Posts by Francis Litterio

Firefox add-on does 'HTTPS Everywhere'

SSL's dirty little secret

SSL helps but is not a panacea. In a corporate environment, it is possible for IT to monitor SSL-encrypted traffic using so-called Data Loss Prevention applications, such as Bluecoat's ProxySG SSL-interceptor:

http://www.bluecoat.com/news/pr/202

For details on how it's done, see:

http://technotes-fran.blogspot.com/2010/05/ssls-dirty-little-secret.html

Facebook scrambles to close hole exposing private data

This can be prevented using Firefox's Adblock Plus add-on

This describes how to use Firefox's "Adblock Plus" add-on to prevent other Web sites from accessing Facebook:

http://technotes-fran.blogspot.com/2010/05/prevent-web-sites-from-accessing-your.html

Facebook convenes privacy 'crisis' meeting

How to use Adblock Plus to block other Web sites' access to Facebook

You can use Firefox's Adblock Plus add-on (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865) to prevent any other Web site from talking to Facebook when you visit that site. Just install Adblock Plus and then add the following filters:

||facebook.com/*$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net

||facebook.net/*$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net

||fbcdn.com/*$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net

||fbcdn.net/*$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net

The above filters tell Firefox never to allow any site other than Facebook's four sites (facebook.com, facebook.net, fbcdn.com, and fbcdn.net) to access Facebook. Thus, Facebook continues to work perfectly, but other sites don't get to talk to Facebook at all.

Ex-IntelCrayAkamai startup rejiggers virtualization

Sounds like an NFS-mounted swap partition

Jeez, back in 1987 I had a Sun 3 with no local disk, so it had to page over (10 Mb/s) Ethernet. Isn't this substantially the same thing (but with faster networking)? Try telling the server owner that he has to trade nanosecond-scale RAM latency for millisecond-scale LAN latency.

Sequoia attack dogs kill review into e-voting discrepancies

Reminds me of a funny Onion news video ...

... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBrDzZCOQtI

SOA benefits: too much reuse of reuse?

This is real code reuse ...

#!/bin/sh

cat "$1" | grep '^cost:' | cut -f3 -d" " | tr A-Z a-z

Very small well-defined components that do one thing very well running in an environment that makes it easy to glue them together.

Critics split over DDoS attacks on Scientology

Shouting fire in a crowded theatre

Steve Roper wrote: "[...] society as a whole MUST impose limits. Perhaps the best known example of this is the statement 'The right of free speech does not carry with it the right to shout 'Fire!' in a crowded theatre.'"

Unless, of course, there's a fire. This may be such a case.

Latest AACS crack 'beyond revocation'

HD-DVD movies are already available for download via BitTorrent

John Ridley wrote: "[...] it's not necessary for everyone who wants to crack AACS to have one of these hacked drives. All that's necessary is for someone, somewhere in the world, to have a drive, then use that drive to extract the key, then publish the key. Boom, everyone can decode the discs."

Indeed. Taking it one step further, only one person needs to decode the discs and upload the _unencrypted_ HD-DVD via BitTorrent. Such decrypted HD-DVDs already available via BitTorrent:

http://www.torrentz.com/search?q=HD-DVD

Of course, not everyone has the time or disk space to download a 20 GB movie (HD-DVD movies are much bigger than plain old DVD movies), but 10 years ago downloading a 4.5 GB DVD would have been an equal hassle.