Category: What I’m Up To

Scenes from “Operating systems” week at The Undercroft’s “UC Baseline” cybersecurity course, part one: Linux 101

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date August 7, 2020
1 Comment on Scenes from “Operating systems” week at The Undercroft’s “UC Baseline” cybersecurity course, part one: Linux 101

It’s the end of Week 3 of the inaugural class of UC Baseline, the cybersecurity program offered by Tampa Bay’s security guild/coworking space/clubhouse for merry tech pranksters The Undercroft. This week has been all about operating systems, with Monday to Wednesday devoted to Linux, and Thursday and Friday set aside for that contradiction in terms known as Windows security.

Not everyone in the program is a techie, and not everyone in the program has had much experience with the operating system, so the Linux portion of the week was largely an introduction.

Here are some photos from the Linux days…

A lot of the sessions were hands-on. To ensure that we were all seeing the same thing for each exercise, we all ran a GUI-free Ubuntu from a USB key:

This is me setting my hostname. The denotation of the name is the French word for “host”, but the connotation in Quebec French is a little more…colloquial:

The Undercroft has a nice little enclosed courtyard, and I love having lunch there. I’m going to miss it when the course ends:

I took advantage of a little downtime during the day to whip up a simple port scanner in Python, complete with 1337 H4X0R 5P34K:

I don’t write shell scripts often, but when I do, 75% of the script’s purpose is to share an inside joke with myself:

Even though I spend my time on the command line on POSIX-based systems like Linux and macOS, I do it in a GUI-based terminal program, where I can control/command-N a new window or control/command-T a new tab. Instead of that nice, cozy world, we were deep in 80-by-24 land, which meant we were splitting screens with good ol’ tmux, which I haven’t used in a dog’s age.

In the top pane below, I was working on a quick Python script to call from .bashrc for kick, and in the bottom pane, I thought I’d run Gopher for old times’ sake:

No OS administration class is complete without covering the process of adding and managing users:

UC Baseline: Windows security

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date August 6, 2020

We’re on the back half of Week 3 of UC Baseline, the cybersecurity training program being given by The Undercroft, Tampa Bay’s cybersecurity guild and security-focused coworking space. We just finished three days of Linux 101, which was mostly an intro to command-line Linux, and now it’s time for two days of Windows from a security point of view.

Scenes from UC Baseline’s “Linux 101” class. Tap to see at full size.

I’m the lucky recipient of a UC Baseline scholarship (I wrote about the scholarship opportunity and then landing it a few weeks back), and I figured that I might as well use my COVID-19 downtime productively by spending five-ish weeks participating in the program.

Tap the photo to see my article from 2009 associated with this photo.

From the fall of 2008 to the spring of 2011, I ate, slept, and breathed Windows — that’s when I was a developer evangelist for Microsoft Canada. I like to think that I was pretty good at it — good enough that the looney-tunes site TechRights.org saw me as enough of a threat to run a hit piece containing this image:

Since leaving Microsoft, I’ve stayed pretty much outside the Windows world. I call it “time off for good behavior”. I took it to the point that immediately after handing in my blue badge, I drove straight to the store and bought my first iPhone — and remember, I was a designated Windows Phone champ:

This part of the program is being taught by Michael “Turtle” Dorsey, and it’s a great refresher for a lot of material that I haven’t covered in a good long time, since none of my machines runs Windows at the moment (for the class, I’m running Windows 10 in VMWare on my primary Linux laptop).

The class opened with this slide, which I think bodes very well:

Hardware What I’m Up To

Unboxing the Motorola One Hyper

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date August 3, 2020
1 Comment on Unboxing the Motorola One Hyper

Yeah, yeah, I know the plastic screen covering for shipping is still on. Tap to view at full size.

In my opinion, when it comes to getting the best bang and build quality for the buck on an Android phone, check out Motorola’s phones. Lenovo — the same company who took Right now, they’ve got discounts on many of their mobiles, including $100 off any of the Motorola One family — the Action, the Zoom, and the one I got: the Hyper.

With the discount, the unlocked Hyper goes for US$299 when purchased directly from Motorola. That’s a pretty good price for an Android phone with mid-level specs.

Released on January 22, 2020, the Hyper features the Qualcomm Snapdragon 675 chipset, which was released in October 2018. This chipset features 8 cores:

2 high-performance 2 GHz Kryo 460 Gold cores
6 high-efficiency 1.8 GHz Kryo 460 Silver cores

Its GPU is the Adreno 612, and it has an X12 LTE modem with category 13 uplink and category 15 downlink.

Here’s a quick video review of this chipset from Android Authority’s Gary Sims:

As a point of reference, this chipset is also used in Samsung’s Galaxy A70, A60, and M40, and LG’s Q70.

This chipset puts the Moto One Hyper firmly in the middle of the road of current Android offerings, making it a reasonably representative device for an indie Android developer/article author like Yours Truly.

The phone’s “Hyper” name is a reference to its “hyper charging” — high-speed charging thanks to its ability to take a higher level of power during the charging process. It comes with an 18 watt charger (the same level of power provided by the current iPad Pro and iPhone 11 chargers), but if you have a 45 watt charger handy, the phone’s 4,000 mAh battery will charge in just over 10 minutes.

The phone also comes with the usual literature and SIM extraction pin:

There is one additional goodie that I didn’t expect: a clear, flexible, rubber-like plastic case. It’s nothing fancy, but it was still a nice surprise.

I’ll post more details about the phone as I use it and start doing development work (native stuff in Kotlin, as well as some cross-platform work in Flutter, and maybe even Kivy).

What I’m Up To

Supplementary UC Baseline notes #3: Videos to prep for this week’s Linux program

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date August 2, 2020

Week 3 of The Undercroft’s UC Baseline cybersecurity program is about to begin, and it’s all about operating systems! From Monday to Wednesday, it’s Linux from a cybersecurity point of view, and we’ll close out the week with Windows.

Not all of us are programmers, and not all of us live in the command line. I’m also not so smug that I can’t benefit from a review of T3H LUN1X!!1!!1, and unlike my normal Linux use case, where I use a desktop installation (I run Mint, Peppermint, and Raspberry Pi OS), we’ll be booting into a server setup.

For the benefit of my fellow classmates — and hey, it’d do me some good as well — here are some videos that will come in handy over the next couple of days.

Linux Terminal Introduction (ExplainingComputers, Jan. 2020)

In the Windows world, it’s called the Command Line. In the Unix world — which includes Linux and macOS — it’s the terminal, and it’s where we’ll be living for the next three days. Here’s a tour.

Beginner’s Guide to the bash Terminal (Joe Collins, Mar. 2017)

Ready for a longer intro to the Linux command line? Here’s a good one:

Linux File System/Structure Explained! (DorianDotSlash, May 2018)

You’re no longer in Windows’ C:, Program Files, and Documents folders any more! You’re in Linux, where the directories are cryptic, with names like /bin, /sbin, /etc, /dev, /usr, /var, and more! This will give you a quick intro to what they are and what they’re for.

Linux File System | Complete Overview (Chris Titus Tech, Sept. 2019)

Also worth checking out.

Vim Basics in 8 Minutes (tutoriaLinux, Oct. 2018)

We’re going GUIless, so all text editing will be done on some command-line editor — most likely Vim. If you’re new to Vim, you’ll find its modes maddening, as it’s a direct descendant of a program that traces its roots back to 1970s computer terminals. You’ll definitely want to watch this video.

Introduction to Linux for Cybersecurity Crash Course 2020 (Grant Collins, Jan. 2020)

Here’s a more in-depth introduction to Linux from a cybersecurity point of view.

Linux for Ethical Hackers (FreeCodeCamp, Jul. 2019)

Here’s another course on Linux as seen from a cybersecurity point of view. This one focuses on Kali Linux, a distribution specifically made for the purposes of ethical hacking, penetration testing, and general cybersecurity-related stuff.

The mind behind Linux (2016)

This won’t be covered in the course, but it doesn’t hurt to find out more about Linux’s creator, Linus Torvalds. This TED conversation from 2016 is a pretty good introduction.

Tampa Bay What I’m Up To

Next week’s “UC Baseline” courses cover Windows and Linux, and I’m ready!

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date July 31, 2020

Photo: Joey deVilla and Steve Ballmer, who is wearing a Canadian flag hat — Me and Microsoft’s then-CEO Steve Ballmer at the Canadian Windows 7 launch in Toronto, 2009.

Today marks the end of the second week of The Undercroft’s 5-week cybersecurity training program, UC Baseline. This week was a quick but in-depth (we each had a Cisco switch to configure) introduction to networking. Next week, we look at Windows and Linux from a security perspective.

I have some familiarity with the operating systems in question.

Photo: Joey deVilla, with his accordion, poses with Linus Torvalds, who is holding a pool cue. — Me and Linux creator Linus Torvalds at LinuxWorld Expo NYC 2000.

Photo: Richard M. Stallman and Joey deVilla onstage. — GNU/Free Software Foundation founder Richard M. Stallman and me at the CUSEC Conference in Montreal, 2009.

If you’re bored: When I was a Microsoft developer evangelist (they hired me from the open source/free software world), I won Stallman’s auction for a plush GNU gnu — and paid for it with my Microsoft corporate card. Here’s the story, titled Winning the GNU.

Tags FLOSS, FOSS, Free Software / Open Source, Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, RMS, Steve Ballmer, The Undercroft, UC Baseline, Windows

Process Tampa Bay What I’m Up To

Scenes from UC Baseline’s “Networking 101” class

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date July 30, 2020

Here’s my daily view for seven hours a day for the next little while, as I’m part of the inaugural cohort of UC Baseline, the 5-week cybersecurity training program from Tampa bay’s security guild, The Undercroft:

Last week was devoted entirely to the “Hardware 101” part of the program. Here’s a video summary of what happened that week, and Yours Truly’s in a fair bit of it:

This week is “Networking 101”, which is all about how the bits gets transferred across wires and air to our hardware.

One of the exercises is making our own Ethernet cables. I can do it — just, very, very slowly…

We spent a good chunk of time setting up virtual LANs on our individually-assigned Cisco Catalyst 3750 programmable 48-port switches (alas, we don’t get to keep them), hooking up our Raspberry Pi 4 boxes (which we do get to keep) to them, and wiring our VLANs together via trunks:

It’s a strange world, where IOS doesn’t Apple’s refer to “iPhone Operating System” — part of my usual stomping grounds as a developer — but in the world of network administration, it’s Cisco’s Internetwork Operating System:

This is way outside my normal experience with networking, which I do at the application level, where I deal with data structures like arrays, dictionaries, base64-encoded data, and maybe the occasional data stream. This is the world of packets, frames, switching, and routing. I would still probably ruin a server room if left in charge of it, but after this course, I’d ruin it less.

I do have a refreshed generalized concept of what happens at the lower levels of the network, and that’s the important thing for me and the sort of work that I do.

Process Tampa Bay What I’m Up To

The UC Baseline cybersecurity course at The Undercroft — Begin week 2: Networking 101!

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date July 27, 2020

It’s Monday, July 27th, which means that I’ve completed the Hardware 101 portion of the 5-week UC Baseline cybersecurity training program offered by Tampa Bay’s security guild, The Undercroft! Here’s a quick rundown of what I’ve posted so far about my experiences…

We’re now on week 2, which means it’s time to move to the next module…

It’s time for Networking 101, which takes up the next five days! This should be fun.

In anticipation of this week’s lectures, I thought I’d repost these two “cats and networking” pics…