USB is a nightmare for security administrators. And in the mix of iPods, high capacity thumbdrives, and you have many potential was for your company to suffer data loss.

The USB disabler is a free remote USB disabler. It only disables storage devices. USB Mice, keyboards, scanners will still work fine when this is in place. You can disable, or enable USB storage devices across your network.

It is small enough to fit on a floppy, and does not need any 30MB .net runtimes, or DLLs. It works without an install.

It is available for download from here [via]

Take a test: Do you have what it takes to become a citizen?

When immigrants want to become Americans, they must take a civics test as part of their naturalization interview before a Citizenship and Immigration Services officer. The questions are usually selected from a list of 100 sample questions that prospective citizens can look at ahead of the interview (though the examiner is not limited to those questions). Some are easy, some are not. these are some of the more difficult ones.

Should you be welcomed immediately to the Land of the Free or sent home for some more homework? Find out!

I scored 75%.

This has got to be the ultimate way to avoid rush hour traffic. — The Ultralight Flying Scooter

Congratulations to Justin, Luke, Matthew, Joshua, Jake, Joe, Joey, Grant, Christian, and Justin Z.

Way to go Pirates!

Thanks for the link Justin!

If you hate you some telemarketer phone calls, here’s one more weapon in the fight against their persistent calls:

If you call a number that has been disconnected or is no longer in service you will hear 3 short tones, “doo…dah…dee”, thanks to Ma-Bell…. Guess what the telemarketers’ software does when it detects these 3 tones at the beginning of your outgoing message? It thinks it has reached a line that is disconnected or is no longer in service. So, it disconnects and does not log your phone number as a working number. BINGO!

NOW record these onto you outgoing message or voice mail announcement, and start exterminating telemarketers. Try this example, but use your own name, “doo…dah…dee, Hello, This is Hiddenpcmaster”. It must be at the beginning of your announcement to work. You may have to explain it to your friends and family, but they will soon have it on theirs’ too.

CLICK ON “SIT.WAV” TO PLAY THE 3 TONES.

ENJOY YOUR MEAL

FCC approved as perfectly legal………………. sit.wav (44KB). Depending upon your Browser, you should receive an option to Save to Disk, or Open it.

Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight. - Phyllis Diller

You can view South Park videos from every season online.

Being a longtime eBay buyer and seller, I was happy to find the new eBay Wiki, a place where newbie and experienced eBayers can find information about buying, selling, and lots of other eBay issues you may encounter.

eBay has message boards already in place with a pretty involved community there, but it’s somewhat difficult to find what you need. This eBay Wiki will (hopefully) solve that problem.

Most email messages you send travel vast distances over many networks, secure and insecure, monitored and unmonitored, passing through and making copies of themselves on servers all over the Internet. In short, pretty much anyone with access to any of those servers - or sniffing packets anywhere along the way - can read your email messages sent in plain text.

Now more than ever, you might want to encrypt your email to protect it from prying eyes. Not only do we have government snoops mining vast amounts of data on the net and an ever-increasing number of companies monitoring their employees’ email, but phishing and other email scams increase by the day.

PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) software won’t protect you against the focused attention of a major government, but it will stop efforts to harvest credit card numbers and information that can be used to commit identity theft. Email encryption is easy, free and offers strong protection against prying eyes.
How PGP email encryption works

Consider this scenario.

Sam wants to send Jane a secret email love letter that he doesn’t want Joe, Jane’s jealous downstairs neighbor who piggybacks her wifi, to see. Jane uses PGP, which means she has a PUBLIC key (which is basically a bunch of letters and numbers) which she’s published on her web site for anyone who wants to send her encrypted email messages to use. Jane’s also got a PRIVATE key which no one else - including Joe the Jealous Wifi Piggybacker - has.

So Sam looks up Jane’s public key. He composes his ardent profession of love, encrypts it with that public key, and sends Jane his message. In sending, copies of that message are made on Sam’s email server and Jane’s email server - but that message looks like a bunch of garbled nonsense. Joe the Jealous Wifi Piggybacker shakes his fist in frustration when he sniffs Jane’s email for any hint of a chance between them. He can’t read Sam’s missive.

However, when Jane receives the message in Thunderbird, her private key decrypts it. When it does, she can read all about Sam’s true feelings in (pretty good) privacy.

You too can get PGP set up in a few simple steps.
Configure PGP in Thunderbird

The easiest tool to use is Mozilla’s email program, Thunderbird with the Enigmail extension. (Be sure to click “Save Link As…” and download the extension to your computer; otherwise Firefox will try to install it.) You’ll also need to download a the free GNUPGP software for Windows.

Here’s how to put it all together.

1. Run the GPGP installer. It should put GNUPGP under your Program Files directory.
2. Once you’ve downloaded Enigmail, in Thunderbird open Tools -> Options -> Extensions -> Install New Extension, and then choose the Enigmail extension file.
3. When you’ve restarted Thunderbird with Enigmail installed, you will see an OpenPGP menu item. Open it and go to Preferences. There you’ll find a dialog to point to your GnuPGP binary. Click Browse. On my machine, GPG was installed under Program Files\GNU\GnuPG\gpg.exe.
4. Now you’ll need to generate your public/private key pair. From the OpenPGP menu item, choose Key Management. From the Generate menu, choose New Key Pair. Choose the email address you want to create a key for, and set a passphrase. Hit the “Generate Key” button, and relax - it can take a few minutes.

When it’s done, you have the chance to generate a “revocation certificate.” This certificate can invalidate your public key just in case your private key is ever compromised. Go ahead and get your revocation certificate and save it.

Once that’s done, you’re all set to send encrypted mail. To find someone’s PGP key, from the OpenPGP menu, choose Key Management. From the Keyserver menu, choose Search. Search for another PGP user by name or email address and add his or her key to your key manager. Once it’s in there you will be able to encrypt mail to that person.

Then, compose your message as usual. Encrypt it by clicking the little key down on the lower right of your compose window. You can also cryptographically sign your message to prove it’s you; that’s the little pencil. Both of these buttons will turn green to show that they’re active.

Easy as pie!

To anyone who uses your computer and doesn’t authenticate in Thunderbird with the passphrase - or anyone looking through your email files on your ISP’s server, the message will look something like this.

Only your private key can decrypt the message and display its contents.

Now, nobody will be able to look at your messages and the government will have to drag you away at four in the morning if they want your chocolate chip cookie recipes.

Of course, in the real world, that’s probably not true. The government spy organizations have miles upon miles of supercomputer farms devoted to cracking cryptography and budgets in the billions. If you’re thinking of doing something you really don’t want the government to know about, and you think it’s something they might inconvenience themselves to find out, you’d really be much better off reconsidering.

They have ways of making you talk.

Via LifeHacker