March | 2014 | Steve Woods

Tor network used to hide botnets and darknets

08/03/2014 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

According to IT security vendors Kaspersky Lab, the Tor anonymity network is under threat of being swamped by criminals abusing the anonymity it provides for hiding zombie networks, malicious command and control servers and ‘darknets’, Le Monde Informatique reports.

Tor – otherwise known as The Onion Router – has always had its dark side, but last year the network’s use by criminals seems to have grown appreciably. According to researcher Sergey Lozhkin, “Kaspersky Lab had uncovered evidence of 900 services using Tor, equivalent to 5,500 nodes (server relays) and 1,000 exit nodes (servers from which traffic emerges) in total.”

“It all started from the notorious Silk Road market and evolved into dozens of specialist markets: drugs, arms and, of course, malware.

“Carding shops are firmly established in the Darknet. Stolen personal info is for sale with a wide variety of search attributes like country, bank, etc. Offers for customers of this kind are not limited to credit cards. Dumps, skimmers and carding equipment are for sale too”, he added.

“In addition, command and control (C&C) servers hosted by Tor are more difficult to flush out, blacklist or eliminate,” Lozhkin continued. “Although creating a Tor communication module within a malware sample means extra work for the malware developers. We expect there will be a rise in new Tor-based malware, as well as Tor support for existing malware.”

Experts from Kaspersky Lab have so far found Zeus with Tor capabilities and then detected ChewBacca and finally analysed the first Tor Trojan for Android.
Exasperated, ma’am?

08/03/2014 Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics, Social Media

This tweet from @Case4theCrown just shows the exasperation the judiciary – a body not normally known for making its feelings known – feels with regard to the continuing farce that is Capita’s courts and tribunals interpreting “service” for the Ministry of Justice.
Spring’s golden heralds

07/03/2014 Steve WoodsBristol, Language

It’s a bright, sunny day in Bristol and there’s a hint of spring in the air. In addition, the daffodils are out in their brazen glory, like these fine examples planted by Bristol City Council in Castle Park.

Along with the blossom of the cherry, in honour of which A.E. Housman wrote “Loveliest of Trees” (posts passim), daffodils are another spring favourite celebrated in poetry, in this case William Wordsworth‘s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”.

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed–and gazed–but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
Addio XP

07/03/2014 Steve WoodsBristol, Linux, Open Source, Tech

It’s not just the Bristol & Bath Linux User Group (LUG) that’s organising an event to mark the end support for Microsoft’s superannuated Windows XP operating system (posts passim).

In Italy a consortium of the Perugia GNU/Linux User Group, LibreUmbria, the Perugia Centro di Competenza Open Source and Girl Geek Life is also organising a half-day event to inform people that they don’t need to buy a new computer to have a modern, secure operating system again; all that’s needed is a change to a free and open source Linux operating system and its vast range of software.

Addio XP, ciao software libero!

The Perugia event takes place at Perugia University on Saturday, 5th April 2014 from 9.00 am to 1.00 pm. Full details can be found at http://xpaddio.perugiagnulug.org/.

Install Linux: don’t end up with an operating system that should died years ago!

Support for XP (and MS Office 2003 too. Ed.) ends on 8th April 2014.
How to make pancakes, 16th century style

04/03/2014 Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities

The Good Huswifes Jewell was an English recipe book written by Thomas Dawson which appeared in the late 16th century, of which the British Library has helpfully provided a transcript of the page covering pancakes for Shrove Tuesday, otherwise known in secular Britain as Pancake Day.

The transcript of the pancake recipe is as follows:

To make Pancakes

Take new thicke Creame a pine, foure or five yolks of egs, a good handful of flower and two or three spoonefuls of ale, strain them together into a faire platter, and season it with a good handfull of sugar, a spooneful of synamon, and a little Ginger: then take a friing pan, and put in a litle peece of Butter, as big as your thumbe, and when it is molten brown, cast it out of your pan, and with a ladle put to the further side of your pan some of your stuffe, and hold your pan …, so that your stuffe may run abroad over all the pan as thin as may be: then set it to the fire, and let the fyre be verie soft, and when the one side is baked, then turn the other, and bake them as dry as ye can without burning.

This is the first time I’ve ever come across a pancake recipe featuring ale. 🙂

As regards the author, Thomas Dawson wrote a number of popular and influential recipe books including The Good Huswifes Jewell (1585), The good Hus-wifes handmaid for the kitchen (1594) and The Booke of Carving and Sewing (1597). These books covered a broad range of subjects, including general cookery, sweet waters, preserves, animal husbandry, carving, sewing and the duties of servants.
Upgrading Debian from stable to testing

04/03/2014 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

I’ve been using Debian GNU/Linux for many years and have been very pleased with its stability, reliability and security.

Yesterday I decided to do something I’ve never done before: upgrade a production machine from Debian stable (codename ‘wheezy’) to Debian testing (codename ‘jessie’). See this guide for an explanation of Debian versions and releases.

Anyway, after installing the apt-listbugs package which a Bristol Wireless colleague recommended, I then proceeded with the upgrade via the command line.

The sequence of commands to perform the upgrade itself is very easy.

# cp /etc/apt/sources.list{,.bak}
# sed -i -e ‘s/ \(stable\|wheezy\)/ testing/ig’ /etc/apt/sources.list
# apt-get update
# apt-get –download-only dist-upgrade
# apt-get dist-upgrade

The first command backs up the software sources list, whilst the second edits the sources list to replace release versions. After that, the actual fun begins, downloading updated package information, downloading the packages themselves and then installing them.

All told, it went very smoothly. The laptop rebooted normally after the upgrade and brought up the GUI. The only major problem was that I lost the functionality of the Broadcom wireless network card; this was resolved by reinstalling the card’s firmware – a 2 minute job. The upgrade also resulted in 2 packages being broken. The command (as root) for fixing this problem is apt-get -f install.

In total, the upgrade took about 2 hours and I now have a machine running a more modern version of Debian on the same machine and have kept all my previous personal settings, which is a definite plus compared with a clean install where one has to spend hours reinstalling software packages not included in the ISO disc image and tweaking.
LibreUmbria taking free software into schools

04/03/2014 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

The first of three free seminars organised by LibreUmbria – the organisation promoting free and open source software in Italy’s Umbria region – aimed at parents and teachers is being organised at the Giovanni Cena primary school in Perugia at 3.30 pm on Monday 10th March, the LibreUmbria blog reports.

For some months the LibreUmbria working group has been making contact with a number of Umbrian schools in order to take free software into classrooms. They wish to start with primary schools where it is easy to raise children on open source (and there’s some great free and open source education software available at primary level. Ed). LibreUmbria’s wave of training is being heralded in with the arrival of spring thanks to collaboration with Perugia’s Terzo Circolo Didattico, which helped get this LibreUmbria experiment off the ground.

The LibreUmbria@Scuola programme will include three seminars on the subjects of awareness, freedom and security. Each word will address one aspect of new technology and open up a debate with attendees.

The seminars will be followed by two courses on the LibreOffice productivity suite in multimedia classrooms: one aimed at parents and another at teachers, who will in turn act as mentors and recommend them to colleagues and then to children in accordance with the cascade training approach.

Just to emphasize the need for a digital culture that generates awareness, the title of the events being arranged by LibreUmbria is “Digital natives do not exist”. That awareness is currently lacking and there are as yet no “natives”.
It’s Bristol Radical Film Festival week

03/03/2014 Steve WoodsBristol, Media, Politics

Bristol Radical Film Festival is on this week with a wide choice of events from today, 3rd March until 8th March. The films will be screened in a wide range of venues, which include and have in the past included digital outreach projects, social centres, political squats, radical bookshops, community bicycle hubs, trade union buildings, etc.

The Festival first took place in 2011 and showcases contemporary and historical works of overtly political documentary and fiction film-making. Organised by staff, students and alumni from the Centre for Moving Image Research and the Film team at the University of the West of England (UWE), the Festival also aims to draw attention to a range of other progressive, community-based initiatives in the city.

Two of this year’s offerings in particular take my fancy.

Firstly, there’s a screening of McLibel, the David and Goliath story of two people who fought back against one of the most powerful corporations on the planet. Ronald McDonald may have won their libel case against Helen Morris and Dave Steel, but it was very much a Pyrrhic victory. McLibel is being shown at Knowle West Media Centre, Leinster Avenue, Knowle West, Bristol BS4 1NL (map) on Thursday, 6th March at 7 pm. Entry is free.

The second offering to take my fancy is Uomini contro (English title: Many Wars Ago), produced in 1970. The film is set in Italy in 1917. Society is violently split down the middle over the question of whether to continue intervention in the war. Anarchists and socialists are intent on causing so much trouble that continued intervention is impossible. Railway lines are ripped up, battle lines are drawn. On the Isonzo front a General smells socialism behind the troops reaction to his orders and a disastrous Italian attack upon the Austrian positions leads to a mutiny among the decimated troops. The screening is being hosted by Bristol Radical History Group as part of its World War 1 series of events. The film will be screened at 5.00 pm on Saturday 8th March and the venue will be 2nd Floor, The Arc, 27 Broad Street, BS1 2HG (map) and there’ll be a £4 admission charge.
Let Bristol be Bristol

02/03/2014 Steve WoodsBristol, Politics

Within 2 days last week, we had the latest pair of proposals from a member Bristol’s great and good and a London property developer to try and turn the city into somewhere else.

On Monday last week Bristol 24/7 carried a story entitled “Bristol… the ‘New Orleans of the UK’?”.

According to the article, local businesses are being urged to help elevate Bristol to a world-class centre for jazz and blues music as part of Mayor George Ferguson’s ambitions to make the city the ‘New Orleans of the UK’.

By the end of the week, apparently plans had shifted from trying to turn Bristol into a city founded by French colonists in 1718 on the banks of the Mississippi to property developers and their scheme to convert some of the city into Shoreditch, now an inner city part of London in the borough of Hackney, which was originally named after Edward IV’s mistress, Jane Shore, who was reputedly buried in a ditch in the area.

This news appeared on Bristol Business News, which reported as follows:

Verve Properties, the niche developer behind Bristol’s highly-successful Paintworks creative quarter, has started work on the first speculative office refurbishment in the city for five years as the market recovery continues to gathers pace.

London-based Verve said it saw a gap in the Bristol office market for trendy office workspace of the type now common in the Shoreditch/Tech City area of East London that would appeal to the Bristol’s vibrant creative sector.

What I like about Bristol is precisely that it is Bristol. It’s quirky, diverse and has its own unique features not found anywhere else, like the centuries of architectural variety on display on Old Market Street and West Street, the City Docks and the wealth of green, open spaces which the public can enjoy, even in the city’s less prosperous parts.

A Bristol montage: image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Where attempts have been made to turn the city into somewhere else, it’s been a disaster. One only has to look at Bristol’s so-called ‘Shopping Quarter’ – Broadmead, Cabot Circus and the Mall Galleries – to see the result: bland and unedifying. The area is filled mostly with identikit local branches of national retail chains. Rearrange the shops and you could easily in another large UK town or city.

I like Bristol because it’s Bristol and it should furthermore be left to be itself and not try to be somewhere else.

One has to ask the question: do those who profess to love the city but want to turn it into somewhere else really love the city; or do they actually hate it?

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