Phishing

I just got called by someone from "Global Security Services." He had a very pleasant South Asian accent. He started with "I assume you are running the Microsoft Windows operating system." To which I answered "Of course not!" He quickly hung up.

Now, I'm going to be highly suspicious of anyone calling me long distance without caller ID info. The "Global Security mutter mutter" made me highly suspicious that this was part of a new phishing scam that's been going on. The goal is to have you install some "Microsoft Security product" which is of course malware.

Notice to readers and family members: They are calling people in Canada. Never ever install anything a cold-caller says to. Ideally stop using Windows at all. It's security is atrocious and the knowledge required to keep it secured is beyond most normal users.

Alpine Linux

My router (pinky) used to boot uClibc Bering from a floppy. ucBering was really cool, but was getting ancient. The hardware was very noisy too. So I changed to less noisy hardware (JA Pinkerton), and run Alpine Linux. Alpine is a descendant of LEAF, which Bering was a variation of. It boots from CD and saves state to a USB key. Just have to remember to do lbu ci after any config change.

What's awesome: finally getting tcpdump on my router!
What's strange: full perl 5.12.3 on my router!

Alpine also include clamav, so you could use it to scan Windows computers for viruses. Kind of like these instructions.