Gl.ib.ly

Yesterday somebody gave me a USB key with ~1000 JPEGs on it. Each JPEG was a scanned page, ugh, and the task was to find some useful information about topic X. Now each JPEG was about 1-2mb and I needed to do something useful with these images quickly. So what follows is quick walk through of how to do Optical Character Recognition (OCR, that means taking silly image files and ripping out any text identified in them) on Linux or in my case a Mac.

Continue reading "Doing OCR on linux/Mac"

For the longest time I have been unhappy with password masking in GUIs. I never really saw the point and a whole host of functionality has been developed to help users out when dealing with passwords; browsers remember and auto-populate password fields for users. I use many passwords, even have my own encrypted password lists, however, I only use a handful of sites everyday and I know those passwords pretty well. This doesn't stop me from making errors while typing complicated 10-16 character passwords -- three in a row is not unheard of and then you have to deal with unreadable CAPTHAs. Seeing the password reinforces the context in which the password is used and helps users learn them off more quickly.

A much better option is to use a screen privacy filter to stop a wide audience from snooping over your shoulder.

This is just one of those gripes that was rekindled when I read The Problem with Password Masking.

Over at the Honeynet Project they used to run security competitions which were quite a bit of fun. I remembered one in particular which I looked at but hadn't completed. It dealt with the forensic investigation of a floppy disk. I was tinkering with an application to measure byte entropy and thinking of a way that it could be used in a forensic investigation. There is no point using the little application to analyse my terabyte (TB) sized drives so remembering the floppy disk challenge I downloaded the floppy disk image (1.44MB;MD5 = b676147f63923e1f428131d59b1d6a72).

Continue reading "Analysing the byte entropy of a FAT formatted disk"