Revisiting the 10 Immutable Laws of Security, Part 1 

BANGKOK, Thailand – Thai police officers who break rules will be forced to wear hot pink armbands featuring “Hello Kitty,” the Japanese icon of cute, as a mark of shame, a senior officer said Monday.

It sounds like the work of Phil, the Prince of Insufficient Light, but it is a new strategy for punishing minor infractions. I have been looking for something like this for a while in order to punish the “sins” I deal with the most.

• Not putting something on the schedule
• Leaving an outside door open
• Not taking something off the schedule
• Leaving an outside door unlocked
• Not updating something wrong on the schedule
• Propping an outside door open
• Forgetting to look at the schedule and trying on using a place that has already been booked

There is other stuff, but I think I have been  in a rut lately.

Do you use minor punishments for minor problems just to make sure people take notice and correct themselves? What do you do when your boss or the preacher does the infraction? What about when you do it?

Some technical infractions:

• Downloading mywebsearch or hotbar
• leaving the computer on and logged in
• leaving their laptop unattended in a public area

• The Central Square of Khanty-Mansiysk in Russia.
• A lit ski slope in Sweden. I watched people skiing with snowfall live while sitting in Florida.
• A quality Axis Pan/Tilt/Zoom camera at Wyoming Medical Center. Wonderful camera, too bad they are very expensive.
• A view inside and outside of Sv. Hostýn, bazilikaan
• On I-95 near the church (let’s me see if it is raining outside).

The widespread use of web cams has not been missed by the government. The Department of Homeland Security has a study on using face recognition and anomaly recognition software with public web cams to determine if something has happened based upon whether there are many fewer people or many more people in the scene than statistically expected (one study can be found here: PDF file). There have been several papers in the FBI concerning home web cams left open to the world. There was even a recent FBI notice concerning web cams in sensitive areas.

If you are like us then you probably have cameras looking at areas where there is not a good physical presence much of the time. Having this available for people to check out gives them an opportunity to see patterns of activity and vulnerability.

If you have cameras accessible outside your network just make sure you have them on a password.  Perhaps do some “site:” searching in Google on the domain name or IP address you view the cameras on.

I recently installed a DCS-5300 in the Worship Center and I thought I would share information on it with others.

The primary purpose of this camera is to let the building supervisor keep track of what is happening in the main auditorium since it is too big to be well covered by regular cameras.

First off is a video of the DCS-5300 in motion. It has a good range of motion and although the motor noises are very noticeable to someone listening in on the on board camera they are not noticeable from a distance of a few feet in an environment with ambient noise. This video was taken from about 2 feet away from the camera and the noise is barely audible over the noises of my computers.

DCS-5300 in Motion

Next is video of the camera being controlled from its current location above the sanctuary. DCS-5300 in Action.

I was about to see the camera since I knew where it was located. I could tell if it was moving based upon the size of the visible silver portion.

Also note that the controls are a bit odd. D-Link has a DCS-5300 Emulator. The sample camera doesn’t move, but it has the drop down list for the preset areas. I didn’t include the pan/tilt speed options in my version, I just set them to the highest speed. It was possible to recreate the controls, but it would take a lot of work to find the current settings each time.

Set Up:

Full control of the camera needs several ports. I opened several ports in the firewall to aim at the camera. (About opening ports for cameras)
The control system uses a lot of javascript, but a little rewriting enabled me to input the ActiveX video into another page (Link to post on the OSMinistry Forum).

I was also able to change the links from being javascript controlled to being simple html links. They have an 1px by 1px iframe set as the target since the camera responds to simple page loads to activate the motor controls.

• Preset Recalls: http://domain.com:1234/cgi-bin/recall.cgi?recall=name of preset
• Move: http://domain.com:1234/cgi-bin/camctrl.cgi?move=left
• Auto Pan: http://domain.com:1234/cgi-bin/camctrl.cgi?auto=pan

I use an altered copy of IETab that works much better with opening Internet Explorer pages in frames of other pages not in IETab. I increased the version number and the version of Firefox it works with to avoid having to keep up with later updates that do not work as well – Altered IETab for Firefox 1 & 2.

Why I use Firefox with IETab:

I thought I should go ahead and answer this here. First of all, I prefer Firefox over Internet Explorer. Second of all, recent updates of Internet Explorer do not let you include basic auth usernames and passwords in links or images while firefox does.

Whenever you visit a site that has the little gray pop-up generated by the browser itself, and not through javascript or CSS, expecting a username and password you are using basic authorization. A lot of web hosting control panels and web applications use this. In older versions of IE and in most versions of other browsers you can insert that usrname and password into the address (ie. http://username:password@www.example.com). Once that auth information is known by the browser it will use it each time to visit a page on that site.

Internet Explorer removed this for a reason. There were phishing attacks where people would receive a link similar to the following: http://www.paypal.com:users@bad-site.com/gotcha. People would think they were going to paypal.com, but were really going to bad-site.com.

By using IE inside of Firefox you bypass this issue and the Eolas infringement issue which requires you to click on an ActiveX or Flash object in order to activate it.

If you have any questions on this camera please post in the comments. You can see previous posts about cameras here.

Our DCS-3220g cameras have this ability.

I have been tempted to use them in different areas of the church with the speakers mounted above the ceiling tiles. Then I could not only tell people to close doors, but maybe even cause a few “religious experiences.”

I could collect a list of open volunteer positions and then recruit via talking camera. So far I have had a few people respond positively to the idea. Mainly people who need to recruit volunteers.

As each contestant increased the number of marshmallows more and more started to drop out of the competition, often ending with a slimy white disgorgement into a waiting garbage can. The first truly disgusting outburst usually lead to cheers from the crowd and a domino effect bringing down another contestant.

Now it is in the news: Chubby Bunny Kills 32 Year Old Woman

I am not surprised that this tragedy which occurred in London this week has happened again. This time it gets more attention due to the event and the age of the woman. There are some references to other deaths on the Wikipedia page for Chubby Bunny. I have been looking for references to a related game called “Royal Roman” which was played with grapes. That one always seemed worse since I could picture sucking a grape into my windpipe when preparing to say “Royal Roman.”

Apparently the worse danger with marshmallows is that they slowly melt into your throat and clog you up with a goop that is not easily removed. The vistim has a decreasing supply of air and each gasp makes it worse until there is not enough air in the lungs to get the deadly goop out.

I posted this in the security section because churches also need to be protected from the stupidity within.

If you ever have the feeling that perhaps you are not paranoid enough about church security I recommend you stop in. As more people who are interested in security are joining in there are more perspectives and resources available.

Blogs are nice. They allow an author to focus on a topic and write in a personal manner. I still prefer forums though. They open up the conversation in a way that a self focused blog cannot.

If you are an active learner then I invite you to stop in at the Open Source Ministry Forum and join in.

It isn’t a place focused on software or Linux (although those are regular topics), it is focused on opening knowledge for ministry. I believe that Open Source is not about software, it’s about people helping people accomplish great things.

The print quality on the ID cards has been pretty much hit or miss. I had a big pile of poorly printed cards before, but lately every single one of them looks like it has a coffee stain on it. For an expensive printer it is pretty lousy. On top of that, the continued service contract is more than $500 per year and when it comes to the print head that only brings about a discount which drops the repair price to a few hundred dollars.

I admit that I am cheap, but I don’t know anyone who likes to pay a premium for garbage with bad support.

There has got to be a better company out there for printers.

One of the features we really wanted was to be able to use the images from the ID cards for other uses, but the documentation for IP 1000 didn’t include info on how to get the images out. Ivis Plus 2000 advertises standard jpeg images as a feature, but the 1000 does not.

It was after about 1 week of starting on the ID cardsthat I decided to look into how the images are stored. They are kept in \IVISPLUS\PHOTOS\PIC1 and they are named as p1.pc where “1″ is the incremented number of the image. Don’t let the .pc fool you, they are really jpeg images and once I associated .pc files with Firefox they open up immediately.

We use a separate program for controlling the maglocks, and it was able to import the .pc images for the picture IDs associated with the cards in the system.

The fact that the images are stored in jpg format meant that I was able to open one of the images in photoshop and use it as a template for creating my own ID images. I used the proportions of that image and created other pictures for the loaner cards (Yoda: “Return this card you must”, General MacArthur: “I Shall Return”, The Terminator: “I’ll be back”, and President Bush: just in case he ever visits). I used a picture of communion trays for our communion prep ministry card, a picture of an audio cassette for the message ministry card, and pretty notes for the worship department loaner card. I saved them as .jpg files and then took a picture with the camera through the ID card program to create an associated image and then renamed the .jpg to match the .pc name in the picture directory.

I also used this option for bringing in pictures of people who were not available to get their picture taken when I had the system set up for regular operation. There were a few times when I had to edit images in photoshop and drop in the default background before importing.

The best feature with this is that we also have a place where staff can look at pictures of all the other staff, ministry leaders, custodians, and regular contractors to know what they look like. I got around to tht after 100 pictures had already been taken so I ended up pulling out a section of the Ivis Plus database and writing a php script to associate the person’s name and position with their image, resizing the images to make them all the same size, and saving the images as FirstName_LastName.jpg for easier future reference.

These pictures look like mugshots so they did not turn out well when a couple were used during service at the last minute (if you want to recognize people they need a more flattering image), but they were used to identify people in security camera video, and one was used in a police investigation. The security hosts have a direct link to the images on the front desk computer so they can identify people by name very quickly.

It is a pretty simple service and very affordable. It doesn’t take the place of the regular background checks we have been doing for a long time, but it works as a good first line check. We are using the “Business Use 1500 Plan” under the corporate account area.
PublicData.com also offers the ability to look up automotive registrations via license plate information or Vehicle Identification Number (VIN). This is helpful for tracking down where some of these cars that appear in our parking lot came from.

I am interested in starting up a license plate registry of staff vehicles and vehicles that are regularly left in the parking lot to make them more quickly identifiable.

It has several databases to search from (a list in the demo), but it doesn’t cover everything in every state.

By the way, if you are interested in using PublicData.com go ahead and register through this link. It will give us 100 more lookups and I believe you will also get an extra credit of 100 lookups as well.
If you have any questions about the service then post in the comments and I will try to answer them.