May 19th 2014 CLI discoveries and No place to hide

Brian presented a number of recent discoveries:

• powertop which marks as ‘bad’ processes where power consumption can be reduced

• reptyr which allows you to transfer a running process from one parent to another

• screen which, after you have run it, allows you to do what you want, log out and, when you log in, restore the screen with screen -r

• sshuttle which can route traffic via a proxy server via ssh; adding --no-latency-control improves the speed

• speedtest-cli which you can download and run from the CLI in order to test Internet bandwidth

• f.lux which adjusts the colour temperature of your monitor to suit the time of day

• syncthing which offers a more secure alternative to bittorrent sync

There are links and more information in the presentation. In relation to the reptyr example, Olly pointed out that pgrep will find the PID in one step. In relation to screen, it was suggested that it might not be being maintained. [However, the manual, last updated in 2010, is over 2,500 lines long and ends with the comment: ‘A weird imagination is most useful to gain full advantage of all the features.’]

David S then gave us a quick tour of the documents from No place to hide highlighting, among other things,

• the New Collection Posture: collect everything!

• GCHQ is receiving ‘upwards of 50 Billion events per day (and growing)’

• NSA’s strategic partnerships with IT companies

• the FAIRVIEW programme, running since 1985 in cooperation with a large company, to access ‘international cables, routers and switches’

• more details about the PRISM programme

• how MS worked with the FBI to help them get round SSL

• how CISCO equipment being delivered to people was intercepted and doctored

• the plugins they use to collect HTTP data

• travel tracking

• how to discredit a target.

He closed by pointing to an article on how irrelevant Microsoft now is.

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