January 20th 2014 Tor, TrueCrypt, BGP and gaming

Alice demonstrated how to download Tor; it is better to download it directly into your own user rather than from repos because the direct download gives you everything you need and is likely to be more up-to-date than the versions in repos. The download comes with a start-tor-browser script to run. The Vidalia graphical controller is included in the package and acts as a control panel.

IT Stuff: 16th January 2014 - Angry Birds

• The NHS sharing of your personal data and how to opt out
• How Google are 'helping' you reach more people than you know
• The Government's cyberstreetwise initiative
• The gagging, erm we mean lobbying bill

December 16th 2013 Answers to the Quiz

Here are the answers to the quiz:

Which database? MariaDB or MySQL?

The MySQL database was one of the most successful free software projects of the 1990s; it became an indispensable part of many websites as the Internet grew not least because it became cross-platform over fifteen years ago. Today it provides the storage for many content management systems such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal.

December 16th 2013 FOSS, IP, IXLeeds and much more

IT Stuff: 21st November 2013

• Console Wars - discussion about the PS4, XBone, and Steam OS
• Passwords - big companies have been hacked again and passwords exposed. What do the IT Stuff presenters think about all this password nonesense?
• News, including, YouTube, selfies, quantum computing, and does your laptop smell of cat wee - it may not be your cat's fault.

November 18th 2013 logstash, money and SlackBuilds

Alice introduced logstash, a tool for managing logs, parsing them and storing the results for later use, in their case to produce graphs using graphite; logstash has good documentation. In response to a question, she also mentioned using splunk to find errors in logs.

Life after XP

After twelve and a half years, most of them as the most popular operating system in the world, Microsoft will be pulling the plug on Windows XP on 8 April 2014. There will be no more security updates, leaving those users who choose to connect to the Internet vulnerable. Though anti-virus programs will continue to work, they will not protect users from any security holes that cybercriminals discover and which Microsoft will no longer close through their monthly security updates.

Stanbury Hill Project

Back when the world was younger, there used to be a saying: ‘A Yorkshireman is a Scotsman with the generosity taken away.’ Offensive sayings like that are thankfully rarer these days, but that one may have had a grain of truth. There's still a cultural reluctance, here in the West Riding, to spend hard-won cash on overheads like IT that benefit far-away corporations, particularly when one is volunteering one's own services for free to a community project.

GnuCash

If they use software for their accounts, many voluntary organisations will start off with a spreadsheet. These are perfectly adequate for many small organisations; my sister in law manages their church accounts entirely in a spreadsheet.