Geek2Live: Ghost Open Source Alternative

As we know Ghost is a soft­ware used to image your Win­dows instal­la­tion, in other words it help you to have a com­plete backup of a PC for later restore or repli­ca­tion in envi­ron­ment such as School,University, Com­puter Train­ing lab, and so on.
The good thing about “FOG” that it stores the images in a local server that you eas­ily build through the installer with We based Admin Inter­face to con­trol your backup and restore operations.

There is an Open Source Alter­na­tive called “FOG” Free Open Source Ghost,FOG is good for any­one run­ning Win­dows XP and Vista with a sin­gle par­ti­tion. Right now FOG can only han­dle a sin­gle par­ti­tion on the hard disk. FOG is cur­rently being used by many schools and small busi­nesses who can’t afford the licens­ing of com­mer­cial prod­ucts like Ghost.

What makes FOG different?

• FOG is easy for end user. The end user no longer needs to worry about NIC dri­vers to image a com­puter, this is all han­dled by the ker­nel. FOG man­age­ment is done via an easy to use web GUI.
  
• FOG is cen­tral­ized. Most of tasks done on FOG don’t require the user to visit the client PC. For exam­ple if you imag­ing a com­puter all you need to do is start the task. After the task is started WOL will turn the com­puter on if it is off, PXE will load the OS, DHCP will give it an IP address, FOG will tell the server it is in progess, and Par­tIm­age will image your com­puter. Then when imag­ing is done FOG will tell PXE not to boot the machine to the fog image and your com­puter boots up. After the com­puter is booted, if the FOG ser­vice is installed, FOG will change the computer’s host­name and that com­puter is ready to use!
• FOG is easy to access. All you need is a web browser to image a com­puter, no client soft­ware required. We have heard of orga­ni­za­tions using FOG who image com­put­ers from an iPOD touch or iPhone.
• FOG is Pow­er­ful. With fea­tures like mem­ory test­ing (com­ming in ver­sion 0.05), disk wip­ing, test­disk, and file recov­ery, FOG does more than just imaging.
• FOG can grow with you. The FOG server can be bro­ken down and run across mul­ti­ple machines. For exam­ple, your NFS, apache, PXE, and DHCP ser­vices can all run on dif­fer­ent servers to max­i­mize performance.
• FOG is com­mu­nity dri­ven. Is a fea­ture miss­ing in FOG that you would really love to see? If so, let us know and we will do our best to include it in FOG.
  
• FOG is Open Sorce Whether you have 2 com­put­ers or 20,000 com­put­ers in your orga­ni­za­tion, FOG is Open Source

The Sound Of Silence: Cell­phone Jam­mers Are Effec­tive, Illegal

The Fed­eral Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Com­mis­sion says peo­ple who use cell­phone jam­mers could be fined up to $11,000 for a first offense. Its enforce­ment bureau has pros­e­cuted a hand­ful of Amer­i­can com­pa­nies for dis­trib­ut­ing the gad­gets — and it also pur­sues their users.

Inves­ti­ga­tors from the F.C.C. and Ver­i­zon Wire­less vis­ited an upscale restau­rant in Mary­land over the last year, the restau­rant owner said. The owner, who declined to be named, said he bought a pow­er­ful jam­mer for $1,000 because he was tired of his employ­ees focus­ing on their phones rather than customers.

“I told them: put away your phones, put away your phones, put away your phones,” he said. They ignored him.

The owner said the F.C.C. inves­ti­ga­tor hung around for a week, using spe­cial equip­ment designed to detect jam­mers. But the owner had turned his off.

The Ver­i­zon inves­ti­ga­tor was sim­i­larly unsuc­cess­ful. “He went to every­one in town and gave them his num­ber and said if they were hav­ing trou­ble, they should call him right away,” the owner said. He said he has since stopped using the jammer.

Of course, it would be harder to detect the use of smaller battery-operated jam­mers like those used by dis­grun­tled commuters.

An F.C.C. spokesman, Clyde Ensslin, declined to com­ment on the issue or the case in Maryland.

gOS: Where Com­put­ers Are Headed?

We reported Thurs­day on the gPC going on sale at Wal-Mart, a $199 bare min­i­mum PC that runs a Linux pack­age by the name of gOS. Unlike some ini­tial reports sug­gested, this isn’t the long fabled Google Oper­at­ing Sys­tem, but the folks behind it most def­i­nitely had Google on their mind.

In an inter­view at Fsckin, David Liu, founder of the gOS project gave some indi­ca­tion of what they are try­ing to achieve:

I got inter­ested in Google appli­ca­tions, espe­cially docs and spread­sheets, pre­sen­ta­tions; and orig­i­nally, I wanted to cre­ate my idea of what a Google OS would look like.. if there were such a myth­i­cal OS. As I started look­ing around at all the Google appli­ca­tions out there, I real­ized that all of our “com­put­ing” could even­tu­ally be done in the Google cloud. We just needed an OS that looked really good and pointed peo­ple to Google in a really friendly, intel­li­gent way. After see­ing this, I got excited because I saw it was also com­mer­cially viable for the main­stream end user… Google makes Linux familiar.

gOS is billed as “Linux for human beings who shop at Wal-Mart” but how does it really stack up? gOS is avail­able for down­load so I gave it whirl under VMWare Fusion to see if we are see­ing the future of PCs.

Not your usual Linux desktop

The most obvi­ous dif­fer­ence in gOS to a usual Linux install is the use of the Enlight­en­ment win­dows man­ager as opposed to the more com­monly used Gnome and KDE man­agers. KDE and Gnome in a stan­dard install look and feel a lit­tle like Win­dows, Enlight­en­ment looks a bit like OS X, com­plete with the rounded win­dow open/ close but­tons to the left of each window.

A dock bar runs across the bot­tom and pro­vides links to a range of Google tools, Meebo, Skype, Wikipedia, Face­book and a cou­ple of OS spe­cific apps. A Google search box is embed­ded in the desk­top in the top right corner.

A leaf icon bot­tom left opens up a famil­iar Win­dows style menu, com­plete with pro­gram short cuts and set­tings options. Inter­est­ingly the Live CD comes with Open Office, despite the empha­sis on Google apps elsewhere.

It Works

I tested a num­ber of Google apps and they all work, pretty much as they would on any machine. Apps are deliv­ered via Fire­fox. The only draw­back I found is one of aes­thet­ics: the stan­dard font pack in gOS doesn’t make for the nicest online expe­ri­ence, but many wouldn’t notice.

The dock short­cuts are handy, and will prob­a­bly be more appre­ci­ated by those who aren’t highly com­puter lit­er­ate, like those who cant save a book­mark or type in a web page…perhaps that’s a lit­tle bit harsh but most peo­ple don’t need gigan­tic short­cut buttons.

The Future?

This isn’t a PC any­one read­ing this arti­cle will likely buy, the specs are low and if you’re com­pe­tent enough to read blogs then you can use an oper­at­ing sys­tem that isn’t gOS. It is how­ever an inter­est­ing exer­cise in where com­put­ers may well be head­ing. In a range of areas, web apps are now the equal to their offline equiv­a­lents, or are quickly catch­ing up. If we get to the point where we can do the major­ity of our activites via an online inter­face, the need for all-powerful oper­at­ing sys­tems and com­put­ers dimin­ishes. gPC and gOS is a nice try, and for peo­ple out in mid­dle Amer­ica look­ing for a cheap sec­ond or third PC for their kids to do their home­work on, or con­versely to do their own work on as their kids are using the main PC for gam­ing, its a pretty good buy. This is very much a first gen­er­a­tion, or per­haps even 0.1 effort, but going for­ward it’s an option we will see more and more of. In 10, 15 or even 20 years time, when the idea of locally installed appli­ca­tions may be for­eign, the likes of gOS may well be the norm.

“

Man is not free unless gov­ern­ment is limited.

Ronald Rea­gan

”

- Ronald Rea­gan Quotes

“

Before I refuse to take your ques­tions, I have an open­ing statement.

Ronald Rea­gan

”

- Ronald Rea­gan Quotes

No email pri­vacy rights under Con­sti­tu­tion, US gov claims [printer-friendly] | The Register

Orig­i­nal URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/04/4th-amendment_email_privacy/

No email pri­vacy rights under Con­sti­tu­tion, US gov claims

By Mark Rasch, Secu­ri­ty­Fo­cusPub­lished Sun­day 4th Novem­ber 2007 12:02 GMT

On Octo­ber 8, 2007, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Cir­cuit in Cincin­nati granted the government’s request for a full-panel hear­ing in United States v. War­shak case cen­ter­ing on the right of pri­vacy for stored elec­tronic com­mu­ni­ca­tions. At issue is whether the pro­ce­dure whereby the gov­ern­ment can sub­poena stored copies of your email — sim­i­lar to the way they could sim­ply sub­poena any phys­i­cal mail sit­ting on your desk — is uncon­sti­tu­tion­ally broad.

This appears to be more than a mere argu­ment in sup­port of the con­sti­tu­tion­al­ity of a Con­gres­sional email pri­vacy and access scheme. It rep­re­sents what may be the fun­da­men­tal gov­ern­men­tal posi­tion on Con­sti­tu­tional email and elec­tronic pri­vacy — that there isn’t any. What is impor­tant in this case is not the ulti­mate res­o­lu­tion of that nar­row issue, but the posi­tion that the United States gov­ern­ment is tak­ing on the entire issue of elec­tronic pri­vacy. That posi­tion, if accepted, may mean that the gov­ern­ment can read anybody’s email at any time with­out a warrant.

What is Privacy?

In a sem­i­nal case (Katz v. United States in 1963) the US Supreme Court, over the stren­u­ous objec­tions of the US gov­ern­ment, upheld the right of the user of a pay­phone to claim a right to pri­vacy in the con­tents of those com­mu­ni­ca­tions. The Court held that the Fourth Amend­ment right to be secure in your “per­sons, house, places and effects” against unrea­son­able searches and seizures pro­tected peo­ple, not just places. Thus, to deter­mine whether you had a right against unrea­son­able seizure — a kind of pri­vacy right — the court adopted a two-pronged test: did you think what you were doing was pri­vate and is soci­ety will­ing to accept your belief as objec­tively reasonable?

The method you use to com­mu­ni­cate can effect both your sub­jec­tive expec­ta­tion of pri­vacy and society’s will­ing­ness to con­sider that expec­ta­tion as “rea­son­able.” Shout­ing a “pri­vate” con­ver­sa­tion into a mega­phone at Times Square would nei­ther be sub­jec­tively nor objec­tively rea­son­able, if you wanted the con­ver­sa­tion to be con­fi­den­tial. “Broad­cast­ing” the con­ver­sa­tion over the radio is like­wise unreasonable.

But, what about “broad­cast­ing” it over an unse­cured Wi-Fi router, ana­log cell phone, or cord­less tele­phone? While cer­tain statutes may make the inter­cep­tion of such com­mu­ni­ca­tions unlaw­ful, absent such statutes is there a Con­sti­tu­tional pro­hi­bi­tion on lis­ten­ing in? Put more nar­rowly, if the cops lis­ten in on your baby mon­i­tor, do they vio­late your “right to pri­vacy,” or do you give up your right by know­ingly putting the mon­i­tor in lit­tle Timmy’s room in the first place?

Par­tial Waiver

Do you have a “rea­son­able expec­ta­tion of pri­vacy” in the con­tents of email you send and receive at work, using a work com­puter, over a com­pany sup­plied net­work, where the com­pany has a “busi­ness use only” pol­icy, and an employee mon­i­tor­ing pol­icy that states that any com­mu­ni­ca­tions may be mon­i­tored? Think about it. Indeed, the pol­icy will go fur­ther and says “users have no expec­ta­tion of pri­vacy.” But is this true? Or, is it even a good idea?

Remem­ber Katz? The Con­sti­tu­tion only pro­tects rea­son­able expec­ta­tions of pri­vacy. If you have no rea­son­able expec­ta­tion of pri­vacy in your email, then the exam­i­na­tion of the con­tents of your email by any­one for any pur­poses is not an inva­sion of pri­vacy and raises no Fourth Amend­ment concerns.

What you really mean in your pol­icy is that your employer (your super­vi­sor, the IT staff, HR, legal, etc.) may exam­ine the con­tents of your e-mail for legit­i­mate rea­sons and if they choose to, dis­close the con­tents to what­ever third par­ties they deem rea­son­able. Fair enough. But, it also means that you can’t read your bosses’ email or your co-workers’ email, just because you are curi­ous. Why not? Because they have an “expec­ta­tion of pri­vacy” in their email.

Pri­vacy is not like vir­gin­ity — you either have it or you don’t. You can have pri­vacy rights with respect to some uses by some peo­ple and not with respect to other uses by other peo­ple. Right? Well, not accord­ing to the government.

---

No Con­sti­tu­tional Privacy

In argu­ing that the gov­ern­ment did not nec­es­sar­ily need a wire­tap order to obtain the con­tents of Mr. Warshak’s email from his ISP, the gov­ern­ment argued that the Fourth Amend­ment did not pre­clude a mere sub­poena because users of ISPs don’t have a rea­son­able expec­ta­tion of pri­vacy. The gov­ern­ment argued:

… any expec­ta­tion of pri­vacy can be waived [cit­ing case hold­ing that a pri­vacy dis­claimer on a bul­letin board “defeats claims to an objec­tively rea­son­able expec­ta­tion of pri­vacy.”] Many employ­ees are pro­vided with e-mail and Inter­net ser­vices by their employ­ers. Often, those employ­ees are required to waive any expec­ta­tion of pri­vacy in their email each time they log on to their com­put­ers. [Court] orders directed to the email of employ­ees who have waived any pos­si­ble expec­ta­tion of pri­vacy do not vio­late the Fourth Amendment.

Now, we are not talk­ing about cases where the employer reads someone’s email and decides to give it to the gov­ern­ment, or where the employer con­sents to the search by the FBI. Essen­tially, the Jus­tice Depart­ment is argu­ing that when you give up your pri­vacy rights in an e-mail pol­icy vis-a-vis your employer, you waive any Con­sti­tu­tional claim to pri­vacy if the gov­ern­ment decides to just take it — even with­out the knowl­edge or con­sent of the employer. Once you give up pri­vacy in an email pol­icy, the game is over. Since the Fourth Amend­ment only pro­tects legit­i­mate pri­vacy rights, and you have no pri­vacy in email, the­o­ret­i­cally (absent a statute that pro­hibits it) the gov­ern­ment could con­sti­tu­tion­ally walk in and just take anyone’s files.

Wow.

But then the gov­ern­ment goes on: they note “some email accounts are aban­doned, as when an account holder stops pay­ing for the ser­vice and the account is can­celled.” There “can be no rea­son­able expec­ta­tion of pri­vacy in such accounts.” Oh really? So if I decide not to keep pay­ing Com­cast, then not only to I poten­tially lose Inter­net ser­vice, but the gov­ern­ment can then read every email I ever wrote or received? Bet­ter pay the bill, then. When I ter­mi­nate my ser­vice, I am ter­mi­nat­ing my right of use — not “aban­don­ing” my pri­vacy rights. A few years ago, when an US sol­dier was killed in Fal­lu­jah, Yahoo had to decide whether his par­ents could legally access the email in his account, an account that Yahoo’s pol­icy ter­mi­nated at the soldier’s death. The case was resolved with a con­sented to court order allow­ing such access, but the government’s argu­ment would be that when you die your account ter­mi­nates and your email is up for grabs. In other words, don’t die with email in your account and don’t get any email after you die.

The gov­ern­ment again goes on:

… hack­ers may obtain inter­net ser­vices and email accounts using stolen credit cards. Hack­ers main­tain no rea­son­able expec­ta­tion of pri­vacy in such accounts.

So the pri­vacy of your com­mu­ni­ca­tions may be deter­mined by the legit­i­macy of the method by which you pay for such com­mu­ni­ca­tions? Bounce a check to the phone com­pany and the gov­ern­ment can lis­ten in to your phone calls? Or buy a cell phone with a stolen credit card, and the gov­ern­ment can read your text messages?

---

The most dis­tress­ing argu­ment the gov­ern­ment makes in the War­shak case is that the gov­ern­ment need not fol­low the Fourth Amend­ment in read­ing emails sent by or through most com­mer­cial ISPs. The terms of ser­vice (TOS) of many ISPs per­mit those ISPs to mon­i­tor user activ­i­ties to pre­vent fraud, enforce the TOS, or pro­tect the ISP or oth­ers, or to com­ply with legal process. If you use an ISP and the ISP may mon­i­tor what you do, then you have waived any and all con­sti­tu­tional pri­vacy rights in any com­mu­ni­ca­tions or other use of the ISP. For exam­ple, the gov­ern­ment notes with respect to Yahoo! (which has sim­i­lar TOS):

Because a cus­tomer acknowl­edges that Yahoo! has unlim­ited access to her email, and because she con­sents to Yahoo! dis­clos­ing her email in response to legal process, com­pelled dis­clo­sure of email from a Yahoo! account does not vio­late the Fourth Amendment.

The gov­ern­ment relied on a Supreme Court case where a bank cus­tomer could not com­plain when the gov­ern­ment sub­poe­naed his can­celled checks from the bank itself and where the Court noted:

The checks are not con­fi­den­tial com­mu­ni­ca­tions but nego­tiable instru­ments to be used in com­mer­cial trans­ac­tions. All of the doc­u­ments obtained, includ­ing finan­cial state­ments and deposit slips, con­tain only infor­ma­tion vol­un­tar­ily con­veyed to the banks and exposed to their employ­ees in the ordi­nary course of business.

In essence, the gov­ern­ment is argu­ing that the con­tents of your emails have been vol­un­tar­ily con­veyed to your ISP and that you there­fore have no pri­vacy rights to it any­more. In a pre­vi­ous pro­ceed­ing in War­shak, the gov­ern­ment went even fur­ther, argu­ing that auto­mated spam fil­ters, antivirus soft­ware, and other auto­mated processes that exam­ine the con­tents of your email, estab­lish that you can­not pos­si­bly expect your com­mu­ni­ca­tions to be private.

What is silly about this is the fact that, at least for the gov­ern­ment, the argu­ment is unnec­es­sary. The Fourth Amend­ment pro­tects against “unrea­son­able” inva­sions of pri­vacy inter­ests. The gov­ern­ment could effec­tively argue that, by obtain­ing a sub­poena or other court order for the records which are rel­e­vant to a legit­i­mate inves­ti­ga­tion, the search or seizure is rea­son­able, and there­fore com­ports with the Fourth Amend­ment. All sub­poe­nas and demands for doc­u­ments infringe some pri­vacy inter­est, and unless over­broad, they are gen­er­ally rea­son­able. The statute which per­mits gov­ern­ment access to stored com­mu­ni­ca­tion pur­suant to a mere sub­poena may like­wise be per­fectly rea­son­able and may with­stand con­sti­tu­tional scrutiny. But that doesn’t mean that the Con­sti­tu­tion doesn’t apply.

No, the gov­ern­ment is seek­ing to elim­i­nate any Con­sti­tu­tional pri­vacy inter­est in email. Under this stan­dard, if the FBI walked into your employer or ISP, and sim­ply took your email (no war­rant, no court order, no prob­a­ble cause, no noth­ing), you would have no con­sti­tu­tional argu­ment about the seizure, because you had aban­doned your expec­ta­tion of pri­vacy. This appears to be more than a mere argu­ment in sup­port of the con­sti­tu­tion­al­ity of a Con­gres­sional email pri­vacy and access scheme. It rep­re­sents what may be the fun­da­men­tal gov­ern­men­tal posi­tion on Con­sti­tu­tional email and elec­tronic pri­vacy — that there isn’t any.

And that, frankly, scares me.

This arti­cle orig­i­nally appeared in Secu­rity Focus (http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/456).

Copy­right © 2007, Secu­ri­ty­Fo­cus (http://www.securityfocus.com/)

Chris­tians becom­ing Ron Paul supporters

Over­heard Conversation–about the iPhone. Arro­gant Apple Store sales guy vs. con­fused seem­ingly meek cus­tomer. Turns into mini-drama. (Over­heard text, plus descrip­tion of front & back sto­ries.) Not for every­body. But amus­ing, dif­fer­ent. Guy seems to go through a mini-story arc in a few minutes.

Isn’t it great that we can joke about the fact that cor­po­rate media has ruined our Amer­i­can democ­racy?! Brian Williams, host of NBC’s Nightly News, appeared on Sat­ur­day Night Live last night as guest host. Watch the video here.

“Cre­ative minds write not a nor­mal appli­ca­tion, they will ensure that you will be atten­tive to them!“That’s the first line of an open let­ter posted on adwordsgoogle.de, docsgoogle.de, , and 6 other domain names. The sites’ owner and letter’s author, Ger­man IT guy Sebas­t­ian Klein, wants to give his domains to Google in exchange for a job.

Here is one list I need to fol­low, not just read. we’ll see about that :)

Have you talked to your kids about lib­erty today?

A: OMG!

Crazy, weird and even funny deaths of promi­nent peo­ple in the last 100 years.

An analy­sis of web-surfing data sug­gests that Gen Y-ers would rather spend their time with Face­book than with sex…

Microsoft has a dif­fi­cult chal­lenge ahead of them in con­vinc­ing peo­ple that they need Win­dows Home Server. After all, hav­ing another com­puter in the house isn’t some­thing peo­ple are shov­ing each other in the face for. We got our hands on a Norco DS-520 Home Server, one of the first pre-made boxes avail­able, and def­i­nitely loved what we saw.

“In a pre­sen­ta­tion to the Geor­gia Insti­tute of Technology’s IEEE Stu­dent Branch yes­ter­day, Microsoft employee and Geor­gia Tech grad­u­ate Andrew Jenks had some sur­prises in store”

Given how the trial went, the copy­right infringe­ment ver­dict against Jam­mie Thomas was not much of a sur­prise. The $222,000 award to the record labels cer­tainly was, and although Thomas is attempt­ing to get the amount of the award reduced and the ver­dict over­turned, she’s fac­ing the pos­si­bil­ity of a crush­ing finan­cial lia­bil­ity if her appeals are u