How the Great Firewall of China Blocks Tor

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Wilde was able to find that the method the firewall was using to identify which sessions to go after had something to do with the list of SSL ciphers contained in the SSL packet the client sends at the beginning of a session. By changing that list, he was able to evade the blocking of the Chinese firewall. More long-term solutions are in the works, as well, including password protection for bridge relays and the establishment of another layer on top of the session that simply looks like binary data.

via How the Great Firewall of China Blocks Tor | threatpost.

Remember the “borderless” Internet? It’s officially dead

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Balancing chaos and order has always been a challenge; you want to curtail botnets and spam and phishing and other Internet ills without destroying the productive chaos that allowed a million websites and online businesses to launch without permission from any gatekeeper. Early Internet theorists, caught up in this chaos and still somewhat insulated from criminal gang activity behind so much spam and fraud and hacking online today, worried about breaking the Internet’s best qualities. Today, with 15 years of online bad behavior to look back on, governments have increasingly ignored Dalzell—but they sometimes risk imposing so much “order” on the ‘Net that creativity, commerce, and free speech is affected.

via Remember the “borderless” Internet? It’s officially dead.

AcerCloud Is Acer’s Answer To The Media Cloud

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AcerCloud Is Acer’s Answer To The Media Cloud | TechCrunch.

AcerCloud makes it easy to take photos on a smartphone while on the go, and then view them on a main PC at home or in the office, without the delay and complication of manually transferring files. It also allows users to purchase a movie from an all-in-one PC, and then watch it on a tablet or smartphone on a train or airplane. As long as the main PC is in sleep (standby/hibernation) mode, Acer Always Connect technology can wake it up through Wi-Fi® so media can be retrieved via a mobile device. AcerCloud, meanwhile, intelligently uses local and cloud storage together so all data is always available. Other features of AcerCloud include:

TCP may keep its offered receive window closed indefinitely RFC 1122

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Part of the Transmission Control Protocol TCP specification RFC 1122 allows a receiver to advertise a zero byte window, instructing the sender to maintain the connection but not send additional TCP payload data. The sender should then probe the receiver to check if the receiver is ready to accept data. Narrow interpretation of this part of the specification can create a denial-of-service vulnerability. By advertising a zero receive window and acknowledging probes, a malicious receiver can cause a sender to consume resources TCP state, buffers, and application memory, preventing the targeted service or system from handling legitimate connections.

via US-CERT Vulnerability Note VU#723308 – TCP may keep its offered receive window closed indefinitely RFC 1122.

Diebold Virtualizes ATMs To Secure Banking Data

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Diebold Virtualizes ATMs To Secure Banking Data – – Storage Virtualization – Informationweek.

Hackers–in some cases, company insiders–have put card readers on gas station service pumps and customer checkout machines in supermarkets, storing customer data in an encrypted file that can be downloaded by the hackers. Virtualization combats such attempts by making such a reading device an instantly identifiable interloper, since the endpoint device no longer needs any memory-equipped accessory.

Starting the Piranha Configuration Tool Service

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To use the Piranha Configuration Tool you will need at minimum a text-only Web browser. If you start a Web browser on the primary LVS router, open the location http://localhost:3636. You can reach the Piranha Configuration Tool from anywhere on through a Web browser by replacing localhost with the hostname or IP address of the primary LVS router.

When your browser connects to the Piranha Configuration Tool, you will notice that you must login to access the cluster configuration services. Enter piranha in the Username field and the password set with piranha-passwd in the Password field.

via Starting the Piranha Configuration Tool Service.

Upgrade PHP 5.1/5.2 to 5.3 on CentOS

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I’m finding that more and more software developers are being quite inconsiderate and are making code that requires PHP 5.3. Since many server-based and long-term support distros are still on PHP 5.2, this can make things difficult quickly.

via Upgrade PHP 5.1/5.2 to 5.3 on CentOS :: Chris Jean.

Here here!  I needed to do the following on CentOS 5.7:

#sudo yum erase php

#sudo yum erase php-commons

#sudo yum install php53

#sudo yum install php53-mysql