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St. Louis Arch

I was in St. Louis for a conference last week and found myself with some free time before I had to hop on a plane…just enough time to make a trip to the Arch.

Welcome to fremont.fergcorp.com

For whatever foolish reason, I’ve decided to take the plunge in to Virtual Private Servers and sprung for a 1GB Linode.

I’m actually kind of excited by this. It’s sort of like being back in high school and running my own server from my parents house. Except I’m ten years wiser…and married.

Anyway, after some minor toiling about whether I should install nginx from the Debian repository or compile it from source, I ended up going with option C and am trying the dotdeb repo.

This has been predominately driven by my continuous desire to push BlueHost to boundaries of what shared hosting meant. I upgraded to the Pro account last year, but it’s still a bit sluggish and I still consistently find myself having to scrape together horrid workarounds for things I want to do on the server. I probably should have got VPS a year ago, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to take that task on…I’m still not sure.

The server is named Fremont, because it’s located in Fremont, California.

I’m going to move some of the sites I run off of BlueHost to see how fremont (along with nginx, MariaDB, and PHP-FPM) handles everything — and to see if BlueHost gets any snappier.

If all goes well, there’s a good chance I’ll move all the sites to fremont.

For now though, I just have the basic “Hey, it works” page up and running, including an SSL certificate, at https://fremont.fergcorp.com.

The Four Horsemen and The United States

I’m not sure what to say about this article, other than it’s immediately relevant for everyone. I know the author personally, though will respect the authors anonymity.

I believe this will end up being a seminal reading for me as it so expertly addresses and focuses the political feelings and worries I’ve had towards all sorts of things over the years.

If I had to give a teaser, here’s the pull quote I would offer:

From inthecourseofhumanevents.com:

“The history of man can be written as an effort by one group of men after another trying to gain power over the life and death of his fellow man, to gain control over the actions and thoughts of his peers, to claim ownership over the fruits of the labors, wealth, and property of his neighbor. And it has worked… for a time… for so many of history’s tyrants… benevolent or otherwise.

Conquest, however, is destined to fail each and every time… because conquest never comes alone.”

And it gets better, or worse.

But the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big b…

From www.raptitude.com:

But the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (the average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in 8 hours) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work.

We’ve been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don’t have. We buy so much because it always seems like something is still missing.

CryptoLocker: An Insidious Virus That Ransoms Your Files

There’s a new virus out there that I want to raise awareness of, it’s called CryptoLocker. I normally don’t post warnings or alerts about virus, but this is probably one of the more insidious viruses I’ve ever seen.

You can read additional information about CryptoLocker at:

Basically what this virus does is locates all your important files on any drive attached to your computer (hard drives, flash drives, USB sticks, network drives/shares) then encrypts the files it finds.

The only way to unlock the files again is to pay $300 to get the key used for the encryption. The encryption method used is RSA with a 2048 bit key, which makes it extremely hard to crack — impossible with the time span and todays computers.

Once infected, you will be presented with a ransom note stating you have 72 hours before the perpetrators destroy the key making it impossible for you to ever get your data back.

Let me put that another way: If you are infected, you will have to pay $300 if you want your data back. There is no way around it and most cases I’ve read about report that once the ransom was paid, the files were successfully recovered.

Nevertheless, this can be extremely devastating if you are running a business and all your files are gone; or if all your family pictures disappear.

If you sync your files to the cloud, you’re still not safe, it syncs the encrypted files as well. If you are able to restore to previous versions of your files in the cloud, you could be okay.

Also, if your backup files are accessible directly they could also be held ransom as well.

Let your friends, family and co-workers know about this.

Here are some simple ways to avoid getting a virus in general:

  1. Don’t open e-mails from people you don’t know
  2. Don’t open attachments in e-mails unless you were waiting for the attachment
  3. Don’t go to websites/click links that you don’t fully trust
  4. Don’t download and execute files that you don’t fully trust

It might seem obvious to the most of us to don’t do the above, but to a lot of friends, family and co-workers it might not be.

Imagine waking up and having to pay $300 to get your data back. However, the police tracked down one of the servers that serves the keys and shut them down which means the keys were not delivered and the data was lost, this means even if you do pay the $300, there is no guarantee that you will get the data back.

Raise awareness of this and avoid having your files lost.