Gl.ib.ly

Shows Google being used over the Tor network, but Google thinks I no speaky the English.

A small inconvenience I am sure! Well that and speed, which is horrendous.

Some interesting links: Nice overview of Onion and Garlic routing, Low-Cost Traffic Analysis of Tor, Low-Resource Routing Attacks Against Anonymous Systems, Shining Light in Dark Places:
Understanding the Tor Network (are the authors in jail for wire tapping?) and Tor hack proposed to catch criminals (or anyone, don't expect all the kids to play fair). For some background check out Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption.

Edit: The researchers did not go to jail.

Awesome! Hot linked from xkcd. Also, checkout wikipedia for more details on what the Russians do and how public key crypto could get you killed or landed in jail (if you live in the uk).

If you have ever had to deal with language packs you will know how much of a pain they can be. I regularly interact with 9 Moodle language packs and I don't like doing that much. For some reason, can't remember why now, we gave people the raw language string files (PHP code files) to translate and they translated these files and sent them back. Only these people are not PHP coders and they make mistakes. Here is my list of what goes wrong and how to solve.

Continue reading "Common translation errors in Moodle language packs"

I came across an old enough post on Didier's blog about Group policies that have disabled cmd.exe from running. Didier mentions a few ways to get cmd.exe to run. The suggestion I like the most is to find the DisableCMD string in cmd.exe and change it to DisableAMD using a hex editor. Thankfully there is a tool which will allow us to patch cmd.exe in one tiny line.

Continue reading "The command prompt has been disabled by your administrator?"