About.Me

December 23, 2010 By

I’ve created an About.Me page. It’s at http://about.me/clint326.

No, I don’t want to fight you … I just want to defend and protect sensitive information and critical systems :-)

The About.Me splash pages are an interesting idea and maybe that’s why AOL just purchased them.

But, I don’t see the longevity in it. If it catches on, won’t most blogging software just add splash pages as a feature?

And, how is AOL going to make money on About.Me? Who’s going to want advertising on their splash page? Who’s going to want a link to AOL on their splash page?

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Defining Information Security Risk

November 17, 2010 By

Years ago I wrote a definition of Information Security Risk that still seems to work well for me. Here it is:

Information Security Risk is a function of (a) the likelihood of a specific threat-source exploiting a specific vulnerability in a specific information system and (b) the resulting impact of that event on confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

Do you have a different definition of Information Security Risk? Please add it as a comment!

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BlueHat Security

September 10, 2010 By

If you’re trying to get to bluehatsecurity.com, you’ve landed at the right spot. That domain name now points to this blog. BlueHat Security, my information security consulting company, is currently on hold.

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Dell Keyboard Troubleshooting

July 24, 2010 By

A few days back someone spilled a small amount of ice tea onto one of our Dell L100 keyboards. This was a relatively inexpensive keyboard that came with a Dell Inspiron home computer.

The Dell L100 Keyboard

After drying the keyboard as much as possible, I let it sit for a day or two to dry even more. But, when I tried it on a working system, every key worked except the “Space” bar. Being an occasional hardware hacker, I wanted to see if I could fix it. My first step was to take the keyboard apart to see if there were any obvious problems. Here’s the inside:

Bottom half of keyboard with top cover and keys removed.

Considering how simple the switches were, I figured it must be something more complex, like the small circuit board:

Internal "logic" board.

In order to figure out which pins on the connector represented the Space bar, I had to follow the conductive traces around the clear plastic “circuit boards” inside the keyboard. Thats when I found it … a small area where the ice tea must have eaten away at the conductive traces making the Space bar inoperative:

The conductive traces (to the right of my thumb) had been eaten away by ice tea spilled on the keyboard!

To confirm the traces were broken, I used a multimeter. I tried to repair the conductive traces using a pen with “metallic” ink, but the traces were too small and pen was too wide.

At this point it was clear the keyboard could not be repaired.

Having served its final purpose – reminding me that I still have useful hardware troubleshooting skills – I tossed the keyboard the trash and turned my attention to buying a new one online.

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Hello world!

July 15, 2010 By

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

from Tkinter import *
root = Tk()
root.title('Listbox')
list = Listbox(root, width=15)
list.pack()
for item in range(10):
    list.insert(END, item)
root.mainloop()
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