The Catling Mindswipe

Full Circle Magazine is proud to present Issue 85 . This month : Security and Q&A CryptoCurrency: Compiling an Alt-Coin Wallet NEW!  - Arduino plus: Q&A, Linux Labs, Ubuntu Games, and another competition to win Humble Bundles! Get it while it’s hot! http://fullcirclemagazine.org/ issue-86/

Yes, I know 2014 is half over - but it's also half remaining. So rather than spot the trends during Christmas party season, let's take a look at the trends that have emerged so far and look set to continue. 1. Interesting Typography with external fonts Time was, if you wanted a site to render properly in all browsers, you had to stick to a small, standardised set of fonts with the fallback of an even smaller set of standby font families, then hope for the best. Now that we have extensive font librries hosted online by Google fonts, Adobe and others, you can now decorate sites with any number of personality fonts and guarantee your page will look the same in any browser. Almost.

Article originally appeared as SMART Tools: Preventing Drive Failures (Linux Lab by Charles McColm, Full Circle Magazine issue 82 , Feb 2014) At our local computer refurbishing project, the top sources of hardware failure that we see are power supplies, CMOS batteries, RAM, and hard drives. The first three failures can cause systems not to POST (Power On Self-Test) correctly. Hard drive failures are a bit more tricky. A really bad hard drive can cause a system to hang while displaying POST messages, or cause a system to randomly reboot (we see more of this on Windows systems), or slow a system down to a crawl, or it might not appear to do anything at all. Knowing a drive has issues before the drive fails can save a lot of work.

Acknowledging the risk of turning this into 'Security Theatre Monthly', the latest malware How-to concerns a particularly duplicitous item of malware; what we now call 'ransom-ware'. This is a malicious trojan which purports to be from a law enforcement agency; variations include the FBI, Interpol and in this case, the UK Serious Organised Crime Agency. All variants lock your Windows machine under the bogus claim that you have been traced pirating material on the Internet and all demand on-line payment of a 'fine' to 'unlock' your machine. DO NOT PAY ANYTHING. It is a SCAM. No law enforcement agencies do this. There are no criminal charges, no court proceedings, so why would you pay a fine?

  Perhaps you've been using the Wordpress.com platform for your website or blog and after a long wait for the screen to refresh after an edit, you get the message: Goshdarnit! Something has gone wrong with our servers. It’s probably Matt’s fault. We’ve just been notified of the problem. Hopefully this should be fixed ASAP, so kindly reload in a minute and things should be back to normal.

Following our last security How-to, Identify the Troj/Urausy Ransom-ware infection, this describes using an anti-virus removal tool from Kaspersky to deal with the malware from my esteemed colleague's laptop. To create a bootable Kaspersky Rescue Disk , you will need a clean, non-infected, computer with Internet access and a DVD or CD burner, OR, if the infected machine lacks an optical drive, a USB flash drive you can wipe and install Kaspersky Rescue Disk onto. You will also need to be able to call up a one-time boot menu (usually the f12 key at power-on) and make sure you can change the boot order in the infected machine's BIOS so that you can boot into the Kaspersky Rescue Disk in place of your Windows install.

Full Circle Magazine is proud to present Issue 85 . Including an article by some hack called Robin Catling! This month: Command & Conquer How-To : Python, LibreOffice, and GRUB2 Pt.1. Graphics : Blender and Inkscape. Review: Ubuntu 14.04 Security Q&A What Is: CryptoCurrency Open Source Design NEW!  - Arduino