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Any filesystem worth its salt will apply restrictions to files in the form of permissions, limiting access based on users and groups. Windows does this to some degree with its NTFS filesystem, but it’s no substitute for Linux’s approach. Everything in Linux is represented as a file, including folders and hardware devices. The ext filesystem then applies special permissions to these files to determine how they can be accessed, and by whom. These permissions boil down to three basic levels of access: r (read), w (write) and x (execute). You can view a file’s permissions when in the Terminal with the ls -l command, where you’ll see entries such as rwx (full access) or r-- (read-only) next to each file. These rwx permissions apply to folders as well as files,…

No, this isn’t another article on getting going with Linux for new users. This is about how Linux starts itself. Part of the joy of Linux is that as a user you retain full control over the entire system, if you want it. To many users this is just some form of magic, except that instead of using smoke and mirrors, most of the activity is hidden behind a fancy splash screen. We’re going to look at the whole process, from when you press the power button to when the desktop appears. This can be broken down into a number of stages: » POST, » Bootloader » Kernel loading » Initial ram disk » Device initialisation » Init » Service startup and runlevels » Display Manager, » Desktop startup We’ll…

Verdict All the distros have put in a good effort to ensure that they are suitable for hardware which has limited capabilities. AntiX and WattOS are both available in multiple flavours. WattOS produces a MicroWatt edition for those looking for an even lighter and barebones distro that they can build from the ground up, AntiX offers a choice of lightweight desktops and window managers in its variants and even offers a core edition that ships with just enough applications to help you build your desktop from scratch. The full edition of antiX, which uses IceWM together with the Rox file manager, is one of the lightest distros here and is complemented by a curated collection of applications. WattOS is created from the Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS core by carefully adding packages…

All the distros in this Roundup can be used to help put an unused computer back into active service. What separates them is how they deliver functionality on the limited hardware. Cub Linux, for example, works best for people who can live with cloud apps. The distro can be fleshed out without much effort, but it isn’t designed with the extra baggage in mind. The same is true for WattOS. The distro creates a functional system but that’s more down to a clever selection of applications. It’ll quickly put on weight and become lethargic as soon as you start piling on applications. To an extent, this is also true for LXLE. The distro extends the usability of Lubuntu while taking up less resources than say Xubuntu. But while it performs…

More often than not, quitting an online service altogether will be an inconvenient, isolating experience. By abandoning one network or another we may lose the ability to contact others or be forced to do so over old fashioned channels like email or have to meet them in person. There may be equivalent (and probably better) services available, but that point is moot if the people with whom you want to commune are not using them. So rather than completely severing ties with a given proprietary service and exclusively using the alternative in general, it’s easier to use the more wholesome alternative service in parallel with the one you’d rather move away from, all the while dropping subtle hints for others to do the same. For example, it’s easy to have…

Wardriving involves detecting wireless networks while moving around on foot or in a vehicle. Hackers sometimes do this to look for vulnerable networks to exploit. As an ethical hacker, you’ll be doing this to make sure there are no rogue wireless networks in your home or network because these can cause interference with legitimate access points. You may also want to be sure your own wireless network is safely hidden. To start out as a wardriver, you’ll need a wireless network card or dongle that can be put into ‘monitoring’ mode. This is used to detect wireless networks passively, without interfering with them. Not all network cards support this feature. In Ubuntu Linux you can check if yours does using the command sudo ifconfig wlan0 down && sudo iwconfig mode…

Now that you’re hopefully connected to your target network, you can indulge in the gentle art of packet sniffing. This term describes the process of intercepting and logging packets of data across a network. The chief challenge when it comes to packet sniffing is the huge amount of data moved across networks, using various protocols. It can be hard to detect, for instance, if a user has visited a certain website or has downloaded a certain type of file. Thankfully, your task is made much easier through using the preinstalled packet analyser Wireshark. This analyser can capture data on a network and enables you to filter it down. Most importantly, you can capture data for a certain time and save it to a file, making it possible for you to…

Now that the Investigatory Powers Act has been enshrined into the statute books, the UK now has some of the strictest surveillance laws in the world [yay, UK no.1!–Ed]. ISPs are obliged to keep records of clients’ internet histories which can be accessed by a variety of organisations. VPN usage has skyrocketed as more and more people realise their communications may be subject to warrantless interception, or stored without appropriate protections, increasing the likelihood of theft by hackers. We’ve covered this from the other (client) side before—it’s easy to set up a Tor router using a Raspberry Pi [see Tutorials, p71 LXF196], to configure NetworkManager to connect through a commercial VPN provider, or even to set up OpenVPN on a remote server. But what if you want to run a…

Verdict Mullvad doesn’t ask for any of your personal details at all. Using a VPN may prevent outsiders from intercepting your web traffic, but it also means trusting your VPN provider with a lot of personal information. It’s worth digging into the small print to find out who deserves it, and who really doesn’t. SlickVPN clearly states that it doesn’t “track the browsing activities of user who are logged to the SlickVPN service.” Sounds good, but everyone says more or less the same thing. Perfect Privacy does better: its straightforward policy explains that the company doesn’t record your logins or any details on your VPN traffic. The only data it stores is the user name, password, email address and expiration date. You can pay with Bitcoin, too. Mullvad also promises…

VPN providers often appear very similar, and it’s tempting to choose a service based on simple stats like the price and the number of locations. But that’s not a good idea. There are many more factors to take into account, and even the most obvious figures are difficult to interpret. A high number of locations means little if you won’t use them, for instance, and a low price may not be so appealing if it gets you slow servers and no support. We’ve tried to get a more realistic view of our providers by checking them out in more depth: reading the small print, signing up, installing the services and trying them out in the real world. Buffered VPN may be at the bottom of our list, but it’s not…

We compare tons of stuff so that you don’t have to! Our selection Linux Kodachi Subgraph OS2 Tails Trusted End Node Security (TENS) Whonix Privacy is one of the topics that’s always on our radar. In fact, you’ve read about privacy fortifying distributions (distros) on these very pages in at least two past issues [see Roundup, p26, LXF124 and Roundup, p28, LXF196]. And here we are at it again. Our obsession with the topic is along the same lines as Bob Marley who showed up to perform at a concert two days after being shot and famously remarked: “The people who are trying to make this world worse are not taking the day off. Why should I?” In the same vein, there’s no dearth of entities that are champing at…

Privacy and anonymity are two different concepts that are often confused. Privacy is the ability to keep some things to yourself; in contrast, anonymity is when you want people to see what you do, just not that it’s you doing it. Being anonymous while maintaining your privacy on the internet requires compromise. First, you can expect slower browsing speeds as the data packets are routed all over the world before arriving at your computer. Second, some distros will enforce a stronger password policy, e.g. for locking your login details or encrypting your files. All this shouldn’t compromise a comfortable web browsing or computing experience. we’ll be on the lookout for the ones that supply the most safeguards with minimum disruptions. Linux Kodachi The distro boots into a heavily modified Xfce…

Verdict Linux Kodachi is the most usable distro straight out of the box. TENS supplies the user with a PDF reader and a bunch of remote desktop software, including the Citrix Receiver and VMware View. These are complemented by a smattering of applications, such as a barebones text editor and an image viewer. The developers also produces a Deluxe edition of the distro which is the same as the regular release aside from including LibreOffice and Adobe Reader. However, more important than included software TENS has no package manager to help flesh out the distro. With Tails you get the usual cocktail of software that you’ll find on many Linux distros, such as LibreOffice, GIMP, Scribus, Pidgin, Audacity and PiTiVi. It also bundles the Synaptic package manager for fleshing out…

The logical conclusion of our recommendations so far is that the safest smart home appliances will be those you’ve built and installed yourself. With inexpensive single board computers, such as the Raspberry Pi, this isn’t only a cheaper option but can be lots of fun as well. The Pi Zero, in particular, is perfect for home automation as it can easily be set up but doesn’t come with Wi-Fi or Bluetooth by default, which allows you to decide which networking components to add. At just £4, the Zero won’t break the bank either. A computer by itself won’t be of much use as smart devices usually need to affect the environment in some way. If you have used a soldering iron before, the Enviro pHAT (https://thepihut.com/products/envirophat) is a perfect, tiny…

Given that macOS is based on Unix, you’d think Macs would be a lot friendlier towards Linux than they are. But then perhaps the reverse could be said as well: most iterations of Linux won’t appeal to Mac users who believe Apple’s ‘it just works’ mantra that’s stuck in a one-button world. Nevertheless, why limit yourself to Apple’s closed garden when you can – with the help of this feature – install a Mac-friendly flavour of Linux alongside OS X? Our dual-boot approach ensures you won’t lose access to OS X, and we’ll even step you through the process of setting up a shared data partition – and moving your Mac home folder to it – so both OS X and Linux can easily access key folders. We’ve also chosen…

The biggest advantage of using the Pi at the heart of a desktop-based system is its low cost. But if you want to eke every last drop of performance from it, what do you need to do? The first thing is – of course – to choose the latest Raspberry Pi 3 model as the heart of your desktop. It’s head and shoulders above all other Pi models, and you can squeeze additional power from it through overclocking. The desire to overclock moves us neatly on to the next phase: how can you keep your Pi from overheating? The solution lies in a heatsink. You can purchase these for as little as £1 each from the likes of Pimoroni but choose carefully: The 7.5mm sink will dissipate that bit more…

There’s one thing the Pi is brilliant at and it’s media. Whether you’re looking for an audiophile-friendly music player, a simple set-top box for playing media through your TV or a full-blown media server for accessing your digital media from anywhere—there’s a Pi capable of delivering what you want. In this portion of the feature, we’re going to focus our efforts on creating a Pi media server, which will allow you to share all your video, music and photos with your other devices, both at home and further afield. For the purposes of this project, we’re focussing on the Raspberry Pi 3, largely because it delivers enough oomph to run a media server comfortably. But there are other benefits too—the Wi-Fi, in case you don’t want to site it next…

Many Linux programs are stored in what are called repositories (repos). These are online channels that bundle together software of similar types, built for specific versions of that distro, Ubuntu for example (so Ubuntu 16.04’s repos aren’t the same as those for Ubuntu 14.04, or indeed 16.10). To focus on Ubuntu there are four main channels for each separate version: Main, Restricted, Universe and Multiverse. The Main repo contains open-source software that can be redistributed and is supported by Ubuntu with regular updates. Universe contains free and open-source software where the community provides updates. Restricted houses proprietary (closed source) tools and drivers required to support Ubuntu on everyday hardware, while Multiverse contains software that’s not free nor supported. These repos can then be accessed by package managers like Software Centre…

Top Tip: Ctrl+Shift+C/V: Use these key combinations to copy and paste text from inside the terminal. Another CLI skill that will help you manage your distro more effectively is the ability to manipulate the filesystem from the terminal. Before we get to the commands, first know that under Linux, everything (including programs, directories and devices) is a file and every file must be owned by a user. Users can only access what they own or have been given permission to run. Permission is granted because the user either belongs to the file’s group or because the file is accessible to all users. The one exception to this rule is the root user who is allowed to access all files and programs in the system. Many times you’ll need to change…

we compare tons of software so that you don’t have to! Our selection antiX Bunsen Labs Cub Linux LXLE WattOS There has always been a demand for lightweight alternatives both for individual applications and for complete distros. But the recent advent of feature-rich, resource-hungry software has reinvigorated efforts to put those old, otherwise obsolete workhorses to good use. Even the modern Linux desktop is a fairly resource-hungry beast and your hardware might not have enough juice to power Unity or Gnome 3. Joining these ranks of users who have hardware that’s been outdated fairly recently, are the users who are holding on to their trusty machines from the last decade. It doesn’t seem fair to force them to ditch their dated hardware when all they need is a computer to…

You’ll find lots of distros with components that don’t tax your dated hardware. But it takes some doing to make all those components fit together seamlessly and turn that rusty old jalopy into a desktop you can use for everyday computing. For a normal distro, the number of applications it bundles has a direct influence on its usability. But a distro meant for older hardware is more than the sum of its applications. This is why we’ll look for distros that have tweaked every possible aspect of the base system to maximise performance, which is an important metric for gauging whether a distro is suited for use with dated hardware. Also, being pragmatic, distros that make it difficult for users to play or stream internet and disk content aren’t for…

Verdict The antiX metapackage installer makes it accessible to new users. Since all these distros are based on the two of the most popular distros, you can flesh them out with all kinds of applications. However, some of them make it an enjoyable experience while others don’t. WattOS, for instance, only includes the Synaptic package manager which is surprising for a distro that’s meant to be fleshed out by the user. The Lubuntu-based Cub Linux and LXLE include easier to use software centres as well as Synaptic. The distros also pull software from their own repos in as well as Ubuntu ones. Bunsen also hosts its own repos and makes it easier to install popular applications by adding entries to fetch and install them in the application menu itself. The…

The original GPL (General Public License) was written in 1989, long before most people started to worry that a couple of decades down the line we’d all be connecting to remote services to which vague and nebulous ‘societal pressures’ would coerce us into handing over our life stories, cat pictures and arm’s-length tales of self promotion. The GPL and its 1991 sequel, both deal only with code that’s distributed to directly to users and run locally on their machines. Where the GPL definitely doesn’t extend to is code that’s not distributed to users; code that runs remotely and sends responses back to users’ machines. So this covers all the server-side languages and just about any cloudy online service that the millennial sat next to you on public transport might be…

We don’t often cover paid-for services in LXF, but we really do approve of the one’s we’ve mentioned here. Even a virtual host lives on physical hardware and that needs to be maintained and protected from all manner of digital malfeasance. Email is particularly tricky to do securely, especially if your threat model accounts for black-suited agents going to your host with scary looking paperwork and removing hard drives. An ongoing case brought by the US government two years ago seeks to compel Microsoft to hand over emails belonging to one of its Live Mail customers. The data is stored in a Dublin data centre and Microsoft has argued (successfully so far) that US law doesn’t have jurisdiction there. While its refusal may not have helped the defendant in this…

One of the many diverse advantages of Linux is its support for older hardware long since abandoned by other operating systems. This appears to be under threat now with various distributions (distros) discussing dropping 32-bit support, and some having already done it. Ubuntu proposed not releasing 32-bit versions of its desktop and server ISOs from 16.10, although this has not happened yet. Even Debian is discussing it. Many smaller distros have already stopped producing 32-bit versions, including some that are aimed at lightweight use—that’s how old 32-bit is considered by some. This makes sense from their point of view. The 64-bit CPU has been around since AMD released the Opteron CPU for enterprise use in early 2003 and the Athlon 64 desktop chip later the same year. Thirteen years later,…

Here, we’ll focus on using Kali’s tools to test the strength of your networks wireless keys by attempting to directly crack the password. In recent years, this technology has come a long way and provided your network is using WPA2-AES encryption, a strong password, and has WPS disabled (see the box below) it’s extremely difficult to access. One method of hacking encrypted Wi-Fi passwords is “brute forcing” whereby every single combination of characters is tried until you hit on the right one. It’s theoretically possible, but this can take years in practice, especially so if a long password is used. Kali includes the aircrack-ng tools suite, which can he used by hackers to speed up this process considerably. This is usually done through trying passwords from pre-compiled word lists containing…

Network ports are the points of entry between a computer and the internet. Even systems that use firewalls will leave various ports open so services can run. For instance, a computer designed to run as a server for Minecraft needs to leave port 25565 open. One of the first things hackers do when connected to a network is to scan for open ports so they can try to crack the password for that service or run malicious code. As a budding pen tester, you’ll also need to scan ports of your own devices to make sure they’re not vulnerable. You’ll be using Sparta, a graphical front-end for several scanning tools. Chief amongst these is Nmap, which sends data packets to ports on the target machine. If a port is detected…

we compare tons of software so that you don’t have to! Our selection Buffered VPN IVPN Mullvad Perfect Privacy SlickVPN Whether it’s hackers and malware, Google and Microsoft, or the CIA and NSA, we’re never far away from another story on how the world is being tracked and monitored online. Virtual private networks can help by encrypting web traffic, keeping it safe from snoopers– and that could easily include your own ISP – and even protect you on insecure Wi-Fi hotspots. They’ll mask your real identity by giving you a new IP address, and maybe give you access to geo-blocked websites. Finding the right VPN can be tough, especially if you’re the demanding type. Most consumer VPNs focus on simplicity above all else, with a bare minimum of features and…

VPNs can be a hassle to set up, and providers typically don’t give much help to Linux users. So we’ve deliberately selected more Linux-friendly services. We tried out each provider, assessing details like the sign-up process, installation, and any special setup involved. We also looked at any clients provided, checked their setup tutorials, and tried them out in real-world situations to test their usability. If you’re an old VPN hand then you might not care much about that, especially if you’re thinking of just installing a standard such as OpenVPN. But even in that situation there’s a chance you’ll need at least some configuration advice, so we also scored the provider’s “Getting started” pages and tutorials for their quality and detail. Mullvad Mullvad is the perfect service for VPN beginners.…

Verdict Even the slowest VPN was fast enough for basic browsing. Check out any VPN provider’s website and you’ll usually find a lot of big claims and marketing hype. The reality can be very different, though, so it’s worth checking them out with a few tests of your own. Mullvad’s speeds were below average. Using benchmark sites like speedtest.net gave us at least 10Mbps from most locations, which was good enough for basic browsing, even some HD streaming, but P2P and bulky downloads may take a while. SlickVPN scored higher in our tests, particularly for short hops (UK to UK), where we saw close to normal speeds. Performance dropped significantly over long distance, and varied considerably between servers, but minimum speeds were typically over 15Mbps. Buffered VPN did much better.…

Verdict Kodachi and Subgraph trump the others and go further to ensure privacy. Trusted End Node Security, like its peers uses a modified kernel along with other tools such as DNS Crypt to prevent DNS spoofing by authenticating communications between the computer and the DNS resolver. It also includes an application to encrypt and decrypt individual files and complete directories, and works with DoD-issued Common Access Card (CAC) and Personal Identity Verification (PIV) smartcards for accessing restricted government websites. Tails (The Amnesiac Incognito Live System) is built around Tor, which is an open network of anonymous servers that attempts to prevent your identification. The Tails distro also includes tools that help set up the network and a web browser with privacy-enhancing extensions with a proven track record. Additionally, Tails includes…

Verdict Apps for messaging and filesharing over Tor in included in Subgraph. TENS has tools that enable you to authenticate with smartcards issued by the US Department of Defense and includes the public edition of the Encryption Wizard created by the US Air Force Research Laboratory to encrypt documents and directories. Besides Tor, Tails has AppArmor for application isolation; PWGen for generating strong passwords; KeePassX for managing them and AirCrackNG for auditing wireless networks. There’s also Electrum Bitcoin wallet, Nautilus Wipe to securely delete files and MAT for zapping metadata information from files. The Pidgin instant messenger is equipped with the Off-The-Record (OTR) plugin and the distro uses scripts to wipe your RAM on reboot or shutdown to protect against forensic recovery techniques. Whonix also uses Tor to hide your…

Cory Doctorow is an award winning author, thinker and speaker. He has written many things, young adult novels, science fiction and non-fiction commentaries on the exigencies of modern society. They are all fantastic, available in DRM-free formats and released under Creative Commons licensing. He is Honorary Steward for the Shuttleworth Fellowship program and co-editor of the Boing Boing blog. He is a digital rights activist and serves as Special Advisor to the EFF. Through the Apollo 1201 project, he’s part of a mission to rid the world of DRM. Linux Format: Without sounding too much like a hysterical screaming fan, I have to tell you that I am a huge fan of your work and it’s an absolute honour to be sat here with you. Cory Doctorow: Thanks man, that’s…

You’ve purchased your kit and you’re ready to build your ultimate desktop system. First things first: which distro will you choose? The obvious one is Raspbian, but if you’re put off by its rather basic interface, then Ubuntu Mate should appeal. It scores points for providing a slicker, more desktop-like environment, but isn’t as well supported and there’s a performance price to pay for those bells and whistles, although you’re less likely to feel the pain with the Pi 3. If Ubuntu Mate sounds like it could be your kind of thing, check out the box (Run Ubuntu from USB, below). Boot Raspbian from USB Full instructions for preparing your Pi 3 for booting from USB 3.0 can be found at www.raspberrypi.org/documentation under Hardware > Raspberry Pi > BootModes >…

We’re still waiting for a single Internet of Things standard to emerge and chances are it never will. In the meantime, each time you purchase a piece of IoT kit from one manufacturer, be it a motion sensor, security camera or smart lighting, you’re gambling that it will not only work with your current ecosystem but also prove flexible enough to work with others should the horse you’ve currently back fall out of favour. And let’s not talk about updates that break compatibility with older devices, eh SmartThings? Services like https://ifttt.com go a long way to helping bridge the digital divide between devices, but why rely on a manufacturer’s piece of expensive kit when you can custombuild your own versatile IoT gadgets using a Pi or Pi Zero? In this…

Joe Damato is a lowlevel computologist and the creator of packagecloud.io, a site that offers free and enterprise repository hosting for packages of all formats, shapes and sizes. They range from the.debs and.rpms we’re all familiar with, to more exotic things like Maven repos. It can talk to all manner of build/orchestration/ continuous integration systems, including but not limited to Chef, Puppet, Jenkins and TravisCI, and generally takes the pain out of software distribution. We caught up with Joe at OSCON Europe in London, where he gave a fascinating talk entitled “Infrastructure as code might be literally impossible”, in which he talked about the myth of high-level code and all the terrible things that go on behind the scenes when ostensibly nice-looking code runs. He also regaled us with some…

The Linux filesystem (ext2, ext3 and ext4) is different to Windows. The key change is how it references drives and partitions: not as distinct drive letters, but as files within the main filesystem itself. Open the Dash and type ‘disks’ to open the Disks utility to help you visualise how things work. Select a drive in the lefthand menu and look in the Disks menu bar. You’ll see your drive is referenced something like /dev/sda. This refers to the dev (devices) folder, inside which each physical disk is assigned a unique file that begins sd (for storage device) followed by a unique letter from a through to z. This follows a logical pattern: /dev/sda is assigned to the drive Ubuntu is installed on, with drives then allocated sdb, sdc and…

Top Tip: Shift+PgUp/ PgDown: Use these key combinations to scroll the commandline interface. Aterminal emulator is one of the core applications that’s bundled with every Linux desktop environment. Gnome has the gnome-terminal while KDE uses konsole though they are usually simply labelled as ‘Terminal’ in the application menu, When you fire up a terminal you get a prompt like bodhi@epoch: ~ $. While it may vary in appearance somewhat depending on the distribution (distro), it’s usually made up of your username@machinename, followed by the current working directory and a dollar sign. Note that the last character changes from $ to # when the terminal session has superuser privileges. Let’s begin our terminal travels by learning to navigate the Linux file system. Files under Linux are organised in a hierarchical directory…

Verdict A lot is packed into the distros, except Cub Linux and WattOS. Just like mainstream desktop distros, specialised distros can come pre-installed with a bunch of software. However, unlike regular desktop distros, which just pack in the latest stable version of the most popular applications, distros for older hardware have to be deliberate about what applications to include and the choice of software is generally dictated by their goals. Cub Linux, for example, ships with very few applications since its intention is to create a Chromebook-like environment. The distro includes the Chromium browser together with a couple of other offline applications and a handful of essential Google apps such as Gmail, Docs, Drive and YouTube. WattOS too includes just enough apps to make it usable as the goal of…

Verdict All the distros allow you to customise the installation in their own ways. All the distros in this Roundup go to some lengths to tweak their offering to better suit computers with limited hardware resources. WattOS, for example, has worked very hard to strip down the excesses and ship with the least amount of applications while still keeping the distro fairly usable. It uses a modified LXDE desktop with the i3 window manager and also ships with the PowerTOP utility that helps measure, explain and minimise a computer’s power consumption. Cub Linux ships its customised desktop with components from various lightweight desktop and window managers. The distro also enables you to add a traditional menu sourced from the Cardapio project and includes a custom control panel that gives access…

Online storage services such as Dropbox offer a convenient option for accessing and sharing data anywhere on the planet. Yet the conveniences comes at a cost, and the very idea of transferring our files to a remote server, outside of our jurisdiction, seems rather strange in the post-Snowden era. This is where Nextcloud steps in. It offers all the convenience of an omnipresent storage service while keeping you in charge of your private data. The open source data sharing server is brimming with features for both home and large-scale enterprise users. With Nextcloud, you can store, sync and share not just your data but your contacts and calendars. It also boasts of advanced features such as single sign-on capability, theming for custom branding, custom password policy, secure WebRTC conferencing, Collabora…

Exploits are tiny but highly specialised programs designed to take advantage of specific vulnerabilities in a target system. They deliver a payload to help hackers gain access a remote computer. The MetaSploit Project are the creators of the world’s largest public database of exploits, which can be delivered through their powerful Metasploit Framework, the free version of which is pre-installed in Kali. If the name sounds familiar, it’s because the Metasploit Project also maintains the MetaSploitable virtual machine, which enables you to test exploits and deliver payloads safely. To get started, make sure you’ve followed the steps in the previous sections to connect the Kali and Metasploitable2 virtual machines using a Host Only network. If you set up a second network interface in VirtualBox so that Kali can access the…

Verdict Buffered VPN’s featurepacked service runs almost anywhere. VPNs seem pretty straightforward, at least in principle: connect to a server, obtain an address in a new location, and then carry on as usual. It’s tempting to assume they’re all the same and make your choice mostly on the headline price, but in reality there’s a lot more to consider. The number of potential servers to connect to can be important. For instance, as well as their geographical spread. SlickVPN offers locations in an impressive 142 cities, scattered all around the world. Meanwhile, Buffered VPN has servers in 37 countries, Mullvad and Perfect Privacy both cover more than 20, and IVPN has only 12 to choose from. That’s an easy win for SlickVPN, which really does reach far and wide, but…

Quick tip For an in depth comparison of I2P vs Tor visit https:// geti2p.net/en/comparison/tor TI2P (The Invisible Internet Project) is a form of ‘darknet’ allowing users to visit web pages, chat, blog and even BitTorrent securely. A more detailed technical rundown is forthcoming but for now it’s enough to know that this anonymous peer to peer network provides the strongest protection against attempts to unmask your location and/or identity. This is mainly because it has been built from the bottom up with privacy in mind, but it also is largely unknown in privacy circles when compared to more popular alternatives such as Freenet or Tor. We are sure you can appreciate the irony. Readers interested in their own security may well already be aware of Tor and its trusty companion…

Verdict It’s best to use an encrypted partition just like Subgraph, so this distro wins. Persistence storage and privacy don’t blend well together. While all distros in this Roundup take special care not to interact with the hard disks on the computer, some do let you anchor them if you decide that the benefits of persistence outweigh the downsides. The only exception is TENS which simply cannot be installed. There’s also no installation mechanism for Whonix. The project offers several deployments mechanisms, the most convenient of which is to grab the virtual machines which function like any other installed distro. Linux Kodachi includes an installation script to help anchor the distro to the hard disk like any regular Linux distro. However the installer is very rudimentary and uses GParted for…

Up until the Edward Snowden leaks, the proponents of privacy attacks were considered digital outlaws on the wrong side of the law by the mainstream. However, it’s now been recognised that we’re in the midst of an information age where invading our privacy is not only a popular business model but statesponsored practice. Given the US government’s track record when it comes to ensuring privacy, it’s difficult to recommend the TENS distro, even more so when there are far better alternatives on offer. One of these is Whonix, which uses a unique compartmentalised approach to ensuring privacy. While we can imagine experienced privacy campaigners putting in the effort required to set it up, we don’t expect the same from new users who probably don’t fully grasp the issues involved. It…

Hopefully by now you will have whittled your required number of devices that must be connected to your wireless network and potentially the internet down to a bare minimum. The chief weak spot that any hacker will target is your router. Many people simply use the router provided to them by their ISP, which is usually chosen by the provider for its low production costs rather than security. Often the routers come with a default username and password, allowing remote attackers to access it easily. An essential step, therefore, in locking down your smart home is to use your router’s web interface to change your default admin password. One excellent way to reduce the chance of being the victim of out-dated firmware and zero-day exploits is to use a router…

The different hardware components in your computer all run at given speeds or have easily accessible speed limits. If your hard drive or SSD is attached to a SATA 3.0 bus then it has a theoretical maximum transfer rate of 600MB/s, while a fancy m.2 SSD (connected to a fast enough PCIe slot) will easily manage 2.5GB/s on a good day, and the bus itself (using 4 PCIe 3.0 lanes) can manage 3.9GB/s. Yes, your CPU will change frequency according to load (likewise your GPU), and yes these things can be overclocked, but all these numbers can be looked up or otherwise calculated. The trouble is, most of the time they don’t correlate with real world performance, since most real world operations use a variety of different aspects of the…

The Pi’s small-form factor and power demands make it the perfect candidate for use as a portable device and thanks to the range of cases, displays and battery power options out there, you can configure it just about any which way you choose. We’ve decided to build our ultimate portable Pi around the official 7-inch touchscreen, but see the box (below, Alternative Form- Factors) for alternatives you might want to consider. The official touchscreen costs around £55 from any reputable Pi outlet. You’ll also need to purchase a suitable stand and case that you can attach your Pi. There are plenty of options here—we’ve plumped for the clever SmartiPi Touch case (£20, www.modmypi.com). The touchscreen fits snugly inside, secured by four screws, and there’s a compartment on the back inside…