They said that I am a libertarian – who would you be?

There is this political quiz which is supposed to be the worlds smallest political quiz. It has 8 simple questions which are divided into personal matters and economical matters. Once you have answered the 8 questions it would show you your points and list your political ideology. This is really nice you should try it out.

Ok then it comes to my libertarianism. I was said to be a libertarian by the quiz. I don’t identify myself as a libertarian. No way. I would place myself between liberalism and libertarianism. I believe in the individual liberty. I believe that what humans do with their lives and property is their individual right. I believe in a society where people tolerate the behaviour of others and accept that the society could be different from the way they like it to be. I believe that the free market economics would deliver us prosperity.

But I’m not naive enough to think that taxation by the government is theft, I’m not stubborn enough to believe that the government is always bad in business, I’m not self deceiving enough to believe that the society is equal in opportunities. Ron paul once, in a ‘google candidate interview’ came up with the idea of abolishing the income tax. No wonder the Navy man won the candidature(I have high respect for Ron paul, probably would have supported him if I was an US citizen. I support obama considering the historical aspect).

Anyway the libertarians managed to get me into their side, in the quiz that is. What was your result?

How to make sure your XP machine is safe

How safe is your windows machine? Would Putting a password for your account and changing the administrator’s password, guarantee your machine’s safety? No it won’t.

Windows passwords are stored in a file called SAM which could be located at C:/windows/system32/config folder. It’s inaccessible from within windows. But all you need to get access to the SAM file is a bootable Linux CD. Once you boot from a Linux CD you can just navigate to the specified location and copy the SAM file. Believe me it is easy as that.

If you use Backtrack which is a popular Linux distribution used for penetration testing rather than a normal Linux distribution you can try to crack the SAM file without leaving the targeted machine. Backtrack has all the tools you would ever want for these kind of things. You can use ‘john the ripper’ to try to crack the SAM file with the use of a dictionary file. Which is nothing more than a collection of possible passwords. Or you can use this tool called chntpw which can be used to inject a username and a password to the SAM file. Then you can use that username and password to log into the system.

If you are booting from any other Linux distribution you can just copy the SAM file to a pen drive and take it home! yes take it home and crack it. You can use a tool like ophcrack to crack a SAM file.

Ok then here is the good news. You can easily protect yourself from these kind of attacks. The best way is to put a BIOS password and change the boot order in such a way that first choice to boot would be the hard drive. This would prevent booting the machine from bootable disks. If that is impossible, it is best to use characters other than alphanumeric characters such as ‘$#%’. These symbols make it hard to crack passwords.