Autarchy of the Private Cave

A nice report on the cost of bruteforcing variable-length and variable-complexity passwords using cloud computing services (e.g. Amazon’s EC). There’s a kind of a tutorial in their previous post.

Slow DoS attack with just 1 computer against a number of web servers, including Apache: slowloris. There is a solution for Apache, packaged for RedHat and also available for Debian.

Finally, there’s Go programming language. The most inspiring promise to me personally is the ease of execution parallelization with language’s built-in syntactic constructs. That is something highly desired. Also, I like that it is a compiled language. However, it might be 10%-20% slower than pure C. Let’s see how it grows.

Today, using memtest86, system speed test, hddspeed and some other DOS utilities for diagnosing and testing PC hardware, I decided to put together my own simple bootable utility CD disk. But first, I did some searching to find if something similar exists.

It does exist – Ultimate boot CD. That CD has numerous freeware testing and diagnosing utilities which will help you – if you are up to some good old (read “small fast”) DOS utilities. And not that old, actually – modern hardware is supported.

The only modification I’ll do to the Ultimate boot CD will be adding freeware bin/hex viewer/editor. Surely, more utils to come – with original size of just 115MB, there’s plenty of room to add extensions. You can even extend the CD image with non-free software, like Partition Magic.

P.S. To diagnose and fix software problems – have a look at System Rescue CD.