NEWS ALERT!

Read all the gory details about this farce that is attempting to strip away one more layer of your personal rights – [LINK]

If you already know about SOPA and want to do something to stop this insanity go here [LINK] to contact your Congressmen.

There is also some good stuff covering the topic over at this [LINK] and here [LINK].

Fight for your rights before they are gone FOREVER!!

TIME IS RUNNING OUT !!

Lately all the attacks on computers connected to the net and personal info being stolen off computers or portable drives has brought security/privacy concerns back into focus for me. Once again looking back into the topic, I read a lot of good things about TrueCrypt and all the features offered along with cross platform accessibility made it very appealing. So I decided to try it out.

I haven’t had time to do a lot with it yet but I did a simple test run on a windows box and it performed perfectly! On a usb drive I created an encrypted volume with the client, taking only moments and the options displayed along the process made it a no-brainer. The volume was mounted as a drive using the TrueCrypt software and presto! The virtual drive was easy to read/write – storing whatever I choose. The next step is to dismount the virtual drive, once done the thumb drive shows an unreadable file of an unspecified type. Everything is secure until you decide to access it again with the TrueCrypt software and pass phrase you created, very nice!

Now for the best part, I took that file and was able to access it on my PC-BSD box. It was pretty painless, I created a directory to mount the volume to and opened a terminal. I changed to root, and mounted the file at the command prompt;

# truecrypt /path/to/encrypted/file  /path/to/mounting/directory

I was asked for the password, then a keyfile which in my case was there wasn’t one so I just hit enter, and finally it queried about a hidden volume which I did not create so the default answer of NO was chosen, all done. Simple, now my secure volume was accessible from BSD to do whatever I wanted with. Dismounting and re-encrypting was even easier;

# truecrypt -d

Done! I do wish there was a pretty gui for it in BSD like there is in the windows version but all the 3rd party graphical front ends I found were out of date and did not work properly. No big deal, for my little test case the commands were very easy. There are a lot more options and abilities built into TrueCrypt, but for now I just wanted to keep it simple to see how it all went. I have to say TrueCrypt definitely earned a thumbs up from me.

There is no perfect way to secure anything especially data, however if my secure container ends up misplaced or stolen this should go a long way towards helping honest people stay honest. For those who are less honest or who are just a busybody sticking a nose where it doesn’t belong it should frustrate the crap out of them!

I almost forgot to mention, TrueCrypt is free!

TrueCrypt PBI installer for for PC-BSD here – [LINK]

TrueCrypt home page here – [LINK]

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It originally came with Android 2.1 1030 but the good news is I finally got around to upgrading the firmware to Android 2.2 0603! It’s fast and has flash support. I haven’t messed with it much to check on the actual performance but it seems pretty good so far. When I make the time I’ll put together detailed info on the upgrade and how I made it work for me.

Ice Pilots seems more of a documentary than a ‘reality show‘, it does have a little too much drama for my preference but I can get past that watching them fly and maintain the old planes… that aspect I love!  It amazes me the amount of effort and skill needed to keep planes like that going. I really enjoy seeing them fly but would have zero interest in the work involved.

If it is available from your tv provider,  it’s really worth a look for those who like vintage aircraft.

It never made any sense to me that NASA has been underfunded for so many decades. NASA has been the ‘goose that laid the golden egg‘ in terms of technological payoffs that have touched almost every aspect of our lives, and instead of feeding the goose, D.C. bureaucrats have decided to cut the head off…. way to go dumb-asses!

The stamp issued will commemorate Shepard’s suborbital flight on May 5, 1961 and is the first stamp honoring a single astronaut on a stamp all by himself.

Full article and details here – [LINK]

The April Issue Articles Include:

• Interview with Dru Lavigne

• Why You Use FreeBSD Just May Start With A ‘Z’

• OpenBSD improves upon /etc/rc.d/

• DragonFly News

• Package Management for the upcoming PC-BSD 9

• Converting a Physical Partition with FreeBSD to a vmware Image

• Build appliances with QEMU and OpenBSD

• Drupal on FreeBSD part 5

• Mutt On OS X part 2

• Realtime Weather Data EMWIN on FreeBSD

• Benchmarking Different Kind of Storage

• Content Management Made Easy The Open Source Way!

Get it fresh off the press by going to BSDMag.Org for your free copy now.

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PC-BSD 8.2 changes include the following:

• FreeBSD 8.2-Release
• KDE 4.5.5
• Added ability to select file-system type and encryption during auto-partitioning
• Able to toggle between MBR/GPT partitioning
• Various bug fixes to the wireless / network managers

Read the release notes here – [LINK]
Download your free copy here – [LINK]
Download via BitTorrent here – [LINK]

(For a full list of changes in this release refer to the changelog.)

• Drupal on FreeBSD – part 3
• Email MX server in FreeBSD – Confguring FreeBSD as a mail MX server with Postfx
• Installing NGINX and PHP 5.3.x on FreeBSD 8.1
• Text Terminal magic with tmux
• Writing ‘bots using XMPP
• How to quickly make a bootable USB stick with FreeBSD
• FreeBSD and simple char device driver for real PCI-hardware
• BSD’s and Solaris on the Desktop. Are they ready to serve?
• Games Geeks Play!
• Why can’t offce employees get along with open source offce suites?

Get it fresh off the press by going to BSDMagazine.Org for your free copy now.

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