuck that shit with a rusty screwdriver.

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Jesus bleedin’ nuts! I’ve got reader-submitted questions coming out of my ears. I’ve had to backlog a few, so don’t worry, I’ll get to you. This next question is right up my alley.

Clutch wrote:
Q:

Here’s a question that may actually be within your realm of experience; I have a bunch of images I’d like to resize, smaller, for uploading. Is there an easy way to do this to many images at once, say, in photoshop? Or perhaps another, preferably free application I could get my grubby little hands on? Thank you, oh wise and gratuitous davebgimp!

A: Easy as your mom! I’m going to answer this a bit backwards by first addressing the issue of software. Yes, you can do this in PhotoShop or the slightly neutered and cheaper PhotoShop Elements. PhotoShop’s a great program. I use it daily at work, but it costs an ass-load so most people end up pimping out Grandma to buy it or they steal it. Personally, I think that for most users, especially those who are working primarily in an RGB (red, green and blue) color space — web publishing for example, it’s not necessary.

Another option is to take the free route. There’s a few more steps involved but it costs several hundred dollars less… actually it costs nothing. There’s an Open Source, free image editing alternative called GIMP, which stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It’s available cross platform, so is accessible to anyone. I use it at home on Linux and having used PhotoShop professionally and otherwise for the past six or so years, I find it meets and exceeds all my home-use needs. Experienced PhotoShop users making the switch might get a bit annoyed at first, as I did, at the learning curve involved. I chalk it up to the fact of using one program exclusively for so long and getting used to the tricks and shortcuts and then trying out a new application with different tools, names and ways to get things done. But once I got past this (it was a quick transition), I found myself impressed and not missing much. If you’re new to either program, I highly doubt you will share this temporary and arguably unnecessary frustration.

The GIMP does have limitations in it’s lack of CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black - a color space normally used with professional printing and presses) support and a rather huge learning curve if you want to install some plug-ins and know nothing about compiling from source code. Unless, you’re designing for print on a professional scale, you won’t be missing the CMYK support though. I have heard that there’s a CMYK plug-in available, but as of the latest version, the color space is not natively supported. No biggie for me or you other average home users. As far as having to compile programs for GIMP plug-ins, if you’re using Linux, you either know how to do this, or could stand to learn for your own good.

You should at least check out the GIMP. Since it’s free, you don’t have the problem of shelling out for a program that updated with a new version almost yearly (which means more $$$ or more pirating if you want to keep up with the latest). GIMP will always be free of charge and there’s plenty of documentation, tutorials and communities to help you get the hang of it, or you can always ask daveb.

Now, on to the first half of your question. I’ll explain how to do batch resizing with both PhotoShop and the the no-cost method. Let’s start with PhotoShop.

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This week, I decided to play mad genius and attempt a dual installation of Linux and Windows on my main computer. I already run Linux on my old computer, but it’s slow and I wanted to see what it would do on my souped up beast of a machine and besides, other than video games, Windoze sucks armadillo balls. I only keep it around because I’m a video game junkie and it’s just easier for me to boot up XP than deal with trying to get a game to run on Linux.

I’ve been using the Ubuntu distribution of Linux for about a year now and I decided I would stick with it for this install. I like it,but will admit that my experience with other packages is minimal. I’m definitely not one of those guys that after many long years of trying every flavor of Linux, thought really deeply and settled on one. Ubuntu works pretty good for me, at least so far.

No problem for a daring genius like myself, I thought. I have two hard drives in my main PC, so I figured I’d leave the one with XP installed on it alone, clean off the other, format and install Linux on it. This way, if there were any problems, my system and my files would remain intact on the main drive. No need for any real backing up, right?

Wrong. So very seriously wrong. Sometimes I can be such an overeager hairless chimp of a fucking retard.

In an effort to keep a long and boring story short, I’ll cut to the basics. I fucked up. I tried again and fucked that up as well. I ended up with Linux completely screwed and waking up next to grandma, buck naked as well as being unable to boot XP. After taking some advice from a support forum, I attempted a Windows repair. However, instead of repairing, it completely fucked me, resulting in a permanent blue screen of death.

So there I was with no working operating system, completely screwed for not having done a proper backup. For several minutes, I contemplated jamming my keyboard up my nose, strangling myself with the mouse cord or shoving my head through my monitor. I had five years worth of photos trapped in there, along with all my game save files. Horror!

Luckily, I had the poise to download and run a live CD so I could boot Linux and run it from the disc drive. I ran a little script called winmac_fstab that searches for and mounts NTFS drives or partitions. Bazoom! I had access to my files. XP is so fucking unsecure. It took me five seconds to bypass my login completely and get at my user folder, or any other folder I needed.

Armed with a USB flash drive, I reenacted the fall of Saigon and evacuated as many files as I could and pretty much got everything out and safely stored on a different computer. Finally, after rescuing everything important, I completely wiped both drives and tried again…and again…and yet again. All told, I think I ended up wiping my PC about three times.

Then, as if sent from a higher power, a thought came into my thick skull: Why not look for a fucking tutorial, you stupid fucking renegade herpes sore?

A minute or two of searching Google brought me to this tutorial on dual installing Ubuntu and Windows. I reinstalled XP and with the help of this rescue CD, resized the partition, leaving about 10 gigs of free space which I subsequently installed Linux into. It worked perfectly.

I now have the glorious experience of being asked which operating system I wish to boot, every time I turn on my computer. I can laugh my most evil laugh and say no to Windoze every time. Ubuntu loads and runs about ten times faster than XP and so far works great. All is well and back to normal. Next time, I swear I’ll consult a tutorial first.

Dongle! It’s true, the only purpose of this post is to use “dongle” as many times as possible. Dongle, dongle, dongle. *sigh*

Seriously though, daveb has been struggling all day with a technical conundrum and endless googling turned up scarce and confusing info. Having finally figured it out, he feels bound to post the steps as simply as he can so that other brain-damaged squirrel humpers like himself can get the job done. With that said, daveb presents to you:

How to install your GPG keys to a USB dongle for WIN XP

1. Install the latest binary version of GnuPG
2. Attach your USB dongle and create a folder named keys, or whatever’s appropriate for you. If you have pre-existing keyrings, place them here.
3. Open REGEDIT (START > RUN > type regedit)
4. In REGEDIT, navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\GNU\GnuPG
5. Right click in the folder and select NEW > STRING VALUE
6. Name it “HomeDir” (without the parenthsis, of course)
7. Right-click the entry and select MODIFY.
8. Under VALUE DATA, type the full path to your desired key folder. For example, daveb’s is F:\keys\ (”F” being the USB dongle). Hit OK.
9. Open a command prompt and type “gpg –version” or “gpg –list-keys”. Check for the Home that is listed, it should now be your dongle and any keys in that folder should now be listed. You’re done!

Now that you’re finished, use a file-shredding program like Eraser to destroy any locally saved copies of your keys. With that done, the only way to encrypt or decrypt with your keys is to have possessin of the dongle. So, keep it safe. You also might want to consider hiding a backup on floppy somewhere (safe deposit box, deserted island, anal cavity) due to the fact that although dongles last a long time, they do have a write-life, depending on your model.