Installed Kali Linux in my virtual lab this weekend - just to make a snapshot of currently available packages and, as usual, steal a couple of ideas for my own pentest Linux VM. Two ideas I will never steal from Kali are Safari Icon for Firefox and use of Gnome 3.

I really enjoyed this. I know it does not look like much, but I am very happy about this little project: I finally learned how to solder properly and lead-free, and I now understand AVR microcontrollers architecture and specifics. What’s left is to finish power optimization and start periodically add different sequences for LEDs and different reactions to button clicks. And I also learned about powering small devices and about Joule Thief / step-up regulators, induction, surface-mount and PCB design/ordering (however, these are not used in this project)...

When I said my last goodbye to Windows, I thought it will be Ubuntu to become my new primary home operating system - I had it for a couple of years in past, with very very good experience for both me and my wife, don’t even remember why I switched back to Windows. Probably because I disliked what they did to Gnome, or the switch to Unity, or Il-2 Sturmovik did not work well with Wine, or all three together and lack of time to deal with it - so I thought I’ll pay Microsoft to make all decisions for me… I really don’t remember now....

I’ve got Windows 10 at my laptop around 3 weeks ago and was testing it since. I do like the new design, and the OS itself is definitely better than any previous Windows version, including 7. And all of my life I’ve always been a Windows guy, preferring Linux only in server or virtual environments. But I just can’t leave all the privacy concerns be. I hate the idea someone is constantly watching what I am doing and where I am going....

In this post, I am going to illustrate that it’s practically impossible to protect any data in Hadoop clusters without Kerberos (‘Secure mode’) enabled. I hope this will help admins and security folks see that Kerberos is the only way to make Hadoop more or less secure - without it, there is no authentication in Hadoop at all. But as you can see from my previous posts about Hadoop, even with Kerberos enabled, there are still very serious challenges, so Kerberos is just a start, not the final solution....

In my previous post “An important Hadoop security configuration parameter you may have missed” I was talking about importance of the hadoop.security.auth_to_local configuration parameter and promised to provide some solutions using this parameter. I want to focus on a couple of practical use examples in this post, and if you want to learn more about this, here are links to the existing documentation: By Hortonworks: http://hortonworks.com/blog/fine-tune-your-apache-hadoop-security-settings/ (IMHO the best documentation to date for Hadoop) By Cloudera:...

upd: Even better solution is to use the latest Windows 8.1 ISO which can downloaded using the following Microsoft’s tool. It instantly detects the video adapter and installs the required driver. http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/create-reset-refresh-media This seems to be a standard problem for many Lenovo laptops: after Windows 8 enters sleeping mode, computer does not wake up - all the lights and fans are on, but display remains always black, until reset. Support forums did not help much - people talk about this problem for a couple of years already, some advice updating BIOS, but this did not work in my case....

So much disappointed… After all these years I finally decided to buy Kaspersky, and appeared it became just another bloatware now. Guess the folks don’t care about their firm’s karma anymore…

Description: http://www.eccouncil.org/Certification/certified-ethical-hacker

I did not use Kaspersky software for over a decade now. Gave it a try today…