Author Archives: Manuel Timita

About Manuel Timita

Passionate about both human and IT systems. More curious than a cat, yet hoping to dodge its proverbial fate for a while.

Protect Windows with pfSense and VirtualBox. Part 6: Running VirtualBox headless. VM auto save state/resume

To operate the VM inconspicuously, obviously you don’t run the full-fledged VirtualBox GUI. VirtualBox can also be fully managed from its command-line interface, called VBoxManage (you can read the User Manual if you want to learn more about VBoxManage). In … Continue reading

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Protect Windows with pfSense and VirtualBox. Part 5: Configuring VLANs. Removing Windows’ TCP/IP stacks

Time to move to the next step: configuring pfSense, so we can make sure that we are going to have connectivity once we strip our physical NIC from its TCP/IPv4 and TCP/IPv6 stacks. Mind you, in this part I will … Continue reading

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Protect Windows with pfSense and VirtualBox. Part 4: Installing and configuring pfSense on VirtualBox

Note: if you need help with installing pfSense beyond the instructions included in this tutorial, you can always refer to the project’s official tutorials, wiki, and official forum, or even better, buy the manual available on Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk (a … Continue reading

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Protect Windows with pfSense and VirtualBox. Part 3: Installing VirtualBox and creating a new VM for pfSense

Installing VirtualBox and creating a new virtual machine should not be a big deal: Install VirtualBox with all the default options. It’s just a matter of clicking Next a few times. Login on Windows as administrator. Browse to the folder … Continue reading

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Protect Windows with pfSense and VirtualBox. Part 2: Installing Microsoft Loopback adapter on Windows 7

The idea is to have the traffic ‘flowing’ through the laptop’s physical NIC to the virtual machine running pfSense, then back to the Windows host through the Loopback adapter. In what follows, I will describe how to install the Microsoft … Continue reading

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Protect Windows with pfSense and VirtualBox. Part 1: Preamble

Recently, I have been contemplating the idea of attending the Chaos Communication Camp in Germany, in order to learn more about information security first-hand. Yet, as outlined in their survival guide, going there without considering a high level of security … Continue reading

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Julian Assange and the improbable implosion of authoritarian systems

[UPDATE: A shortened, but still fairly accurate attempt to explain Julian Assange's attitude and mission, can be found in this comment published today, 5th of December, by Theo Brainin in The Guardian. Somehow, though, I feel that he too has … Continue reading

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Some systems are impossible to hack. Narrow minds, for instance

WkiLeaks, Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, and, generally, the hackers (boo!) have made the headlines lately. And they will keep on being an important news story for another few good weeks, as more and more of the 251,287 cables will be … Continue reading

Posted in Harangues | 1 Comment

Selfishness as a reliable vehicle for good deeds

I have written the previous article without going into details about the ‘why’ of altruism, and why does it appear to be (not even paradoxically) more like a matter of egoism, so in what follows I will try to clarify … Continue reading

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How seeing dead people might just help you become a better (living) one

Shall I add that this might not really apply to those creating said less-than-pretty sight? Say, murderers. Also, I presume, it may have no effect on the very religious types, as they usually hope for the best once they’re off … Continue reading

Posted in Second wind | 2 Comments