Tales from the “true”-crypt

suspicious-fry So what is up with Truecrypt??  Something fishey is indeed going on, their website www.truecrypt.org has been taken down and is now just redirected to; http://truecrypt.sourceforge.net/ My initial thought was that they had been hacked, but that does not appear so – the redirect happened several days ago and had it been a hack I would have expected it to be fixed by now.  So something more serious seem to be going on.  I read and heard several different ideas on what is going on ranging from protest against the XP end of support, Lavabit a like case, to NSA infiltration. My personal “favorite” is that it is and internal powerstruggle in the Truecrypt team, the team has always been very secretive and roumers are that then internal power balance in the team has not always been the best.  It is thus likely that the team somehow ended up imploding and subsequently just abandoned the whole thing. I do feel that if the case is internal power struggels, then the team defaced their own gravestone, why would you not give a good explanation on your website as to what happened instead of having people be suspicious as to possible NSA infiltration etc. Shame on you Truecrypt team, this exit is just plain irresponsible, grow up and face the music. A summery of what is known, a repository of the “original” truecrypt files and some additional useful insights can be found on the GRC website; http://sl.readmydamnblog.com/1xgFhIK truecrypt-logo
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Reddit – bookmarks -> the easy way..

Npolitifact_photos_redditow I have for the longest time been way to occupied to do a lot of reading on Reddit – which is actually a shame as there is lots of good info flowing around in there..  But anyhow, I came across a neat little trick which might be wellknown to you Reddit sharks out there, but I did not know it so I’ll share 😀

See the thing I hated was that in order to get to the groups that interests me I had to logon and then do several mouse clicks afterwards..  Might not sound like a major undertaking, but if you are busy then everything that takes mouse clicks may put you off..

Then I discovered that you could actually embed the groups you wanted to see in the URL and hence bookmark it!?  Now I have one bookmark with the mail groups I want to read and thats it…  Nice..

A few examples;

First one group;

http://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin

Now a bunch of groups, you see you just add a “+” sign and the groupname..

http://www.reddit.com/r/andSec+antiforensics+AskNetsec+computerforensics+homelab+HyperV+netsec++PowerShell+pwned+SCCM+sysadmin+sysadmintools+usefulscripts

As mentioned, this is likely childsplay to Reddit know-it-all’s but to me it is a real neat trick.

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Web-server caching.. Varnish Cache

5df133c41bfcbf3289618ffd525f199a_largeI just read about a free caching solution (Open Source) for your web-server, it sounds like an excellent solution and it seem it has been around for some time.

What it does is basically to cache incomming requests in order to reply rapidly to repeated requests, thus taking a load of your servers and possibly reduce the need for a clustered solution.

Again there are many aspects on solutions like this, but if you “need more power” (as Cpt. Kirk always said to Scotty in Star-Trek then this may be a possible road to go down).

Header from website;

Varnish Cache is a web application accelerator also known
as a caching HTTP reverse proxy. You install it in front
of any server that speaks HTTP and configure it to cache
the contents. Varnish Cache is really, really fast. It
typically speeds up delivery with a factor of 300 - 1000x,
depending on your architecture. A high level overview of
what Varnish does can be seen in the video attached
to this web page.

Link to video that explain what it’s all about (in VERY general terms 😀 but still)..
http://sl.readmydamnblog.com/1nARoMe

Link to website;
http://sl.readmydamnblog.com/1k0Bo6p

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