Category Archives: Technology

Mac OS X 10.8: Gatekeeper

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Interesting post about Mac OS X 10.8 detailing “Gatekeeper.” This seems like a similar approach to what I’m doing with AppLocker in Windows 7.

“My favorite Mountain Lion feature, though, is one that hardly even has a visible interface. Apple is calling it “Gatekeeper”. It’s a system whereby developers can sign up for free-of-charge Apple developer IDs which they can then use to cryptographically sign their applications. If an app is found to be malware, Apple can revoke that developer’s certificate, rendering the app (along with any others from the same developer) inert on any Mac where it’s been installed. In effect, it offers all the security benefits of the App Store, except for the process of approving apps by Apple. Users have three choices which type of apps can run on Mountain Lion:

  • Only those from the App Store
  • Only those from the App Store or which are signed by a developer ID
  • Any app, whether signed or unsigned

The default for this setting is, I say, exactly right: the one in the middle, disallowing only unsigned apps. This default setting benefits users by increasing practical security, and also benefits developers, preserving the freedom to ship whatever software they want for the Mac, with no approval process.”

From http://daringfireball.net/2012/02/mountain_lion

GRUB2 installs to USB device during installation

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Every once in awhile I have a problem with Debian/Ubuntu installers running from USB thumb drives. What I think happens is the installer sees the USB drive first and the HDD second, so when it installs a bootloader, some information is written to the USB thumb drive that is needed to boot the computer. This is a problem because I don’t intend on leaving the USB thumb drive in the computer every time I need to boot it.

So my fix is quick and simple (and can be found all over the Internet). I only post it here so that I can easily find it in the future.

sudo grub-install /dev/sda # HDD device name
sudo update-grub

Good luck!

New Year’s resolutions 2012

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Here’s my short list of New Year’s resolutions for 2012. I will come back to this post and strike through what I’ve completed, as I complete it.

I will also bump this post in December 2012 before making another Post in January 2013.

  • Read THESE books.
  • Eat at every restaurant in Richmond’s Fan district (neighborhoods include Oregon Hill, VCU, Broad Street Corridor, SOFA (Southern Fan), and Carver), or at least every restaurant on this list:
  • Complete Code Year 2012 at Codecademy: Got behind by a month, gave up.
  • Enable 2-step verification on my Google accounts.
  • Enable full-disk encryption on every laptop, desktop and server I own. For the Windows boxes, I will be replacing Bitlocker for Truecrypt. For the Linux boxes, I will continue to use dm-crypt/LUKS/cryptsetup.
  • Buy an ugly Christmas sweater before the holidays.
  • Import all of my photos (thousands) into Picasa and tag them for faster searching. Having them in folders is no longer working for the number of photos I have.