One Shot Design

Cross-platform, multi-protocol chat client Pidgin has briefly been mentionned on this blog. I’ve always used Gaim and its successor Pidgin to manage the MSN, ICQ, AIM and GoogleTalk accounts on GNU/Linux. As of late, I’ve been getting half-a-dozen spam bot messages per day through MSN.

Realizing that blocking the user was pretty much ineffective, since there is a myriad of these bastards, I searched for a possible filter plugin. I came across Bot Sentry, an underrated plugin that surprisingly isn’t included in the default Pidgin distribution. Blogger Mark O’Neill explains how the plugin efficiently gets rid of chat spam.

After fiddling with the command line, I managed to install the plugin and get it running.

With the strong decrease in price, flash memory has replaced magnetic and optical drives as a universal storage media. Every personal computer user now owns at least one of those USB flash keys. These tiny devices typically hold more data than a CD while taking less than a third of the physical volume. Fact is, USB key are so easy to carry around in the pocket or attached to a key… that they easily get lost or stolen. With the increased digitization of life, storage media often carries personal and sometimes critical information. And that can be a liability.

Password encryption software has already been discussed on this blog, but weekly reports about theft and loss of laptop computers holding critical information do raise the issue of protecting files as well as passwords. Truecrypt, a free open-source disk encryption application (for Windows Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux) enables to create an encrypted containter on media storage or to encrypt a whole storage drive. Once access is given clearance, the application mounts the encrypted data as a virtual drive, allowing the user to browse and move files and folders around with the file explorer.