INFOSECC

One thing I've started to enjoy is picking up on scam calls and wasting as much of the scammers' time as possible. Maybe it's altruism and not wanting that time to be spent successfully scamming vulnerable/gullible people. Maybe it's my white-hattedness wanting to dig as deep as I can to keep others safe. But my desire to figure out this particular scam definitely has something to do with my distaste for people who make their living by scamming other people. The auto warranty scam calls only took me a few rounds to figure out the overall scheme. Here's what I've found out: Make/Model/Year Make and model are fairly irrelevant. As long as you match something up decently, you can keep the scammer's attention. Year is the most crucial thing to get right or wrong, depending on the point in the call. Auto warranty scammers will ask for up to three vehicles if your first two don't "qualify" for the supposed extended warranty. I start out with a modest...

If you walk into my family's home, you may find it cluttered with toys and books and other miscellaneous messes created by our four children, but what you will not find are scattered bills laying about. For that, and other paper-centric processes, I have a system which has evolved over the years, to the point I'm actually pretty happy with it. The small apartment we occupied in the mid 2000s was right-sized for our dog, cat, my wife and me. To ensure we didn't accumulate paper clutter, I began the process of scanning any bill or receipt that ended up on the counter, and tossing it right away. It was at this point I became enamored with the YYYY-MM-DD naming convention for dates, as it made things easily sort-able in a directory. Each file I dumped on my PC was backed up to DropBox . This system was okay, but not particularly useful when it came time to try to find something. In 2010 or so, I started dumping everything into  Evernote . Receipt? Evernote. Bill? Evernote. Bank...

Justin and I are an amazing team. Then again, we kind of have to be as a two-person team. Before Justin decided I was worthy of being his insubordinate subordinate, I had always worked on fairly large teams--12 or so people in small companies. I have to say that not a day has gone by since I left my last job that I've missed having a larger team. With it being just the two of us, we get a much higher volume of work done faster and better than I've ever seen happen on larger teams. The benefits: We don't have to: run our ideas by a room full of people to reach a consensus wait for internal bureaucracy to approve every last little project or purchase waste time having meetings waste even more time having meetings about other meetings spend a chunk of the day responding to emails from other team members work around each other's in/out time to work on a group project send emails back and forth to keep everyone in IT in the loop stay locked in to vendor relationships set up...

 If the title of this post got any more exciting, we'd have to sell tickets. We both use Manjaro Linux, but we each use it much differently than the other. Each of our approaches is detailed below. Pick your fighter and may both teams win. In the first corner of the ring (corner of a round thing, ehck)... Monica's "Woman"jaro. Monica's Minimal Manjaro Linux (Mmm, Linux) My approach to Manjaro Linux is to have a Windows environment without running Windows. I start with the minimal iso of Manjaro and build it up to run only the software I want, and none that I don't. Side note: I also run a blog on minimalism, so go figure I don't like digital clutter. Ease of gaming and working both inform my Linux setup style. I've been immersed in PC gaming since 1993 and thought for about 20 years after the fact that I'd be locked into Windows forever to keep things easy. My first foray into an attempt at gaming on Linux came in 2006 with Ubuntu. I loved the OS b...