MySQL has become an important part of most Web servers, especially over the last few years. With all those databases, the risk of corruption, intrustion, data loss, hardware failure, and lots of other factors necessitate automated backups.

Luckily, backing up MySQL isn’t nearly as hard as it might sound. Actually, it’s only one command. But, not many people have only one MySQL DB, and dumping all of them to a single file can be hard to parse should you only need to import one. This is easily remedied by making a script run on cron to dump them all individually.

I set this script to run once a week, monday morning at 5am. It generates a logfile as well, info.txt.sl, which contains the date, a list of files, and their MD5Sum. Finally, it uses bzip2 to compress the files efficiently. MD5Sums are critical in determining the integrity of the archive and to ensure the database has not been corrupted or altered since the snapshot was taken.
Read the rest of this entry »

Source: engadget

Apple is now shipping (and probably has been shipping) iPhones and iPod Touches with a bit of extra software in firmware 2.0 in the form of a rootkit.

This is an outrage.  The fact that phone / device manufacturers get away with this kind of crap makes my blood boil.

It seems that Apple has finally taken things a step too far with the whole notion of “It’s still our device”.  When you buy a piece of electronic equipment, you are entitled to use it however you see fit; if that entails throwing it at a brick wall, flushing it down the toilet, using it for a sanding block, etc.

This also included hacking the living crap out of it, in my opinion.

When you buy a computer or build a computer, no one is there to tell you “don’t load Linux onto it or I’ll turn it off remotely from BigBoxHQ”, yet that is exactly what Apple is trying to do.  Some enterprising individual took apart an iPhone’s software only to discover that embedded deep within the core of the OS lies a “phone-home” rootkit.  It is a rootkit by the very definition of rootkit, and after the break we can examine the examples of how Apple ships your iPhone and possibly iPod Touch with a rootkit installed.

Read the rest of this entry »