My laptop sits on my dining room table. I don't eat at it very often, and haven't noticed heat issues.

When not at the table, I have a small folding bed desk I use. It's made of wood, but haven't seen issue with heat damage there either. Usually I use it sitting on the floor or laying in bed.

Actually, I was thinking he clicked stuff he wasn't supposed do, and is now part of a bot-net or the like

If the owner knows about the problem, maybe you should offer to help him fix it. that we you can get QoS set up, be serious about it not just to improve your usage, and he gets to learn how to offer a better service.

From the sound of it, it sounds like you're in an apartment or other shared resource area (dorm). The best thing to do would be to complain to the people who own the network.

Be a minor pain, have screen shots and other ways of showing the problem (graphs are nice). If the network is included in your rent, point out you're paying for a service you can't use because it has too much traffic on it.

If they ask for suggestions tell them to set up QoS, and do bandwidth monitoring to see what the dude is going to. Not hard to set up BandwdithD and NTOP on something monitoring the connection to the upstream from the router.

There is also the chance that the guy doing it, doesn't realize there is a problem, and his system is compromised.

I wouldn't mind getting it and installing. I want to wait a few days see if there is a new round up of people by the feds first.

I'd have to install it on a machine that would only run that with no internet connection. I would then destroy said hardware after use.

You've been around long enough. Go find H1t M0nk3y's posts on his experiences.

You are going on a very hard mission, where many try and most are told to try harder.

It's dangerous to go it alone, take this

Anyway impelse.... good luck.

Talking with a local recruiter (in the Detroit area), who said they're having problems finding "qualified" Linux people in the area, but I know tons of linux admins in the area.

So it looks like  case of they're paying more, they're being overly picky on what they are looking for.

I hangout on freenode in #misec, #milocksport, and #social-engineer

I was thinking he was going for a study group. I'd be down for that, but not at the expense of SANS. I can't afford it either right now. But not on the table until next year anyway.

So you're only worried about people you live with... Look in to getting a shell account, or a small vps somewhere, and then set up SSH tunneling. Have everything tunnel over it. Done. Like the vpn option it doesn't do End Point to End Point, but does give you a tunnel out. I used to use ssh tunneling from hotels to home, but now I use it from anywhere I need to my VPS. All you see is ssh to a server. Not the website I'm surfing over the ssh connection.

The ssh option will add extra deniablity. "Hey Jamie, why are you always connected in to your server?" "Oh, because I use it as an always up irc client". Having a VPN connection might make people suspicious.

I'm going to ignore the first paragraph and go from the right now. If you want to be a programmer, then program.

Getting experience as programmer is probably easier than other parts of IT.

First look at what languages you know. Look at what languages you want to learn. Lastly look at the languages that are popular, but don't forget the old stable ones always people looking for those.

From there, start finding itches you have that you want to scratch. Set a deadline and test the code. Make a website that you can host the code on as an opensource thing. Put something in there that you will recognize as yours. It's about building a portfolio. Use that to try and get on a larger open source project. Even if you have to join the project by saying you'll work on the Documentation. Which may actually be a good start to getting in to R.E. Or at least dealing with other people's code. There are dead projects out there that need to be picked up too.

After that, find some bugs, write test cases, submit. Repeat.

As for the certs, there are secure coding exams and certs out there that you can take. Look up SANS Secure Programming Assessment.

Third party VPN? Ok, I was going to say why not use OpenVPN to access your network, but I think I see what they are selling there. They're trying to be a competitor to TOR from the quick reading I did on their page.

If you have the bandwidth (even hosting a podcast on my server I've got bandwidth to spare right now) on an external server, why not just set up SSH tunneling?

Or just rock out with TOR?

From their page, it looks like you'll connect to their server which will be what sends the data out beyond it, so really it's just natting you and sending the traffic back over an encrypted path. If I understood what I read on: https://www.goldenfrog.com/vyprvpn/why-vpn properly.

Saw the banner. Missed the columnist bit. very cool indeed.

Just remember to lock down your BT sustenance. wither it's virtual or a direct install. Some simple things like disabling root log in from anything other then the console. Change the password. Set up a regular user account and go to root if and when you need to. Change the name of the box.

A friend and I were talking on twitter the week before classes started about how we were installing bt5, a friend that is the network admin at another school said he loved finding students running bt on the network. Which lead to a third friend jumping in and sharing her experience of that happening when she was new to BT.

cd82, nice I'm a little jealous. I want a new laptop, but I'm saving up more money. The one I have my eye on is really designed to be a gaming machine. I figure I can run what I really want to with that beast.

As for the netbook. I bought an eeepc one last year, I hate it. It's running bt4r2.

The screen is too small for any real work.
The keyboard sucks for typing on.
forget trying to run jtr on it.

It's a nice little toy, but not a good quick little hacking box like I hoped. really it spends most of it's time turned off with books and stuff stacked on top of it, and I only tend to get it out when I need to update my phone (triple boot between windows 7, ubuntu and bt4r2). I've used it for war driving a few times with my Alfa plugged and gps receiver plugged in to it. but beyond that not really as great as I thought it would be.