If you want to do a thorough system security audit on a Linux machine what do you use? Cobble together a few of the pre-installed tools? Search through the numerous locations for a tool that might give you enough information to determine if your system is safe? Or, do you open up a terminal window and use the Lynis security auditing tool? If you are of the former category, you get a gold star!

The Lynis project is from the same team that brought us Rootkit Hunter, so you know you can trust this tool. Lynis will not only scan your system for security issues, it will also scan and report installed software, general system information, and even configuration mistakes. You can’t afford to not use Lynis. In this article I will show you how to install and make use of Lynis.

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Tags: linux auditing, security auditing, security reporting tools
Categories: Advice, Linux, Open Source, Security, troubleshooting

If you have been running Windows 7 for some time you might notice eventually that some of the notification icons that are displayed in the customize dialog are those of programs that are no longer installed on the computer system. Neither the software program nor the Windows operating system seem to remove those old notification icons from the system tray automatically.

This can be a problem because of two reasons: The customize dialog will grow over time with new notification icons added but none removed. It will take longer to customize the system tray icons. The second is privacy as the icons will reveal information about programs that have been used on the computer system in the past.

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Tags: notification icons, system-tray, tray cleaner, windows 7, windows software
Categories: Windows, software

Open Office 3.2.0 Final has been released and is currently distributed to mirror ftp servers worldwide to ensure a smooth delivery once the release notifications will be added to the project’s homepage. Five release candidates and numerous betas have made available before the developer’s of Open Office decided to release the final version of the Office suite.

There are lots of changes and improvements over Open Office 3.1.1, the current stable build that is still offered at the Open Office website.

Among the improvements are faster startup times for Open Office writer, draw and calc, improved ODF format support, added support for proprietary formats like password protected Microsoft Office XML documents, improved statistics function, changes in the way comments are added to Draw or Impress and new diagrams in Chart.

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Tags: office suite, open office 3.2, open office update, open-office
Categories: Linux, Mac, Windows, software

One of the things I’ve always liked about using Linux is the feeling that my input is actually important. Either by way of giving input to the developers directly or (more importantly) reporting bugs that inevitably appear on a system. It’s the latter of the two that help Linux (as a whole) to take great strides forward. Without a community of users and developers to report problems, the operating system would stagnate.

But to the new user, these bugs are nothing more than a nuisance, getting in the way of things “just working”. Those new users need help in understanding that bugs in Linux should be reported to the developers. But how do you do it? A new user isn’t going to be savvy enough to run a backtrace on a segfaulting piece of software.  In this article I am going to attempt to help the new user to see how easy it can be to report bugs as well as how and/or where to report them.

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Tags: bug reporting, bugs, bugzilla, strace
Categories: Advice, Linux, Open Source, Tutorials Basic, software

Webmasters and researchers sometimes need to take a look at a website’s history. This is for instance essential when buying a website to make sure that the seller has been running the website for the time claimed and not snatched a dropped domain to make a quick buck. The Wayback Machine at archive.org is the preferred way of checking how a website looked in the past. Not every website is included obviously but the most popular and visited websites usually are.

WaybackFox is an interesting prototype add-on for Firefox that makes it a tad easier to access the Wayback Machine directly from the website that needs to be checked.

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Tags: archive.org, firefox, firefox-add on, wayback machine, waybackfox
Categories: Browsing, firefox

If you are a very observant – or cautious – PayPal user you might have noticed that several connection requests are made that are to other domains that are not paypal.com. This can be extremely worrying to users considering that malicious software and attackers also use these kinds of connections for their evil doings.

If you analyze the connections that PayPal makes you notice that the site makes two connections to elements on the domain paypal.112.2o7.net which looks on first glance like a phishing website. The two elements are the smallest in size (both are 43 Bytes) but seem to take the longest to transfer.

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Tags: 2o7 cookie, paypal, paypal tracking, paypal.112.2o7.net, tracking, tracking cookie
Categories: Security

The Libraries are a new addition in Microsoft’s latest operating system Windows 7. They have basically evolved from the MyDocuments folders which were limited by the fact that they lined to one absolute location on the computer system. Libraries on the other hand can combine and display the contents of multiple locations which is very helpful if photos, videos, music or documents are stored in different folders or even on different hard drives.

Libraries are by default however limited. It is for instance not possible to add a network location to a library. Trying to do so will result in the error message “This network location can’t be included because it is not indexed” or “This folder cannot be included because it is on a share that is not indexed”.

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Tags: libraries, win7 library tool, windows 7, windows 7 libraries, windows software
Categories: Windows, software