Most popular articles of 2008

2008 has been a good year for HiR Information Report. This marks eleven years of HiR, which started as a text-file e-zine in 1997. The core crew is still around and writing, although we spent quite a few years dormant.

2008's our first full year with the new blog format. It's time to highlight the most popular articles of 2008. This goes by hits acquired in 2008, so some of the posts may be older than 2008.

10) Shimming a cable lock
This article went somewhat viral in the lockpicking and bicycling community. It sees inconsistent waves of high traffic from forums and blog links, then goes weeks without a hit.

9) jLime Linux - Wifi Scanning
Jornada 6xx and 7xx-series handheld PCs seem to be getting cheaper and more popular. jlime is a viable alternative to the built-in WinCE OS.

8) Sysadmin Sunday: Pure-FTPd configuration
Pure-FTPd is a security-enhanced FTP server. It takes a little bit of elbow grease to get it working properly under Ubuntu, but Asmodian X outlined it clearly. Most people find the article while looking for configuration specifics such as quotas and virtual users.

7) Series: Web Filter Evasion
After the last post in the series was (finally!) completed, the series started getting links. The series was featured on The Edge of i-Hacked and recieved mention in the PaulDotCom Security Weekly Podcast #132

6) Sysadmin Sunday: OpenBSD/Apache/MySQL/PHP (OAMP)
The security and stability of OpenBSD meets the flexibility of an AMP server environment. It's a match made in heaven.

5) Sysadmin Sunday: Process Accounting
Are you seeing a trend? As a general rule, a lot of Sysadmin Sunday and UNIX-Specific content gets linked to. Process accounting is a relatively simple procedure, but it's a good one to know.

4) Testing an ATX Power Supply
This is one of those posts where I feel the HiR Community did a better job in the comments than I did in the article. There's a lot of useful info in there. They picked up where I left off and had some great suggestions for better testing methods.

3) Epoch posts - perl Epoch time and Epoch Fail
I have these two grouped together because they're tied on hits.
Epoch time is just a pain in the butt. It makes sense on a computer, but it doesn't help much in your log files. A quick perl one-liner was just what the world needed, and a lot of sysadmins search for it and find my epoch time post.

Epoch Fail took off for purely viral reasons, because very few people understood the xkcd cartoon. "What is an epoch fail?" and similar terms were the heavy-hitting keywords that linked to this post. Thanks for the traffic, Randall!

2) Unofficial Tethering Guide: LG Chocolate
Verizon is notoriously pesky when it comes to tinkering with phones they sell. Bluetooth OBEX, tethering, and things of that nature are made intentionally difficult. The relative affordability of the LG Chocolate vx8550 made it a popular one among geeks, and this article has remained very popular throughout 2008, with quite a few hits on a seemingly daily basis.

1) Series: Make your own lock picks
This was the most popular content on HiR this year. After my TSA/Lockpick post on i-Hacked got minor mainstream exposure, links to this series took off. Also, the final article on pick templates gets frequent hits from image search engines. I guess there are a lot of locksport enthusiasts out there, looking for templates!