Freedom

The other day I was trying to play an old game I bought some time ago on my LAN. I was just trying to enjoy a little cooperative bot killing fun with my buddy, but for some reason, the game kept telling me my 'master key' or something along those lines didn't check out. Needless to say I wasn't happy with it... I bought this game... and maybe I wasn't supposed to play it on two machines at once... but at the very least I certainly didn't want it phoning home for a simple LAN game, a game mode where no master server or internet should be required.

So I decided to see what my 'game' was up to. A quick download of Wireshark (formerly Ethereal) and an even quicker packet sniff and sure enough I could see where my 'game' was initiating connections and across what port.

Personal data security is often overlooked by many computer users today. As people use their computers more, they never stop to think about how much personal data is accessible on their hard drive. I have been looking for a safe and convenient way to deploy cryptology in Linux. So far Truecrypt has been the best choice. It is very convenient and cross platform. This story will show how to use it on Ubuntu Linux along with some basic data safety principals.

A quick word about data in Linux
One of the first things that fascinated me about Linux is devices are treated as files. For example if you have an IDE hard drive, it is located at /dev/hda or a SCSI hard drive is located at /dev/sda. This is true about all devices in Linux including serial ports /dev/ttyS0 and sound cards /dev/dsp.

You could output the data from these devices as they where any other file, for example you could redirect the data from your hard drive to the standard output using