Control Window Behavior With Compiz

Check out the new article on how to control how windows behave via Compiz. It includes instructions on how to embed a usable terminal in the desktop background.

Linux From Scratch

*Please place all comments/feedback on the new site please!*

Ever wanted a TRULY customized Operating System, but don't know enough to do it alone? Try Linux From Scratch, a project dedicated to helping users create entire Linux distributions from the ground up with easy to follow instructions.

File Carving Tutorial and Challenge

The next few posts are going to be in the form of a series of challenges. In each challenge, I'll post a tutorial to get you started on the topic, then I'll post a few questions that you need to solve. Today's topic is file carving.

The Competition:

1. The first person who wins each category wins:
1. Easy: 1 point
2. Medium: 2 points
3. Hard: 3 points
2. Each user can answer ONE (1) difficulty level. 
3. Each challenge closes in 7 days if there isn't a winner.
4. The competition will take place over several weeks, and will consist of several challenges, like the one you are about to undertake.
5. At the end of the competition, scores for each user will be counted up, and the user with the most points wins a prize!

Good luck!

How to be Hardcore: Part 3

Good news everyone! Today we're going to actually start programming! I'll show you how to make a really easy "Hello World" program, in assembly! From this, you should get a good handle on the basic syntax of assembly, which will make the rest of assembly seem like a piece of cake.

Thanks GNU for as (assembler) and ld (linker)!

How to be Hardcore: Part 2

Alright, so far you (hopefully) understand the basics of registers and the CPU, along with CPU instructions and interrupts. Today I'm going to talk about memory, and how to set up an assembler that uses AT&T syntax, since AT&T syntax the native syntax of GCC. So, lets get started with memory.

How to be Hardcore: Part 1

This might just be me, but whenever I feel like being a hardcore programmer, I program in assembly. Yes, you read that right. Assembly. One step above machine code. So, in order to convert normal programmers into hardcore programmers, I'm going to make a series of tutorials. At the end of each section, I'll include a "tl;dr" (too long, didn't read) summary of the section. In today's episode, I'm going to give you some background information, focusing on the CPU instructions and the CPU itself.

Yes, this makes you cool

All About Torrents

Torrent have gotten a bad reputation lately. When most people think of the word "torrent", they automatically think about sites such as The Pirate Bay, or software like the late Limewire. I'm going to teach you the workings behind torrents. I'm going to focus on the BitTorrent protocol, used to communicate and transfer files.

TrueCrypt

TrueCrypt is a program that is used in order to provide secure encryption for files, however, it's a lot more secure than just that! TrueCrypt stores the encrypted files within a single larger file, with the size not proportional to the file(s) inside it (except that the encryption file must be larger). Without knowing the key, it's nearly impossible to crack the file. The best part? You can have several "partitions" inside the encryption file, each containing a separate directory of files. So, if someone discovers one key, they still don't have access to all your hidden files! Alright, so here's how to use it:

TrueCrypt lets you create encrypted volumes

Booting From USB

Flash drives, thumb drives, memory sticks. They go by many names, and are an extremely useful piece of technology. But did you know you can boot your computer from a USB drive without even touching your hard drive or CD drive? This tutorial is going to show you how to easily turn an ordinary USB drive into a mobile hard drive, complete with an operating system. In this case, I'm going to show how to put Ubuntu, a Linux distribution with a very user friendly interface, on it. This way, we won't have to deal with the licensing issues that accompanies doing this with Windows. This is really useful because when you use other people's computers, knowing you are in a safe environment.

Creating Standalone Backdoor Binaries Using Metasploit

Here's the highly anticipated Metasploit tutorial! Since Metasploit has so much to offer, it would be impossible to capture every single aspect of it in a single post. So, I'm going to do this in parts; each part will have a specific topic, such as creating standalone binaries. Specifically, the binary I'm going to show you how to create will drop a Reverse TCP payload on a victim's computer. Basically, the user's computer will connect back to the attacker's IP over the Internet (TCP/IP), and will listen to the attacker's computer for commands. I'm going to include a Meterpreter payload as well. Meterpreter can best be summed up as a "smart shell". It comes preloaded with Ruby scripts that can make actions such as taking screenshots, recording audio, starting a keylogger, or even taking video from a webcam on the victim's computer as easy as typing in a single command. Scary, huh?

Nmap

Nmap is a really useful utility that will help you scan your local network. Beyond just finding hosts, nmap can tell you what ports are open, the type of device, and even the operating system of whatever you scan. This versatile network utility has several uses which I'll go over.

Compiz on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

Ever wanted desktop effects for free that would put a computer running OSX or Windows to shame? Well, look no further than Compiz. Compiz is a windows manager for the X Windows System that can use graphics hardware for extra power. Besides the fact that it has some really awesome affects, one of its best points is that it works by loading plugins. This lets the user pick and choose what features they want loaded at any given time. I'm going to show you how to install and configure Compiz on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, although the same process works on most other versions. Lets get started.

Conky

Conky is an awesome system monitor for Linux systems. It just sits on your desktop and does, well, whatever you want it to do! And thats the beauty of it. It is extremely customizable, which makes it useful for just about everyone. For a while now I've had a cool .conkyrc (the conky config file) that calls on another script to download album art based on what music Rhythmbox is playing! There's another way to do this if you use MPD (music player daemon), but I've always used Rhythmbox, so that's what I'll write about.

My humble desktop