Is your child a Hacker?

A list of potential warning signs recently published by the Liverpool Echo:

1. They spend most of their free time alone with their computer
2. They have few real friends, but talk extensively to online friends about computers
3. Teachers say the child has a keen interest in computers, almost to the exclusion of all other subjects
4. They're online so much it affects their sleeping habits
5. They use the language of hacking, with terms such as "DdoS" (pronounced D-dos), Dossing, pwnd, Doxing, Bots, Botnets, Cracking, Hash (refers to a type of encryption rather than cannabis), Keylogger, Lulz, Phishing, Spoof or Spoofing. Members of the Anonymous Hacktivist group refer to their attacks as "Ops"
6. They refer to themselves and their friends as hackers or script kiddies
7. They have multiple social media profiles on one platform
8. They have multiple email addresses
9. They have an odd-sounding nickname (famous ones include MafiaBoy and CyberZeist)
10. Their computer has a web browser called ToR (The Onion Router) which is used to access hacking forums on the dark web
11. Monitoring tools you've put on the computer might suddenly stop working
12. They can connect to the wifi of nearby houses (especially concerning if they have no legitimate reason to have the password)
13. They claim to be making money from online computer games (many hackers get started by trying to break computer games in order to exploit flaws in the game. They will then sell these "cheats" online)
14. They might know more than they should about parents and siblings, not being able to resist hacking your email or social media
15. Your internet connection slows or goes off, as their hacker rivals try to take them down
16. Some circumstantial evidence suggests children with autism and Asperger's could be more vulnerable to becoming hackers

Check out this post from the National Crime Agency too...

My standard set of Nautilus scripts

By stuffing these script files into

~/.local/share/nautilus/scripts

and making them executable, you can select them by right-clicking (a) file(s) in the Nautilus windows and selecting from the "scripts" sub-menu.

lowercase

#!/bin/sh
# lowercase: Changes input to lowercase.
for arg
do
tmp=`echo "$arg" | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]'`

if [ -f $tmp ]
then
msg="Lowercase filename: '$tmp' already exists."
gdialog --msgbox "$msg" 100 100
else
mv "$arg" "$tmp"
fi
done

UPPERCASE

#!/bin/sh
# uppercase: Renames input file to uppercase.
for arg
do
tmp=`echo "$arg" | tr '[a-z]' '[A-Z]'`

if [ -f $tmp ]
then
msg="Uppercase filename: '$tmp' already exists."
gdialog --msgbox "$msg" 100 100
else
mv "$arg" "$tmp"
fi
done

underscore

#!/bin/sh
# lowercase: Changes input to lowercase.
for arg
do
tmp=`echo "$arg" | tr '[ ]' '[_]'`

if [ -f $tmp ]
then
msg="Translated filename: '$tmp' already exists."
gdialog --msgbox "$msg" 100 100
else
mv "$arg" "$tmp"
fi
done

Installing Ubuntu onto itself

What?

OK. Here's my situation. I have a laptop with a broken CDROM Drive, no floppy and a BIOS which does not support bootable USB. The only way to install was to load the HD with the installer and run from there. So:

1. Remove the HD load it into a USB HD caddy and mount it on a working system (at this stage it can be either Windows or Linux depending on what Disk Partitioning tools you have - you'll need one that supports EXT3)


2. Repartition the drive with a big EXT3 partition, a small (2Gb) EXT3 partition and a swap partition (2Gb)


3. Download or create from an existing CD, an ISO for your distribution - I wanted Ubuntu Desktop 8.10 Intrepid Ibex


4. Download, install and run UNetBootin


5. Point UNetBootin to your small EXT3 partition and your ISO and let it do it's thing.


6. Unmount the drive, install it back to the new machine and boot it


7. The UNetbootin menu appears, select "Default" and let it boot. For my Distro, it booted into Ubunto Desktop Live mounted at /cdrom which gives you an "Install" icon on the Desktop.


8. This is the key bit to allow the installer to work, start a Terminal window and run

   sudo umount -l -r -f /dev/sda2

   (where sda2 was the device mounted as cdrom)


9. Click "install" on the Desktop and run through the prompts. If you didn't umount the device at /cdrom, the partition manager will be disabled so cancel the install and unmount it.


10. When prompted reboot


11. The newly installed Distro should now start via Grub. On mine, it didn't. Grub didn't have a menu item for my OS. To fix this, I visited http://users.bigpond.net.au/hermanzone/p15.htm#Second_method_configfile_boot which helped me use the Grub CLI to finally boot then fix the grub installation. One problem was a missing vmlinuz symlink. Rather than trying to fix that, I used the full path to the original file for the Distro's kernel version (Ubuntu 8.10 installs /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-7-generic on my system). Once you got grub to boot manually, edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst file and enable updatedefaultentry. Save & exit then run sudo update-grub. Thant should sort you out.