Security Applications

http://www.insecure.dk/

Don't get me wrong, I like Tripwire. It was the first, but it's certainly not the easiest thing to set up. What I dislike about difficult things is not just that I'm lazy (I am), but difficult often means someone, somewhere will misconfigure or otherwise nullify all the good the program should do. This program is fast and easy. Not necessarily better, but different. Requires: Perl and Perl module Digest::MD5.

download only: buschencrew.hypermart.net/software/datedif/datedif-0.9.1-4.tar.gz

This small C program will calculate the number of days between any two dates. Granted, this has somewhat limited use, but the author does present an example. It is most useful in scripts. How many days until Christmas? Requires: glibc.

http://motion.technolust.cx/

I like this little application. It was designed so that you could connect a (surveillance) camera to your system, run motion, and it would take pictures each time the image changed. You can make a movie, even send an e-mail. Yep, great for security. But I (ab)use it differently. I connect my video camera after taking a home movie, let motion grab frames every second. Then I load all the images into xv and delete what I don't want and rename what I do want. Much faster and easier than doing it manually—a lot of options. This is a keeper. Requires: libjpeg, libmysqlclient, libz, libcrypt, libnsl, libm, glibc.

Until next month.