In Through The Out Door

Headline: NSA’s data mining explained:

Capitol Hill politicians reacted angrily this week to a new report about how the National Security agency is involved in not merely surveillance of phone calls, but also an extensive data mining program. “We need to know what our government is doing in its activities that spy upon Americans,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat. Republican Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania vowed to hold hearings to get to the bottom of how the NSA’s data mining works and whether Americans’ privacy rights were affected. To answer some questions about the program and how it likely works, CNET News.com has created the following list of answers to frequently asked questions. Keep reading.

The New Wireless Wars:

An anonymous reader writes “BusinessWeek has a story on the coming wireless wars. It’s a look at how the upcoming government auction of wireless spectrum will open the door to a new crop of competitors. The new players, from Google and Microsoft to Intel and Craig McCaw’s Clearwire, will compete in new wireless voice services and in wireless broadband. Look out Cingular, Verizon Wireless, and Sprint-Nextel.”

Enable SELinux From Scratch (13 May 2006):

SELinux, the U.S. National Security Agency’s implementation of mandatory access control, is the most prominent new security subsystem in Linux. It comes installed by default in Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux and is available in easy-to-install packages in other distributions. This article shows you how to convert a non-SELinux system by hand in order to expose details about how SELinux is integrated into a system.

How To Test Your Linux Firewall:

This article shows how you can test your Linux firewall with a tool called FTester (Firewall Tester). With FTester you can check your firewall’s filtering policies. The tool consists of two perl scripts, a packet injector (ftest) and the listening sniffer (ftestd). Furthermore, FTester also provides Intrusion Detection System (IDS) capabilities.