Latest Articles - 5/22/2012

Latest Articles from TheLinuxGeek.com

5/22/2012

Google Adsense Scam

Google has been in the business for some time. From the beginning they have had the motto, "Do no Evil." However, I believe Google is breaking away from there non evil heritage. I believe this has been going on for some time. Years ago I ran a computer hardware review site. This was a very small time site and it didn't stay active long. Part of the reason for this was that the site was banned from Google Adsense. The excuse was invalid clicks. Hardware was expensive and because it was such a small site review samples from manufacturers where quite rare and with absolutely no revenue the site quickly became vacant of any updates and died. The only reason it still lives today is because I used the name in my current business. Read More

Hacking WEP in under 10 minutes

WEP, also known as Wired Equivalent Privacy is a form of encryption used in early WiFi networks. While its not recommended today they're are still a very high percentage of people still using it. As with most technology people just set it and forget it leaving a high number of under secured networks in the air waves. As always I am not recommending you try hacking your neighbors WiFi networks. This should be done with all of your own equipment. Read More

Find Hidden SSID's

Known as security though obscurity many people may hide there ssid's from broadcasting. Just like mac address blocking this is a worthless form of protection. There is nothing secure about hiding your SSID. Its like the wizard hiding behind the curtain. It just does not add any value to your security and like mac address blocking it adds complication with no reward. Today I am going to show you how easy it is to reveal a hidden SSID using the aircrack-ng suite. First things first. Start airdump-ng by using the following command. Replace the interface with your own. Read More

Linux Tip: (Wireless Deauthing)

I found a great way to have some fun with friends and family. Using Linux to kick an individual or everyone off of an access point. Fun times you say, well lets see.

Deauthing is you pretending to be the access point asking the client to re connect. You spoof a re authorization packet to the client which makes the client try to reconnect to the access point. However, because you are constantly sending these packets the client can't connect because they continuously need to re authenticate. This is also how people kick users to set up a man in the middle attack. When you kick the client the client will automatically find another known access point. If you provide that to then they will connect to it. However, we are not going to get in to man in the middle attacks today. Maybe another time. ;-) Read More

Linux Tip: (Bootsplash)

This tip is something I have wanted to do for ages.

Has anyone ever wanted to change the bootsplash to something a little more personal. Personally I don't like the color green and the pale green bootsplash that openSUSE uses looks more like the poop from a sick baby. Well its supper easy to change. I had no idea how easy it was until I did it. Read More

Linux Tip: (Dynamic conky)

Just a new tip I figured out that I hope someone else will get some use out of.

I use conky quite a bit on both my desktop and netbook. However, my netbook has limited desktop space so I wanted to hide some elements that where not needed like the eth0 info when I am on wifi. so this is what I did. Read More

Linux Tip: (no root password for wifi)

I have spent 2 hours dealing with this and i finally have it working.
In opensuse 12.1 you need the root password to create a system connection in network manager. I didn't like this and wanted to be able to connect without a password so here is what i did.Read More

Linux Tip: (hdd temp in conky)

I have had a problem for a while now. I wanted to display my hard drive temp's in conky.

To do this I used this command.

This worked great except for the fact that the conky instance I was using has a .7 second update interval. This made my hard drive light blink constantly and because of where my case was it was quite annoying when watching a movie or something. So to solve this I created a script that I could run in cron that would write the info I needed out to a txt file in my temp directory. Read More

Linux Tip: (commands over ssh)

I have a freenas box and I like to periodically check the smart status on my drives to make sure everything’s OK. I just figured out a really sweet way to do it without lifting a finger. You can run commands though SSH by using ' around the commands Read more

Canonical cutting off Kubuntu

I have been an openSUSE user for many years. Because of this I have gotten quite attached to KDE. I have spent very little time using Ubuntu because of my preference to KDE over Gnome. I have however installed Kubuntu on many occasions. My netbook to this day even runs an older version of Kubuntu. I have always found it to be a great KDE distribution. However, apparently it has not been the success that Canonical had hoped for and after 7 years of financial support they have decided that as of version 12.04 this support will end. This isn't necessarily a bad thing though. Read More