The Labyrinth (of th3 Malfunction3d Droi3d)

Introduction In today's topic, I will be showing readers different ways you can encode your music collection, if you just moved over to Linux from Windows using open source codecs! You do not have to encode your music files with Vorbis, due to the fact that MP3 is also supported in Linux and HTML 5, but there are some substantial benefits to doing in this day and age (at least from the perspective of an open-source nerd 8-)). The first is you don't have to worry about royalty's and licensing rates (especially if you are opening up a store for indie musicians). The second is that both objectively and subjectively Vorbis sounds substantially better and has been greatly improved with the help of dedicated "audiophiles" and the open source community, since it's first public release over a decade ago, way back in 2002. Today, I will show you some tips and tricks if you are new to encoding your music collection in Linux using the oggenc command-line program in Li...

Introduction Everyone knows how complicated regulatory laws can become, luckily for us our "good friends" over at Microsoft have put together a page that sums up what you need to know about I.T regulatory compliance laws. Microsoft summarizes each one and goes into more depth. I am just going to provide a brief overview of what federal laws, you need to focus on if your organization is part of any of the industries, mentioned on the Microsoft page I referenced and below. Note: Some states have state law statutes surrounding regulatory compliance frameworks, such as California and my home state of Massachusetts! Microsoft does NOT mention every state law statue below (just California). The United States is one of the "few" countries in the world that has "strict" state and federal laws surrounding regulatory compliance, unlike i.e United Kingdom. Keep that in mind as you move forward, due to the fact that these laws may overlap and you might have to u...

Introduction Note: Because there are MANY different scenario's that involve packet sniffing and because they need to be evaluated on a case by case basis in various countries, I highly RECOMMEND you seek legal counsel specializing in Intellectual Property law or "I.T" law in THOSE respective countries if you need to better understand the legality of such issues OUTSIDE of the U.S. If you ARE legal counsel in the U.S and want me to make technical corrections or add more case scenario's for U.S readers, DO NOT hesitate to contact me. I understand U.S law is not static and open to interpretation. Thank You! In this week entry, I will be analyzing the varying degree of circumstances, in which packet sniffing with Kismet/Wireshark computer programs maybe consider "legal" and "illegal", given two real life, real world scenario's. I noticed that this question comes up quite frequently between "hackers" and law/policy analysts. This was ...

Introduction  In this weeks entry, I will be re-exploring a very important topic! the question that a lot of people often bring up in different scenarios is whether or not law enforcement or the F.B.I needs consent in order to search a computer that you or somebody you know who has given the computer to a repair person in order to do maintenance on and the computer has "questionable" material on it. Is it considered an "illegal search and seizure" under the fourth amendment or can you be implicated? The short answer is yes, you can in fact can be implicated in "most" scenarios and under a varying degree of circumstances. Here is why the F.B.I can seize the computer without a warrant and go back and obtain one, in order to perform a computer forensics investigation on you. What the CCIPS Manual by the F.B.I states under constitutional law  "As discussed above in Section B.4, computer searches by repairman prior to contact with law enforcement a...

Introduction In this weeks entry, I am going to be looking at a landmark U.S Supreme Court ruling using "stare decisis", meaning a precedent that was set this past summer in the world of privacy law, that has made it unconstitutional to perform wireless GPS tracking of potential suspects vehicles. I am going to briefly analyze two cases that have been decided upon (one by the U.S Supreme Court that you may have heard about on some I.T news sites about a month ago) and the other being decided upon in California by California legislators. Both of these events are significantly IMPORTANT and should not be ignored by those working in the field of law, law enforcement, all other parties involved, and may need to be included in future revisions to the F.B.I manual for prosecuting federal crimes. Let's begin by analyzing each case piece by piece, in order to fully appreciate and understand what each case means in the context of warrant-less wireless GPS tracking and what it me...

Why you should have these five books in your collection if you are an I.T Professional Let't face it, there are many books out there aimed at entry and mid level I.T professionals. The big question is, how do you know what books you will actually be able to use and will not collect dust on your bookshelf? In the first entry to the "new" Labyrinth, I will be exploring five of my favorite reference books, that you can utilize time and time again, without the need to dig around on Google and search countless manuals in order to find a solution to the problem that you may be facing. I narrowed down this list of books, based upon reviews that I have read on the Internet and ones that I have personally used as a reference, that will provide you with the material you are looking for in order to accomplish solving a particular I.T problem. You may agree or concur with the list! I am always looking for feedback, let me know by commenting or contacting me directly. I have narrowe...

History of the "original" Labyrinth and how we go to this point  I want to welcome you all to my new "home" on the web. My previous blog was located at http://www.defendingthetruth.com/blog/2-the-labyrinth/ In the span of over just two years I was able to eclipse, well over 100,000 viewers to that blog! When I first started this project back in December of 2010, I was happy, when I had just received all of, but 2,000 views in span of about three weeks! I had no idea that I would be sitting here two years later pouring over the 1,000 or so weekly visitors a week that I get to the original Labyrinth! I have covered various topics in so many different areas, that's going to be difficult to "replicate" all of the great entries that I had written about previously in the past two years. I am going to attempt to import them over to this blog, especially a lot of the tech entries, so that a lot of individuals can continue to use those as an excellent refer...