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I purchased the AmazonBasics 8-Sheet Micro-Cut Shredder a few months ago. For the price I think it’s a good buy. The CD shredding is a bit of a joke (use scissors), but it handles paper and cards admirably, cutting them into 4mm x 12mm pieces that will foil the casual antagonist. The 8-sheet capacity, compact size, and low cost make it a good choice for personal document filing. Tis the season.
The CIA’s A Tradecraft Primer is a brief introduction to critical thinking and structured analysis. Its techniques are not limited to intelligence, but instead are applicable to any field where the bias of preconceived notions may cause harm. Its short length makes it a worthwhile read – I read it in a little over an hour while waiting for a plane – particularly as an adjunct to publications like Red Team Journal.
Brian Krebs’ recent experience highlights PayPal’s insecurity. The convenience and ease of use of PayPal give them a wide customer base, but their inherent untrustworthiness has long been reason for concern. For as long as I’ve used the service, I’ve been concerned about external attacks, like what Krebs experienced, as well as the internal threat – PayPal themselves have a history of freezing and diverting their users’ funds. Both of these concerns can be addressed via a proxy bank.
In 2008 I opened an online checking account with a new bank, completely separate from the financial institutions I normally use. The account has no “overdraft protection” or any line of credit. As with my PayPal account, I keep no money in the checking account. This checking account is the only account I associate with PayPal. When I want to make a purchase via PayPal, I transfer the needed funds from my primary financial institution to the checking account at the proxy bank. Since banks still subscribe to the archaic notion of “business days”, this transfer can sometime take up to week, but more frequently completes within 2-3 days.
The brief wait period is acceptable to me (it certainly reduces the ability to impulse buy) and gives me a level of security that otherwise cannot be achieved with PayPal. If someone breaks into my PayPal account, there’s nothing for them to steal. Even PayPal themselves have limited ability to steal funds. If an attacker is lucky, they may gain access to the account when I’m transferring funds in preparation for a purchase. My PayPal transactions are typically low-value, so at most this lucky attacker will acquire $100 or so. That’s an acceptable risk for the convenience of PayPal.
In the past I used this multilayer approach for all online purchases. A debit card from a proxy checking account at a different bank with no access to my primary accounts was the only thing I would use to make online purchases. When the account was compromised, the wait period for a new card wasn’t the inconvenience it normally is, since it had no impact on my day-to-day spending with my primary accounts. I think this type of security is required for shopping online, but responsible use of a credit card can offer acceptable protection for non-PayPal transactions without the hassle of a proxy account.
Arch has been my Linux distribution of choice for the past 5 years or so. It’s a fairly simple and versatile distribution that leaves most choices up the user, and then gets out of your way. Although I think it makes for a better end experience, the Arch Way does mean that it takes a bit more time to get a working desktop environment up and running.
At work I use Ansible to automate the provisioning of FreeBSD servers. It makes life easier by not only automating the provisioning of machines, but also by serving as reference documentation for The One True Way™. After a short time using Ansible to build servers, the idea of creating an Ansible playbook to provision my Arch desktop became attractive: I could pop a new drive into a machine, perform a basic Arch install, run the Ansible playbook and, in a very short period of time, have a fresh working environment – all without needing to worry about recalling arcane system configuration or which obscure packages I want installed. I found a few projects out there that had this same goal, but none that did things in the way I wanted them done. So I built my own.
Spark is an Ansible playbook meant to provision a personal machine running Arch Linux. It is intended to run locally on a fresh Arch install (ie, taking the place of any post-installation), but due to Ansible’s idempotent nature it may also be run on top of an already configured machine.
My machine is a Thinkpad, so Spark includes some tasks which are specific to laptops in general and others which only apply to Thinkpads. These tasks are tagged and isolated into their own roles, making it easy to use Spark to build desktops on other hardware. A community-contributed Macbook role exists to support Apple hardware. In fact, everything is tagged, and most of the user-specific stuff is accomplished with variables. The idea being that if you agree with my basic assumptions about what a desktop environment should be, you can use Spark to build your machine without editing much outside of the variables and perhaps the playbook.
The roles gather tasks into logical groups, and the tasks themselves are fairly simple. A quick skim through the repository will provide an understanding of everything Spark will do a matter of minutes. Basically: a simple i3 desktop environment, with GUI programs limited to web browsers and a few media and office applications (like GIMP and LibreOffice), everything else in the terminal, most network applications jailed with Firejail, and all the annoying laptop tasks like lid closure events and battery management automated away. If you’re familiar with my dotfiles, there won’t be any surprises.
Included in Spark is a file which describes how I install Arch. It is extremely brief, but provides everything needed to perform a basic installation – including full disk encryption with encrypted /boot – which can then be filled out with Ansible. I literally copy/paste from the doc when installing Arch. It takes about 15 minutes to complete the installation. Running Ansible after that takes about an hour, but requires no interaction after entering a passphrase for the SSH key used to clone the dotfiles. Combined with backups of the data in my home dir, this allows me to go from zero to hero in less than a couple hours without needing to really think about it.
If you use Arch, fork the repository and try it out.
Shirley’s cyberpunk magnum opus tells the story of a private security company attempting to use the distraction of a third world war to impose fascism across the United States and Europe, and the guerrillas who resist them. Although first published in the 1980s, the omnibus edition was refreshed by the author for publication in 2012, which gives it the feel of taking place 20 minutes into the future.
The Pelican 1060 plus pre-cut foam from eBay makes for compact and environmentally secure battery storage. The foam I bought has 10 holes for AAA batteries and 40 holes for CR123 and AA batteries. This holds the CR123 batteries I keep on hand to feed devices and all of my spare AA/AAA Eneloops.
A diameter of 1.65 mm puts it in the same neighborhood as Type I Paracord, but with a little over twice the tensile strength. It fits through more eyelets than the typical Type III Paracord, making it appropriate for a wider range of footwear. It holds knots well, will pop through zip-ties in a jiffy, and the inner Kevlar can be broken down into three strands. I buy it from TwinLine.
