Monthly Archives: August 2009

Use Google Voice for your Voicemail with Any Phone, Any Provider 25

Update 10/27/2009: Google Voice now supports adding voicemail to any old cell phone number without the “Do not disturb” trick. Simply go into ‘Settings’, Enter the ‘Phones’ tab and then click ‘Activate Google voicemail on this phone’.  It will give you directions on call forwarding, which are the same as below, customized for your provider. Disable the “Do Not Disturb” setting to set your Google Voice account back to normal. Thank you Google! For those lucky enough to have a Google Voice account, you’ll know the advantages: forward calls to multiple phones, visual voicemail and audio to text transcriptions. But, since you are not yet able to transfer your current phone number to Google Voice, it is hard to give up your old phone number and start having family, friends and business associates use your new Google Voice number. Also, there is the whole confusion as to your outgoing caller….

How to Install SNMP on Tomato Router Firmware and Graph Traffic with Cacti 14

You’ve flashed your old WRT54G or other vanilla router with the Tomato firmware. This itself turns your router into a lean, mean routing machine with QOS, SSH and more, but let’s say we want to take it a bit further. What it we want to get some more stats out of it? In order to do this, we first need to set up a way to pull this information from the router. The best way to do this is to install an SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) daemon on the system. The main roadblock we face here is that the system mainly runs in volatile system memory, meaning that every time the system is rebooted the filesystem is reset. Fortunately Tomato provides a way to get around this using CIFS shares. Follow the steps below (as modified from here) to install an SNMP server on a Tomato router. Create a….

Social Media and the Downfall of the Password Reset Question 8

There have been a number of high profile account compromises due to the insecurity of password reset questions. Examples of two big ones off the top of my head are Sarah Palin Yahoo account compromise and the Twitter “Hacker Croll” fiasco. There have been many more compromises on accounts due to weaknesses in password reset questions, even if they are rarely as publicized in the main stream media like the previous two. The attacks are basically the same – primary e-mail accounts are typically secured by password, and the password can be changed by entering an answer to a password reset question. Both of these account compromises were caused by weak password reset questions. And although Palin certainly was/is a high profile account, the Twitter compromise was caused by a low-profile IT Administrator who happened to store sensitive company documents in their Google Docs folder. This goes to show that everyone, from….