USB Data-Blocker aka USB Condom

I was recently reading Kevin Mitnick’s “The Art of Invisibility” and found that he’d also recommended these devices. I’ve been using them for several years as it was always unnerving to plug in a mobile device into a work computer to recharge only to see that there was a request to mount them. Additionally, my laptop would occasionally want to tether data via my cell phone. In an effort to block data transfer and leakage, something was required. These simple and cheap devices allow for power but no data to be transferred via the USB port.

WARNING: there’s always the possibility that any USB device could be compromised, including these… keep them in sight and under your control at all times.

REFERENCES:

Ashley Madison data dump

This topic has been in the media ALOT lately, for the less technical individuals here’s a simple way to get at the information.

For (mostly) anonymous access to the ‘dark internet’…. it’s not as ominous and illegal as you might think, you can download a browser here:

https://www.torproject.org/download/download

If you don’t mind being (possibly) tracked by your IP Address, you can just download a Torrent client such as Transmission or µTorrent.

The torrent file can then be accessed here:
https://thepiratebay.mn/torrent/12237184/The_Complete_Ashley_Madison_Dump_from_the_Impact_Team

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JavaScript code quality

I’ve programmed in a lot of different languages, and with various IDE’s. The one area that has always been lacking is a simple means to review JavaScript code for common errors, both syntactical and format. This is where JSLint and JavaScript Lint come in…. these represent the tooling previously available to other languages like C++ and Java, where you can analyze code without actually executing it to identify problem areas. Often, these are items like ‘missing semicolons’ that occasionally cause difficult to find errors in browsers.

These can be scripted to execute from the command line or within (some) IDE’s on several operating systems.

Data URL’s (aka HTML Inline Images)

Here’s a useful trick for minimizing server HTTP connections, unfortunately it’s not universally supported so you will need to provide alternate methods for non-supporting browsers (such as MSIE).

This works by placing the content of the image into the URL itself, as such there’s no need to open up a new server connection and no extra caching at any tier.

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