Posts by Justin Pasher 159 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Aug 2008
"... won't cough admin privileges to the hacker – at least not by itself. Attacks are likely to generate pop-up warnings and under default settings a User Access Control popup would get displayed."
Ohhh, you mean that "this program is requesting admin rights" pop up where everyone just clicks Yes when they see it?
Netflix complains that the speed issues are due to the end user's ISP. The ISP says it's because Netflix is sending traffic over other upstream providers that don't have the capacity to carry the traffic. Yet now, Netflix creates another peering agreement with another ISP. They even have a peering agreement arranged (but maybe not implemented) with Verizon, but they had their recent spat over who's at fault for the slow down.
What in the world am I missing? Netflix complains that the problem is with someone else, then they establish peering agreements with those parties. Are they just trying to make the ISP look like the bad guy? Is Netflix just bi-polar?
Hmmm... Methinks this would be a good way to suck up more IPv4 addresses and push more toward IPv6 (not really, but hey, it's Google). It's too bad we can't just all assume that SNI will work everywhere, although with the "death" of Windows XP, there should be less resistance, in theory.
Irony alert: When the Heartbleed bug was discovered, you would have actually been a little safer to NOT be using SSL, as you wouldn't have had the potential for private keys to be stolen and allowed a third party to impersonate your site over a secure connection (although nowadays, I'm sure a large percentage of netizens don't pay as much attention as they should to whether a connection is secure or not).
"Yes, he loves them so much that he's actually only 21st out of 44 for number of executive orders issued (182 as of June 20.) See also: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/data/orders.php"
Uggh... This argument again? The NUMBER of executive orders DOES NOT MATTER. It's the CONTENT of those executive orders that matters. If one president issued 500 executive orders that did small, non-law creating things, that would be so much better than a president that issued just one executive order that established a new law that made everyone take 15 minutes our of every day to personally bow down to him or risk imprisonment. He's already riding the line when it comes to what power he is actually granted by the constitution.
Now, back on topic...
"Aereo even found three Supreme Court Justices who agreed with it. Six Justices, however, didn't, sticking broadly to the common sense and widely accepted principles of property and compensation."
Putting the "spirit of the law" aside for a moment, let's look at this scenario.
(I am assuming the one-to-one antennae aspect of Aereo is true, as they say)
An end user goes out and buys an antennae to receive over the air broadcasts. He hooks up said antennae to a capture card on the computer and uses some form of PVR software. The net result? The end user is getting the same content as the Aereo service (at least at the location of antennae installation) for a one time hardware payment. No money has gone to the broadcasters, following the "common sense and widely accepted principles of property and compensation". Yet this scenario is perfectly legal.
Let's take the DVR aspect out of it for the Aereo service. Now, a user only has access to a live stream of whatever is being broadcast at the time. Take that technology and put it in a USB dongle, and now it's portable. Assuming the verdict would be the same if Aereo did not provide DVR service (I wonder if it would have been), the former method is illegal but the latter is legal.
Since (I assume) the Aereo service could be accessed from any Internet just by logging in to a user's account, it's not quite as straight forward, but the principle is still relevant.
"... new legislation that limits firms’ ability to control prices could also cause foreign suppliers to abandon or decide not to enter the Australian market, resulting in less competition and less choice for consumers in Australia."
Assuming that the final prices being charged are stilling providing a profit, I'm pretty sure if a company is given the choice of "no profit" (exit the market) versus "some profit" (stay in at a lower margin), they would choose the latter.
If ARIN actually wanted to help with the adoption of IPv6, they would make it more cost effective (i.e. free) to at least get your feet wet with it. As far as I know, there's no way to get a free "test" block of IPv6 addresses from ARIN for experimenting with a publicly accessible IPv6 setup. At the very least, they should have made IPv6 addresses available for people with existing direct IPv4 allocations. If I had access to an IPv6 block and I didn't have to try to justify an associated cost with management for something that is just being tested, I'd definitely show more interest in playing around with it.
Think about it. A large portion of the "value" associated with an IPv4 address is because of supply and demand. For IPv6, the "demand" is essentially not there, not because so few people are deploying it, but because there are so many addresses available that every micro-organism could be assigned one and we'd still have plenty to spare. This eats into ARIN's bottom line, so they have to start out by establishing a dollar value for IPv6 that's not anywhere close to its real value (e.g. millionths of a cent per IP)
'According to Cohen, the move is all about fairness. 'People who use more should pay more and people who use less should pay less,' he said.'
So given your example, people that use less than the 300GB get a discount right? Oh, that's right. The base price would include up to 300GB for everyone at the same price, regardless of what percentage of people are using a lot less than that. Almost sounds like a redistribution of the wealth.
Reading some of these posts, it seems there might be a lot of misinformation regarding the technical implications of Heartbleed. Without writing a huge article, here's a brief overview of critical points.
The flaw affects BOTH servers AND clients. The heartbeat command that is generated that causes the flaw is like a ping. The server can "ping" the client and the client can "ping" the server. Granted, a server would have to be specifically set up to send malicious heartbeat packets sniffing for data, although it's still possible. Embedded devices, like routers, WiFi access points, etc. are potentially affected because they can be running a "server" too (although this should make people take a good look as to whether you really need that WiFi access point interface to be accessible to the whole internet over port 443).
A MITM attack is NOT needed for a random third party to (potentially) obtain username/passwords that are sitting around in memory on a server. All that has to be done is for someone to attack a vulnerable server with forged heartbeat packets, then sift through the returned data. Would it be difficult to find usernames and passwords? Potentially, as the leaked data is whatever random data was stored in memory at the location that was copied. It could return useful information after only one request, or it could return useful information only after 10 millions requests. Now when it comes to sifting through that data, that's a whole other issue.
A MITM attack IS required for someone to pretend they are another site, IF they happen to get a copy of the server's private key. Because of that IF, this is why people are recommending revoking SSL certificates. Just like the usernames and passwords, they might get the private key easily, or they might have a really hard time getting it. One they get the key, they still have to get the end user to visit their site (to avoid certificate warnings, they would need something like DNS cache poisoning to redirect someone to a different IP while keeping the domain the same).
As an end user, you visit a lot more than just your "ISP's server". Any web site you visit over SSL poses a potential risk.
All in all, I still agree that the media over-sensationalized this quite a bit. Odds are most people will not be affected by it. Sure there will be some (especially considering known attacks started up shortly after the vulnerability was revealed), but most will not, simple because they first have to attack a server that vulnerable, then they have to hope the server leaks the credentials, then they have to actually be credentials for you.
Kudos to the majority of the staff out there that got things patches up quickly (I'm probably a little spoiled, as I keep the 50 or so servers I manage up-to-date on a regular basis, so a simple apt-get upgrade is easy. The SSL certificate revocations was a little bit more work).
Aren't cable provider's service areas typically regionally exclusive (i.e. "this area is serviced by Comcast while this other area is serviced by Charter")? The end user generally doesn't have a choice, except possibly across different technologies (e.g. cable, FiOS, DSL, etc). Maybe the cities they mention are different...? If not, how exactly are they planning on doing this? Selling the local infrastructure with it?
And what if the client likes Comcast more than Charter? (well, I guess the answer is "tough luck")
"If the Netcraft extension determines that a site was vulnerable before news of Heartbleed broke, it checks the date on the site's SSL certificate to make sure it has been recently replaced. If it hasn't, the extension displays an alert."
Ugh... That's all fine and dandy if every CA changed the issue date on certificate reissues. I've read from multiple sources that this is not always the case. I know that GoDaddy will update the issue date, but I think Comodo is an example of one that does not update it. Without installing the extension and knowing how the "alert" is presented to the user, they could be venturing into dangerous territory by saying a site is still affected when it's truly not.
Also considering the possibility where someone was running a non-vulnerable version (0.9.8 or 1.0.0) and they upgraded their servers to now be running 1.0.0g+. Most likely they wouldn't get their cert reissued because they were never vulnerable.
They *could* have been using GnuTLS instead, but considering the extra work involved in doing that as opposed to installing the distro packages, that would be extremely unlikely.
The state of open source SSL libraries is a pretty sad affair right now. OpenSSL is the "defacto" standard mainly because it's been around for so long, but the code is so big and cumbersome, there's not a single person that knows everything about it (or probably even a large percentage). GnuTLS isn't really much better. I've read on some sites where developers dislike the GnuTLS code just as much (if not more) than OpenSSL.
Debian uses GnuTLS for some services (OpenLDAP is the first to come to mind), but they did that because of the licensing issues with OpenSSL (GnuTLS is LGPL).
OpenSSL 0.9.8 is not "dead". Yes, it's the older branch, but it still receives major security fixes. Many systems still utilize it because it's been around for so much longer than the 1.0.x series, so it (should be) more stable.
The biggest disadvantage of the 0.9.8 branch is that is doesn't support the newer ciphers suites.
I understand that the potential risk is there (and theoretically everyone COULD have already had their information exploited) and there's know what to know for sure, but the problem is the media is essentially going straight to the "doomsday" scenario when the odds are it's not nearly that extreme. However, now that world+dog knows about the exploit, I'm sure a lot more attempts are being made to capitalize on it (as evidenced by other sites mentioned by another ElReg article).
I'm not saying it would be a bad idea to change critical passwords for the sites you access, but once the majority of the big providers have patched their servers, a lot of this will blow over and the majority of people will be unaffected, IMO.
"The flaw is potentially among the most damaging ever to surface on the web but there's been little evidence that it has been widely exploited so far - leading some security experts to say it's been overblown"
The media has severely sensationalized this. The actual compromised data can range from "move along, nothing to see here" to "hide your kids, hide your wife, hide your husband"*. For the majority of the people seeing the reports (read: non-technical people), they are receiving the message that "The world is collapsing and nothing is safe. You have been compromised, change all of your passwords, PINs, combination locks, dead bolts, alarm clocks, dog's name, etc"
Yes, the *potential* for your secure data to be compromised is there, but most likely, the majority of people are just fine. It's hard to imagine that if this particular exploit was in wide use in the "hackers" underground that it wouldn't have surfaced much sooner. Think about it: the main thing the crooks want are usernames, passwords, credit cards, etc. If they've compromised those, I think you would have noticed before now.
It doesn't mean the IT departments around the globe shouldn't have due diligence patching what they can (at a minimum the OpenSSL libraries and rekeying SSL certificates where feasible), but it's not exactly "the sky is falling" scenario that is being presented.
* http://youtu.be/EzNhaLUT520?t=59s
"This compromises the secret keys used to identify the service providers and to encrypt the traffic, the names and passwords of the users and the actual content"
This is a little misleading. There's no GUARANTEE that private keys were compromised, although it's possible (and should be assumed as a precaution). It just all depends on what happened to be in the memory location that was leaked. However, statistically the number of instances where this is true is going to be much smaller than the ones where it is not.
My thoughts exactly. I think it's pretty rare and unique circumstances that make someone run nginx as their primary web server software (at least at the present time). It would typically be a front end/proxy for another server instance. Imagine if Varnish identified itself as the "web server" instead of passing through what was behind it.
All in all, I don't think it really matters what web server someone is running, as long as it gets the job done and you can configure things correctly and securely. Even if IIS jumped over apache, does that mean Apache will die off? Of course not. Now if PCI compliance checking companies started saying stuff like "well, you need to be running the top web server in order to make things secure", then we'd start having problems.
And this is where I get confused. Was MtGox not (supposed to be) used just as sort of an escrow service that facilitated the transfer of bitcoins from one address to another? I'm only moderately versed in how bitcoin operates, but you only need the private key to send money from one address to another, so why would you ever give the "keys to the kingdom" away to someone else? I would think the process was "pay X bitcoins to a MtGox address, they take a cut, then send the payment along to the person that bought it".
Did it operate differently where MtGox was the judge, jury, and executioner for your wallet?
"Just to add insult to injury, the password was rubbish, featuring the word "welcome" with a few numbers."
The password displayed was w3Lc0m3!HERE
12 characters long, mix of uppercase, lowercase, numbers, and symbols. Decent entropy (number seems to vary depending on what site you ask).
You may not think it's as secure as LnzujrfAI5489u!#$a832PT, but rubbish? I wouldn't go that far.
El Reg seems to be confused with the term "deprecated". If NARROW_COLUMNS and SINGLE_COLUMN was deprecated, it would still work properly, just no guarantee it would work in the future. According to the Android development page, the feature was completely removed, not deprecated.
Without researching, I'm not sure if they previously deprecated these features, but if they didn't, it's a little brash for Google to remove an important feature out of the blue without any warning.
Check out foobar2000. I switched away from WinAmp a few years ago and I use foobar2000 for my light playback needs. It supports a lot of the features that people probably use in WinAmp and is much less bloated. It supports most (all?) of the common formats and few additional ones via the plug-in system (.MOD anyone?). I also use it for WAV > MP3 conversion (interface to lame.exe command line)
So let me get this straight. Their method of "security" to avoid people getting emails intended for the previous recipient is to make everyone ELSE implement code that lets said third party check to see if an email address has been "valid" since a certain time frame? So basically if said third party does not implement this new Require-Recipient-Valid-Since header in their "ping back" email, it's no different than someone taking control over an email box through some other nefarious means.
What could possibly go wrong?
Of course artists should be paid for all their hard work they put into music, but just like music as moved from a physical format to a digital format, the primary source of income for an artist as moved from selling the music to PLAYING the music (e.g. concerts). That's where all the money is going to come from nowadays.
There are probably countless numbers of artists out there that think "I'm just gonna write the songs then let the money pour in from the sales while I kick back." It's just not the way the big boys do it.
Please tell me one of the filters they have is this:
WARNING: You are shooting your video in portrait format. This is not the standard video format used by every playback device on earth. It will not only look bad, but it will also waste over half the pixel space when viewed in a standard viewing box / monitor / TV / etc. Please rotate your camera 90 degrees. Otherwise ...
Continue?
Yes - Pfft. What do you know about how to hold a phone?!
No - Thanks for helping me become smarter and save the world from yet another poorly shot video clip!
I an a former programmer turned IT manager, and I can definitely say one thing:
Keep us away from the design aspect!
It's one thing to IMPLEMENT the design. It's another thing altogether to MAKE the design. It's like the difference between a paint by numbers picture and a blank canvas.
I'm sure hardware designers fall in the same basic category.
In a lot of cases, they wouldn't even need to go that far. Just look how easy it is nowadays to take a phone number (at least non-mobile) and perform a reverse lookup. Granted, some people will have made the effort to "unpublish" their number or make it private, but most will not.
You want "anonymous" data? Convert each phone number to a one-way hash key. That allows you to "link" the data between two callers but makes it very hard to KNOW who those two callers are.
Then again, what good would the data be to them in that case .... I guess that's why they need a little more than "anonymous" data...
@Velv: Check the article. The settlement only applies to the iPod TOUCH and some iPhones, not all iPods.
Referencing the "never wrong" Wikipedia [1], about 100 million iPod Touches have been sold (including later gen models not covered). It says approximately 250 iPhone units have been sold (also including later gen models not covered. Granted, with those numbers, the percentage is still pretty small, but 350 million is a lot smaller than 800 million.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_Touch
Although I don't (yet) see exactly how well Glass will pan out, here's my prediction
1. Google releases Glass
2. Apple says "that's stupid"
3. A few years pass
4. Apple releases a product that's basically the same with a prettier interface and say they have invented a revolutionary new product
5. Fanbois swoon and flock in droves to buy it.
For some reason, this all sounds so familiar... just ... can't ... put my finger ... on it...
Assuming that it is impossible to pirate an Xbox One game (yes, I'm sure it will eventually happen), I don't see why people are missing the most obvious reason why you can't compare something like Steam to an Xbox game:
Once you sell the Xbox game, you don't have it anymore! Period.
With something like Steam, you already have a copy of all the files needed to run the game, so it is MUCH easier to maintain a copy of the game. That's why "reselling" a used game on Steam wouldn't work. You don't have that problem with an Xbox game because you don't have a copy of the game anymore.
Obviously once the hackers figure out a way to rip and play "backed up", the argument becomes moot, but until then, there's absolutely no comparison. There's also really no logical reason in my mind why they shouldn't allow second hand games just like the past (excluding corporate greed, politics, etc).
I'm more confused by the people that feel that an acronym has to be pronounced using the same hard/soft letters as the words it stands for. Using that logic, take these examples:
ASCII - Do you pronounce it uh-ski, since "A" stands for American?
ICANN - Do you call them ih-can, since "I" stands for International?
... just to name a few
I welcome T-Mobile trying to shake things up in the cell phone market (there's basically no competition in the segment), but I'm a little unsure exactly how much influence they will be able to push. We are almost at the point nowadays where AT&T and Verizon are so big, there's not much that can be done to knock them off their thrones.
I find it REALLY hard to believe that Apple would release even the "low cost" version completely free with a 2-year contract. I think $50 or even $100 would be more likely.
One of the big ideas that Apple has toted over the years is the "value" of their product. They don't want to undermine that value by pricing things really cheap, regardless of their actual cost ($100 premium to go from 32GB to 64GB?). That's why you don't see them on sale like other products (although they seem to have relaxed this a little bit over the recent years).
I bought this phone right after it came out because it was the first Android phone available for AT&T (I really didn't want to get an iPhone). Initially I thought it was great (my previous phone was a Blackberry Pearl from work). However, since this was my first Android experience, I didn't have much to compare it to.
I like the keyboard flip out design. I have always been a much bigger fan of physical keyboards than virtual keyboards, and it seems like more and more Android phones are moving to virtual-only handsets. However, that's about the only thing that really stands out. It has poor video quality, a lackluster processor, and measly storage included. Oh, and it's still stuck on Android 1.5 (and based upon the Motorola timeline, no one knows when 2.1 will *actually* be released in the USA). I personally think they are still releasing it in the USA to avoid a class action lawsuit for falsely advertising that it was upgradeable to Android 2.0. This makes me question how the performance will be. The phone has been rooted recently, and the people that have done it have said good things, but I don't think I want to take the risk (I have to use the phone for work).
Personally, I'm looking at something in the Samsung Galaxy S series, such as the Captivate. My wife recently bought one and it's pretty nice. It has a lot nicer screen, it's much faster, and it already has Android 2.1.
"Any clue as to how it does this? Is it a one-time code? Is it implying that a buggered hard disk will result in buying a new copy of Office? A swift "no, thanks" will be offered to them from me."
Make sure you read their new EULA very carefully. The "key card" method of purchase is very similar to an OEM license.
Page 17, Section 3 (Product Key Card Terms), subsection 2a
"a. One Copy per Device. The software license is permanently assigned to the device on which the software is initially activated. That device is the “licensed device.”"
In the past, Microsoft as defined a "device" as being the core component (i.e. the motherboard), meaning that when the motherboard dies or is swapped out, the device no longer exists, and your license is no longer valid. This is why the key card version of the software is cheaper.
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