Month: August 2016

That Time Were My Security Paranoi Might Pay Off in a Real World personal Scenario

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In a recent post I wrote about how I had to wipe my Mac Mini at home due to a potential compromise in my chrome browser. The ironic thing with that issue was for months I’ve already started taking steps to minimize the chance of such an exploit. The problem likely began months earlier and didn’t present itself until recently however the damage was already done. It just justifies the extreme measures I am taking taking in regards to securing my web browsing.

At a high-level my approach is isolating some but not yet all of my browser traffic to Linux virtual machine. I know that theoretically a virtual machine is not 100% isolated. I’m willing to chance using the virtual machine over booting into TAILS using a USB key. That level of inconvenience is not something I typically want to be bothered with and I feel that my current solution will be good enough.

Within the virtual machine I installed Firefox and chrome browsers as well as the TOR browser. I also configured open VPN to use my VPN provider. I then set up a visual cue i.e. a distinct background of the virtual machine to note that when I am using it I am in a semi-isolated system.

To protect the virtual machine from most exploits I take a snapshot about every month that includes the latest patch level for all the applications in the operating system. I do not ever use the virtual machine prior to that snapshot to do anything other thank update software or make base OS and application configuration changes I want to be persistent. Once a snapshot is taken I will use the virtual machine and then when I’m done I will revert back to that clean snapshot. I might not revert back to the clean snapshot after each use however I try to do it as often as possible. At minimum when I go to update the virtual machine I will revert back to the last known good “clean” snapshot and upgrade that. Then I’ll take another snapshot.

Late last year I implemented this solution using an Ubuntu 14.04 virtual machine. In April I built new ones using Ubuntu 16.04. Because I own a copy of VMware Fusion for personal use and a work copy of Parallels I have both virtual machine flavors of the operating system image. Other than a few minor tweaks with the new image the 16.04 version is mainly an operating system upgrade. I now have a “secured virtual machine” on all the main computers that I use day-to-day.

The solution isn’t perfect however as a first pass at this I feel that it gives me the best trade-off between additional security and ease of use. The VPN gives me some anonymity. TOR And VPN gives me more. The snapshot of the virtual machine decreases the chance that the system can be infected.

Longer term I want to build a dedicated machine for TAILS or Quibs. That solution would only work at home since I need a dedicated computer setup for it.  For now I will settle for the VM solution I have implemented until I am comfortable using it and able to accept the extra effort involved in a dedicated machine configuration.
What’s interesting or disturbing to me is some corporate executives and even government representatives (NSA labels Linux Journal readers and Tor and Tails users as extremists

The W Sisters and the Assorted Stories From 19-August

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Having a 2 1/2 & almost 4 year old makes for great entertainment.  I like to say they are our entertainment budget.  I have been making a more active effort to journal the funny things they do and say.  Up till last week I didn’t take the time to clean up the writing to make it more “presentable” for public posting.  I am going to keep trying to do that because it is funny stuff (at least for me so I want to share) and it contrasts the geeky technical stuff I typically post.

This post is a collection of a few brief stories from 19-August 2016.  Some of this stuff wouldn’t be as amusing if it wasn’t for the fact they were from a 2 12 and almost 4 year old.  It amused me anyway.

While I was changing Amelia into pajamas Teagan was by my computer.  Both girls like to watch the photo slide show that plays as a scream saver. Teagan must’ve seen something that she wanted to show Amelia so Teagan called out to Amelia to come see. From across the apartment  on the changing table. Amelia replied “I’m busy right now”

A few minutes after finishing changing her when I put Amelia down on the floor she slapped my arm a couple of times. It was playful and didn’t hurt however I cautioned her that hands are not for hitting since we do not want her hitting even if playing around. Her response was crying out “I don’t want to hit the couch”. I assumed that was something she was told to try when she wants to hit someone.  I later confirmed with MC that was correct. I asked her then what she wanted to hit if not the couch. Instead and she told me her Dee Dee (Paddington Bear).  I gave her Paddington bear and she proceeded to lightly slap it two times and walked out of the room.

Later that day playing with he really big Legos that are bigger than the duplo Legos the girls were arguing. Teagan wanted to walk out of the room. As she was walking out Teagan asked me to keep an eye on Amelia. I said okay and glanced at Amelia for a second and continue cleaning in the kitchen.  I was trying to complete cleaning all the 30+ year old lego so the girls could play with them. Teagan then looked at me again as she was walking to her room and scolded me and said I need to look at  Amelia.  She continued to insist that i keep eyes on her the whole time.  For an almost 4 year old it was pretty persistent.2016-08_kids_selfie

I Played iOS 10 Beta Roulette and I Lost

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When Apple announced that the public betas for iOS was available I thought about trying it out. I then remembered Beta one of iOS and how I had to quickly remove it from my phone even though it wasn’t a phone I relied on day-to-day. This year I waited. Last year around now I felt it was safe enough to try the beta on a phone and generally was okay playing with it through the official launch of the operating system.

Since as of this writing it is late August (22-August and not sure when this post will be scheduled to post) and the launch date for the final version of iOS 10 is close enough I finally installed the latest public beta of iOS 10 on my iPhone 6S Sunday. So far I haven’t noticed much difference. It feels like all his bedding features I was looking for a not yet enabled class apps are written to support them. I am talking about features like unified call log and chat messages in messages from my VOIP applications. Or Siri application integration.

One function that does work is facial identification in photos.I was able to tag some photos with the correct names of people however when I miss tagged one photo I was not able to remove the linkage. There’s definitely some work that needs to be done however so far it looked pretty cool.

Other than the notification pop-ups looking different I haven’t really experienced much change so far. Our plus side most of the apps I’ve tried to use including my dictation app seemed to work without problem. I was concerned about the beta breaking stuff. That is why I waited until late August to try a beta. I am also only testing on one phone that if I ran into a problem I don’t have to rely on.

UPDATE

I wrote the initial part of this post over the weekend and scheduled it to publish on Friday, 26 August. Between the time I wrote it and Wednesday night I had a change of heart. There did not seem to be anything fundamentally wrong with iOS 10. I’m eager to see some of the new functions working when applications are updated to support them however feature wise the beta was just not that compelling to keep using it. The trade-off to using it was flaky network connections where I would have to put the phone in airplane mode and then turn it off every time I came out of the subway. To my dictation app, Dragon Anywhere not syncing correctly even know it mostly worked. I don’t rely on this phone that’s running the beta however it was more nuisance than it was worth.

In the end there wasn’t anything majorly compelling to use the beta or to get rid of it. I took the short term hit of time to do a full restore last night and will eagerly upgrade when the final version comes out.

It’s A Microphone Not A Speaker, That’s Why I Talk Into It

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Say hi to Snowball. Pretty much everyone that sits near me believes that this is a speaker. They are usually pretty surprised when I tell them that it is in fact a microphone. I would think the people that immediately sit near me here my dictation however maybe I’m more self-conscious then I should be.

What’s cool about the snowball is that with a keyboard command I can turn on my Dragon Dictate app and dictate something pretty clearly and then turn off the listening mode of DragonDictate. I was hoping for and what ended up happening is that this microphone enables me to use the Dragon software more often throughout the day. Before that I would have to put a headset on and take it off every time I wanted to dictate. That was annoying. I also couldn’t listen to music at the same time I want to dictate anything because I couldn’t have two headsets on at the same time.

A guy at work who was dabbled in blogging owns a better model microphone by the same company recommended it. The reviews on Amazon were also pretty good so I splurged a little bit and picked this mic up a few months ago. I’m glad that I did. It is not as accurate as My headset mic right up against to my face however it gets the job done a lot better than any other alternative.

Anything that allows me to decrease the amount of typing I do, the happier I am. I do find however that for longer documents or messages I need to write I prefer to take my laptop and headset and go into huddle room to dictate. I think that is more around being self-conscious then performance of the snowball.

Overall this was a great purchase.

The Real Reason I had Kids Was to Play Legos as an Adult

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I knew that my parents had a bunch of old toys of mine. In general I was vague on the details of what I had. There were matchbox cars and G.I. Joe’s. There were also possibly some Star Wars figures and other action figures. Beyond that I really wasn’t clear on what exactly survived childhood to get put in storage. Out of all those toys however I knew that my parents had kept a large cache of Legos. The reason I knew they still existed was at some point (I think when Zachary was old enough to play with them) my dad unsealed the box that I sealed up when I must’ve been 14 or 15 years old. I remember that because I sealed the box with a completely built Lego SDF-1 from Robotech. My dad mentioned that when he opened the box there was something built inside. He also mentioned they immediately took it apart before starting to play with the Legos. I was sad that he didn’t at least take a picture of it since I was curious how the model survived over the years. If it was intact I would’ve been really cool to have kept it since how often do you get to keep something you built when you were a kid and have it show up decades later?

The story about my SDF-1 being dismantled reminded me I had Lego and as of around 2010 it still existed. Ever since I knew we were going to have kids I was excited to have the opportunity to play with Legos again. We have these mega blocks that the girls played with ever since Teagan was small. We held off on the Duplo’s. I am now glad we made that decision since we can jump right into Legos. Teagan is the right age for it. We are also trying to train Amelia not to put anything in her mouth. Other than her finger I think she’s been pretty good about that.

When the topic came up a few weeks ago I asked my mom if she could get out the box of Lego and bring it over to our apartment when she got the chance. I was pleasantly surprised about a week ago when after my mom came back from the beach with Amelia that I had a box waiting for me on my desk.

We could not start playing with them right away however since they’ve been in storage for quite some time. It was visibly apparent they needed cleaning. I hand cleaned a few of the large pieces and went through the rest of them to see what we could give the girls and what we would need to clean further. Last week as I was cleaning them the girls were both fascinated in them. I ended up having to move my sorting session from the kitchen to the playroom floor so the girls could immediately start playing with what little amounts of Lego I declared clean and ready for use. At first session the girls were engaged for about a complete our before we had to stop and clean up for bedtime. Finding torsos and legs for all the Lego people was a priority for both girls. I was surprised how many we were able to find.

Over the first weekend we had the Legos MC brought out a bag we bought when Teagan was a baby. This bag was special because you could spread the bag out on the floor and play with stuff on it. When you were done and you wanted to clean up all you do is pull on the cord of the bag and everything stores away very easily. The bag is very big so both girls could easily play on the work surface that it creates when opened up. It was a genius idea to use for our Legos. I have a feeling may have been in MC’s mind the whole time when she bought that thing in 2012.

MC bought a few boxes of 300 piece Lego kits to give as gifts for birthday parties. It is a starter kit with lots of basic size blocks. We were having so much fun we decided to use one kits of blocks for us to add to our collection. MC gave them to the girls Sunday. Before we did I had the realization that as much is we have a lot of Lego we have a lot of oddly shaped pieces. That is because what’s left is an amalgamation of several playsets that I had when I was a child. There’s left over pieces of the moon lander playset. There were also pieces of a gas station, fire station, and police station. Is also a boat from something but I can’t remember that very well other than the boat itself.

I think both mornings this weekend the girls played for almost an hour with the Legos and again for a little while in the afternoon. Yesterday I came home and our babysitters son was there for the day and he built stuff with all the Legos a little bit of Amelia’s help. Before bedtime the girls and I continue to play with what he had built and I built them rocket with two boosters on them. We must’ve played for about 45 minutes before we had to go brush teeth.

So far I’ve seen both girls play with the lego men and the accessories that come with them. They’ve made cars, and a boat. They’ve also just been generally fascinated. Hoping that this turns into a long-term hobby they enjoy. For now I’m just enjoying that they’re happy with something that I enjoyed so much as a child. I’m also pretty pleased to be a will to play with some of it myself not have a really good excuse.

The W Sisters and the Story of Watching Star Wars For The First Time

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Saturday I got a box of old toys from my mom that she had been storing for me.  Now that she gave me my lego’s earlier in the week she wanted to clean house and give me the rest of the toys she had of mine.  I was happy to take them.  Last night I started introducing some of them to the girls. There were some new matchbox cars as well as some small matchbox car sized fighter jets. Among the stuff was also my old metal star destroyer and the millennium falcon. I explained that the millennium falcon is the ship that Chewbacca flies in.  The girls are both into Chewbacca so that got some interest.

Yesterday morning the girls were talking about either the millennium falcon or Chewbacca when MC suggested I watch Star Wars with them.  We needed a distraction while she cleaned a bit around the house. I had wanted to introduce them to star wars the actual movies for a few weeks now. I had previously showed them the trailers of most of the movies and we read the little golden books a bunch of times.  That is how they started liking Chewbacca so much.

As a purest we started off watching A New Hope. We watched about half of the movie. We stopped when they found out the princess was in the Death Star with Han & Luke. That was over an hour for them and it was plenty. I was glad that neither of them got too scared.  There were some scenes that Teagan got a little bit scared but handled it a lot better than she did with finding Nemo last year.  The asked a bunch of questions like they do with any video or book however I think they liked it.  Teagan did continue to mention Star Destroyers periodically throughout the day so that is a good sign.

Next up is to finish the movie and then hopefully move on through the first trilogy.  After that I need to figure out how to introduce them to Doctor Who without scaring them.

The Time I Had To Nuke The Site From Orbit

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Back in mid July I noticed something odd with my Mac Mini.  It turned out that At some point in the past few months my chrome browser on my Mac Mini at home was compromised. I’m not sure if it was malware or a configuration hack on the browser.

The problem may have existed for some time. I do not normally use chrome on my home Mac. What I noticed that was odd behavior  after I launched chrome to log into my Google account. Whenever I use my Google account I always login via chrome. Call me paranoid but I do not want Google possibly tracking activities via my login on Safari that I use as my daily browser. When I attempted to log in I noticed that after clicking on login from Google.com  I got some fake message about my Google account being compromised. The funny thing was I never actually gave it my login credentials and the screen that was displayed didn’t look at all like standard page on any Google site I have been on.

My first reaction was to clear all the settings on the browser like it was a brand-new set up. I then tried again however the problem persisted. That was concerning to me.

My next step was to completely delete the Chrome browser from my Mac and download a fresh copy from Google.com using a different browser. That worked and once I installed the new version everything seemed okay. The lingering question I had was how contained was the problem I had? I some confidence but not enough that  issue was purely within chrome.   I had no definitive evidence to back myself up. 

To be safe in the immortal words of Riply from the movie Aliens  “nuked the site from orbit”. I created a carbon copy cloner image of my OS drive and then deregistered any application I needed to associated with this computer and wiped it. That was the only way to be sure that there was no ongoing compromise to my system.

The rebuild process was slightly challenging and took more time than I’d hoped. As I was trying to reformat the drive in recovery mode the computer kept crashing. I am not sure why.  That forced me to start to do a network boot and download the original operating system that came with this Mac bypassing the step on my local hard drive that was crashing. The machine is from 2012 so that meant at least three OS upgrades to get me to the latest. By the time I completed the original OS install I was able to download El Capitan on my MacBook Pro and create a boot USB key. The USB key worked so I was able to save a significant amount of time and jump right to El Capitan.  I was handful I did not need to complete several more upgrades. The parallel efforts paid off of trying to create the sub key boot disk from my laptop paid off.

Once I had my base install done I was able to patch the system and install the standard applications that I typically use. Because I use Bittorrent Sync for replicating my data restoring most of the system was as simple as reseeding my data on this machine. It took several days for the data to replicate however when it was done everything was fine.

Weeks later there are still some applications I haven’t finished setting up yet. Of course that means I don’t use them that often so it’s a minor inconvenience. The main applications I use already set up and working perfectly fine.

For me the moral of this story is my data replication set up works. I also confirmed what I already knew that no matter how diligent I am I can still be compromised. I think the problem is existed for a while however have no way to prove it. Recently I have started compartmentalizing some of my web browser to prevent such exploits. That I hope will mitigate risk for the future however nothing is 100% safe. That Compartmentalizing effort in and of itself is a blog entry I’m working on.

The W Sisters and the Story of The Bedtime Sing a Long

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Last night after putting the girls down for bed I could hear on the baby monitor Amelia leading Teagan in singing “if you’re happy and you know it clap your hands”. Teagan sang along for a while until she started singing some other song on her own. Amelia wanted none of that and went back to singing if you happy and you know it. After a while Teagan responded back to Amelia with something like “stop singing that song”.

Sometimes bedtime routine Canby extremely frustrating if they’re jumping on the bed or running around.  Other times it’s very hard to keep a straight face if I have to walk in there to have them stop doing something. Tonight at least I didn’t have to go in there and talk to them about their singing.I did have to go in half a dozen times for other stuff though. The challenge of them sharing a room is on supervise bedtime.

Continuing to Instill a Coffee Ritual in Toddlers But Not Really Because That Would Be Bad

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As far back as Teagan being able to hold her head up and able to be held by me upright we have been making coffee together. At first it was just me holding her and her watching me. Then it was Teagan pressing the button on the Nespresso machine for me. Next evolved into her helping me put the cartridge in the machine and press the button to make the espresso.

Nowadays Teagan and Amelia both can put the cartridge in by themselves. The only help the need is closing the container. It’s pretty cute to see both of them bring over their chairs to stand up tall enough by the counter help make my coffee.

I’ve blogged about it before since it is something so simple yet something that makes me smile every time I think about the coffee ritual we do together.

I don’t use the espresso maker very often anymore. Maybe once or twice a week I’ll have a shot or two of decaf after work. I rarely make it on the weekends. Instead I have moved on to a French press cup of coffee. I will use the Nespresso machine when I want to make an Americano. The price of the pods are significantly more than the price of coffee for the French press.

After I have lost my weight a few years ago I do not make cappuccino’s as often as I used to. Because of that the lore of the espresso machine is diminished. I still like Americano probably more than the French press however the cost just makes it prohibitive in the French press is not that bad.

I do however have used for the milk frother. That is because Teagan always asks me to make her coffee. What she really means is that I froth her up some milk. Since I used to take spoonfuls of my cappuccino milk that wasn’t touched by coffee and feed it to her as a baby I find it cute she likes to do that. She’s been asking me rather consistently in recent weeks to make it for her. Usually she asks when I get home from work and it’s late. I tell her to remind me on the weekends when I’m up to make her and Amelia breakfast. Then when she asks the three of us will make a batch of milk together and the girls will share.

I find it adorable that they sit on their chairs with the mug of frothed milk and eat it like yogurt or ice cream.

That Time I Spent Way Too Much Time Reasearhing and Buying a Divers Watch

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In June I read an article that was comparing to classic style diving watches. One from Seiko and one from Citizen. I have been thinking about getting relatively inexpensive watch to use when I’m at the beach or doing outdoor stuff. I don’t always want to be out using my Omega’s. I have almost done damage to my X-33 a few times. Especially in water, the pool or the ocean.

I liked the classic look of both the Seiko & Citizen in the review. I read the article thoroughly and had recalled that I have seen many people have the Seiko as part of their “EDC” everyday carry. Seperatly I have been reading a blog where people submit what they carry on them every day. It’s interesting to see what other people consider essential for their day to day lives. I’ve gotten a few ideas of accessories to get from that blog. I kept seeing the Seiko diver watch and to some smaller extent the citizen one and was curious. They are in the general style of the Rolex Submariner so it catches my eye.

After reading the article I did some more research on the Seiko SKX007. There was a newer model available (SKX009K) however the older SKX007K was more reasonably priced and exceedingly popular. I decided if I wanted an everyday watch that I could take to the beach this diver watch would fit the bill perfectly.

The challenge I had was finding the specific  Seiko SKX007K or even the newer 009K to see in person. I went to the only Seiko boutique in New York and they didn’t have it. Macy’s had some similar models but they weren’t what I was looking for exactly and they were more money. I found out later that the reason I couldn’t find the exact model number is the 007K & 009K are manufactured for everywhere in the world except North America. I ended up finding someone selling the SKX007K on Amazon Marketplace and bought it there. Even before my trek to the store I knew I could get it on Amazon but I really wanted to see it in person if i could first. I also bought a tool to change the watchband out. I bought a 22mm NATO strap and intend to use NATO straps with this watch like I am doing with my other ones.

In my teens and 20s I had cheap Casio digital watches and never understood why anyone would want a nice mechanical watch. Now here I am with the budding watch collection.

I have owned the Seiko SKX007K for a few weeks now. Overall it was a great purchase especially for the money.  Not quite a negitive however something I need to get more used to is that it is pretty heavy even with a nylon NATO strap and not a metal one. Compared to both my Speedmaster and the titanium X-33 I am not used to that extra weight on my wrist. It has done its job though while at the beach and as a general watch I can beat up.  I wore it basically all vacation since we were at the beach most days and I was happy with it the entire time.  I didn’t go diving however timing when we put sun tan lotion on the girls was easy enough with the bezel.  I am happy with it as a solid beat up watch.  Right now it is not likely i would wear it to work often though.

Beyond wearing the new Seiko at the beach, I am also wearing it when I get home from work so I can wind it since it is an automatic movement. I need to buy a watch winding device however I haven’t yet so wearing it for couple of hours when I get home helps me not have to manually wind it.

I am debating expanding my collection further. Next up for me would be something a little bit nicer.