.:Computer Defense:.

Michael Arrington has an interesting post over at TechCrunch. It's a post that has drawn some controversy, controversy that I wanted to add to. Michael identifies three reasons why Netbooks aren't good enough and to put it plainly... he's wrong. I purchased my netbook (ASUS EEE PC 900) for traveling. I absolutely hate lugging around a full size laptop (and on occasion, two full size laptops). It does everything I want it to and then some.

Michael had three complaints. They were:

1. Screen Size
2. Keyboard
3. Processing Power

So let's take a look at each of these (btw, I'm typing this entire post on my netbook).

Screen Size

I think this is the most interesting as Michael uses a screenshot from a Mac to demonstrate what you see on a Netbook... he's simply cropped the photo.

Here's his post (with the title showing) and he's correct, you don't see a lot.

However, I can easily scroll down with my mouse (Michael mentions that you need to use the trackpad or keyboard to scroll and that means taking your eyes of the screen... I don't know but I can scroll with either and my eyes never leave the screen... in addition, I always travel with a physical mouse.) So here's the article if you scroll to the start of the text, more than enough is displayed at once.

Keyboard

Up next was the keyboard, which Michael describes as 80-85% of the size of a regular keyboard. This is probably true, however the comment that no adult can type on it is bullshit. I'm not a small guy, and I definitely don't have small hands, yet I can type just fine. As proof... here's a online typing test screenshot... again done on my netbook

Processing Power

These netbooks definitely aren't loaded with processing power... but I'm not going to be running multiple virtual machines, 20 firefox tabs and a video game... I use it for email, word processing, surfing the net and occasionally a flash game. While it does slow down on certain flash games... so does my desktop. Netbooks are designed for Web 2.0... they don't need a lot of processing power because other than your browser not much will generally be happening locally.

Conclusion

In the end, netbooks are good enough... and they do exactly what they are designed to do. People may want to attach unintended labels to them and designate that they be used for tasks they weren't designed for... but that isn't the netbooks fault. I highly recommend a netbook to everyone that I talk to.

So I finally got a ASUS EEE PC. I've wanted a small laptop for a while now, and there happened to be a great mail rebate option (valid in Canada until Aug 31st for anyone thinking about getting one).

I went with the 900 in Galaxy Black. The first thing I did was set it up to use Advanced Mode... the second thing I did was install nmap. It's quite a bit of fun... even in basic mode, I could see it being useful to a lot of people. I have a USB Enclosure and a spare DVD-RW, I'm going to assemble it and hook it up and see if it's detected. If it is, then it'll be perfect.

Attn Parents: If you're sending your kids away to college (it is that time of year), consider getting them one of these, and consider the Linux version. Really it has everything they need... it's nicely secured (compared to getting a full blown laptop)... In basic mode the ease of use is way up there and with a USB DVD-RW and maybe an external monitor, they have everything they need. Although the screen would be ok for watching DVDs.

I went with the solid state drives, but there is a option with a 80GB drive (I believe it was 80GB). Simply to play with solid state, and because it seems more logical for something that might get tossed around a bit.

Specs on mine:
8.9" Screen
900Mhz Celeron Processor
1GB RAM
4GB OS Drive (1.5GB seems to be used, with the remainder holding an image that I can restore to by holding F9 on boot (apparently)).
16GB Storage Drive (mounted as /home)
1.3M WebCam
3 x USB, 1xHeadphone, 1xMic, 1xVGA, 1xSD

Hey All,

I wanted to do a brief repost over here to direct everyone to the 5-part non-technical blog series that I did on cons (for the most part) and con experiences. This was my contribution to blogging following Blackhat / DEFCON.

1. Being a Research Engineer at a Blackhat Booth
2. Competitors Can Be Civil
3. Why DEFCON Sucks
4. Why the Social Aspect of Cons is Important
5. What Can Be Done to Improve the Cons.

Enjoy!

Hey All,

Thanks to everyone who's filled it out, for those of you that haven't... you still can (survey). A large number of people are prefering to stay anonymous, but I have gotten some rather interesting comments. To date 169 people have filled out the survey. If all goes well, I'm hoping to start analyising the results after about a week or so.

To clarify, for anyone who reads this first... When I say Denial of Service, I'm not considering packet flooding (these days you essentially need DDoS for that)... I'm thinking single packets that cause servers to crash, or malformed pages that cause browsers to crash. That being said, I don't want to influence anyones answers... that's why I provided plenty of places for notes. Feel free to tell me what you really think.

Lastly, in the goal of making an interesting whitepaper out of this, I've started contacting vendors. Currently I've contacted Adobe, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Red Hat and Sun. I've asked them to answer the survey (and provide me with unique information via email that they will put in the name, email and url portions (for proper identification)) and I've passed on a few vendor specific questions. I've taken the route of contacting their PR agencies, so we'll see what happens.

Hey Everyone,

So Blackhat/Defcon is behind us... Instead of blogging about the talks, I've taken a different approach and I've been doing some non-technical blogging. In the end it will be a 5-part series, but the first three are already up.

They are:

1. Being a Research Engineer at a Blackhat Booth
2. Competitors Can Be Civil
3. Why DEFCON Sucks

The last two will most likely appear early next week.

Also, now that Blackhat/ DEFCON are over... What's next? As far as I know the next Con I'll be attending is SecTor. Last year was the first SecTor and I had the opportunity to attend. SecTor will actually make it's way into my upcoming blog series (from above) on the VERT Blog. That being said, I wanted to remind people that it's coming up, after all... it's held in Toronto and I live in Toronto, so the more people that attend, the more people I get to meet.

For anyone who didn't get a chance to visit SecTor last year and is curious about the quality / style of the talks, I tried to write-up everything that I saw.

• Overview
• Growing the Security "Profession"
• TCP/IP Perversion
• Zen and the Art of Cybersecurity
• Web Application Works - The Future of Browser Insecurity
• Exploit-Me Series
• Defending Layer 8
• Black Ops 2007: DNS Rebinding Attacks
• Hacking Hollywood
• Modern Trends in Network Fingerprinting.

Of course, these are biased because they're all my opinion, but I do recommend the Con for anyone that can make it up this way. Let me know if you'll be coming up and we'll make arrangements to get together for a beer.

Well, I'm leaving shortly for Blackhat and Defcon. For half the time at Blackhat I'll be working the nCircle booth, feel free to say 'Hey'. Look me up while you're there, or message / email me and I'll pass along my cell so that we can text. I'll also be updating twitter as much as I can and blogging when I can.

This is my first time heading down to Vegas so I'm looking forward to having quite a bit of fun.