R Portable Version 3.4.2 and RStudioPortable Version 1.0.153 have been released and are available at the R Portable project page, https://sf.net/projects/rportable/.
Back in February, I ran into an interesting problem. Both my Wi-Fi and wired connections stopped working on my laptop. I was able to connect to the access point and get an IP address but was unable to ping or connect to anything. I was getting the infamous ‘limited connectivity’ error. After a day of debugging, I gave up and restored the computer from a backup. Everything worked fine until recently. This time I figured out why the Wi-Fi failed.
Until recently I was using an old version of Nmap from the February backup. Upgrading Nmap to the latest version broke my Wi-Fi. During the install process, Nmap installs its promiscuous driver, Npcap, and then says you might want to look for a newer version of the driver. So I downloaded the 0.92 version. While installing the driver, I noticed that it recommended uninstalling WinPcap. I forgot that I had WinPcap installed. At one time WinPcap was the promiscuous driver of choice for Nmap and Wireshark but it has not been updated since 2013. Npcap is supposed to be the replacement for WinPcap even though it is not stable enough to be called version 1.0. Despite my stability concerns I uninstalled WinPcap, installed the latest version of Npcap, and everything works.
My best guess is that I updated Nmap from version 6.47 to 7.40 in late January. I use Nmap about once or twice a year so I probably decided to upgrade to the latest version prior to running a network test. The network connectivity problem appeared when I rebooted in February. Although the Wi-Fi problem started occurring for people in April of 2016, it does not manifest itself until Nmap 7 installs Npcap. I upgraded Nmap to test our network Wannacry vulnerabilities in May. The next time I rebooted the network connectivity problem had returned.
R Portable Version 3.4.0 and RStudioPortable Version 1.0.143 have been released and are available at the R Portable project page, https://sf.net/projects/rportable/.
R Portable Version 3.3.3 and RStudioPortable Version 1.0.136 have been released and are available at the R Portable project page, https://sf.net/projects/rportable/.
R Portable Version 3.3.2 and RStudioPortable Version 0.99.903 has been released and is available at the R Portable project page, https://sf.net/projects/rportable/.
R Portable Version 3.3.1 and RStudioPortable Version 0.99.902 has been released and is available at the R Portable project page, https://sf.net/projects/rportable/.
Back in January I wrote an article about using Let’s Encrypt with Multiple Virtual Host Files and now I know a better way to do it. The problem I ran into was the script throwing an error when renewing the certificate. After a little research the easiest way to get a robust installation is to follow Erika Heidi‘s instructions in How to Set Up Let’s Encrypt Certificates for Multiple Apache Virtual Hosts on Ubuntu 14.04. Now the script to renew the certificate works.
I found two problems that might people trying to implement SSL.
Please update RStudio to the latest version to avoid this warning message when using R Version 3.3.0.
R graphics engine version 11 is not supported by this version of RStudio. The Plots tab will be disabled until a newer version of RStudio is installed.
R Portable Version 3.3.0 and RStudioPortable Version 0.99.896 has been released and is available at the R Portable project page,https://sf.net/projects/rportable/.
R Portable Version 3.2.5 has been released and is available at the R Portable project page, https://sf.net/projects/rportable/.
R Portable Version 3.2.4 has been released and is available at the R Portable project page, https://sf.net/projects/rportable/.
Over the holidays I converted this site over to use SSL using a free SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt since the folks at Digital Ocean had written a nice tutorial, How To Secure Apache with Let’s Encrypt on Ubuntu 14.04. The problem was that the installation script partially worked. It created a SSL certificate for multiple hosts but it did not update any of the virtual hosts files. So I had to update the files manually using the template in the /etc/letsencrypt folder. To get an “A” rating from Qualys SSL Server Test I had to download the intermediate certificate https://letsencrypt.org/certificates/. Finally I redirected all of my encrypted traffic to the SSL site. Here is what my Apache host configuration file looks like.
<virtualhost *:80>
ServerName mysite.com
Redirect / https://mysite.com/
</virtualhost>
<virtualhost *:80>
ServerName www.mysite.com
Redirect permanent / http://mysite.com/
</virtualhost>
<virtualhost *:443>
ServerName mysite.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/html
ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
SSLEngine on
# Intermediate configuration, tweak to your needs
SSLProtocol all -SSLv2 -SSLv3
SSLHonorCipherOrder on
SSLCipherSuite ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:DHE-DSS-AES128-GCM-SHA256:kEDH+AESGCM:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA:DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:DHE-DSS-AES128-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA256:DHE-DSS-AES256-SHA:DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:AES128-GCM-SHA256:AES256-GCM-SHA384:AES128-SHA256:AES256-SHA256:AES128-SHA:AES256-SHA:AES:CAMELLIA:DES-CBC3-SHA:!aNULL:!eNULL:!EXPORT:!DES:!RC4:!MD5:!PSK:!aECDH:!EDH-DSS-DES-CBC3-SHA:!EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA:!KRB5-DES-CBC3-SHA
SSLCompression off
SSLOptions +StrictRequire
SSLCertificateFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/mysite.com/fullchain.pem
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/mysite.com/privkey.pem
SSLCertificateChainFile /etc/letsencrypt/lets-encrypt-x1-cross-signed.pem
</virtualhost>
R Portable Version 3.2.3 has been released and is available at the R Portable project page, http://sf.net/projects/rportable/.
R Portable Version 3.2.2 has been released and is available at the R Portable project page, http://sf.net/projects/rportable/.
R Portable Version 3.2.1 has been released and is available at the R Portable project page, http://sf.net/projects/rportable/.
R Portable Version 3.2.0 has been released and is available at the R Portable project page, http://sf.net/projects/rportable/. Please update RStudio to the latest version to avoid the “Error in tools:::httpdPort < = 0L" error when using RStudio with R 3.2.0.
R Portable Version 3.1.3 has been released and is available at the R Portable project page, http://sf.net/projects/rportable/.
Okay, Joel, here it is. I got these instruction off of the Internet but I do not remember who was the original source.
#Get currently installed packages #work package_df < - as.data.frame(installed.packages()) package_list <- as.character(package_df$Package) #write.csv(package_df, file = "package_df.csv") #Re-install Install packages #install.packages(package_list)
This month I have been fooling around with ConsoleZ. ConsoleZ by Christophe Bucher is the open sourced Windows Command Prompt replacement and is a fork of the more popular replacement application, Console2 by Marko Bozikovic. Since I was already using Console2 I already had customized tabs for Windows Command prompt, Ipython, Powershell, MinGW shell, and some custom DOS/Powershell applications. One of the tabs I wish I had was a DOS prompt with Administrator access. So I searched the web and found that Ben Garrett had solved that problem and few others I did not know I had in his post, Create A Better Windows Command-line Prompt. So I added an Administrator console tab, ANSI color, a DOSKEY macro to start Notepad++, GOW, and a colorized version of ls. It is almost as functional and colorful as a Linux prompt now. 😉 Here is what it looks like.
This ZDNET article, “Over 90 percent of data breaches in first half of 2014 were preventable”, had me intrigued but it was their summary that really caught my attention. Since the latest explanation of how the North Koreans hacked Sony was that they stole a system administrator’s password by some method that is not discussed but vaguely confirmed by the NSA, we would have to conclude that the Sony breach was probably a staff mistake.
The Online Trust Alliance says that a high percentage of data breaches were the result of staff mistakes — rather than external hacking.
According to a recent Online Trust Alliance press release about 47% of data breaches was the result of staff mistakes and 40% were the result of external intrusions. Here is what they said.
OTA also announced that it has analyzed over a thousand breaches involving the loss of personally identifiable information (PII) in 2014, as reported by the Open Security Foundation (OSF) and the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. OTA found that only 40 percent were the result of external intrusions, while 29 percent were caused by employees—accidentally or maliciously—due to a lack of internal controls. The balance of incidents were primarily attributed to lost or stolen devices or documents (18 percent) and social engineering/fraud (11 percent).