Posts by maniax

Christmas headaches? We prescribe a year long course of BOFH

Hardcopy?

What about a hardcopy version, it would make the perfect gift for Christmas to give to some people :)

Skype to test advertising

Secure?

Seriously, why does everyone think skype is secure? There's no information on the crypto, the key exchange, there's no source to verify (you get a big binary blob and that's it) and they bombard every researcher that tries to do something with legal crap.

It's not paranoia, but common sense - you can't know if skype is even a little bit secure. If the rest of the voip wasn't such crap with crypto, we might have something that was, but even sip/tls/srtp isn't very good...

BOFH: Pepper-packing bot plot

“Railgun powered Shuriken launcher,”

First it got me laughing, then it got me thinking. Should be easily doable...

Wikileaks publishes encrypted 'insurance' file

Stuff that doesn't seem to be understood....

... is that the invading side had no idea what to do after the invasion. There are a lot of good books on this (it's plainly visible in Philip Gourevitch's "Standard operating procedure", the book about the Abu Ghraib prison). They expected that after they ousted Saddam or the Taliban, the country will come up and create a government, institutions - which is pretty much impossible for some people that have never had a tradition for something else than religious dictatorship.

This is what these files show in the best possible way. This is what wikileaks is bringing to everyone's attention.

As for Julian Assange being a traitor, an arrogant prick or whatever - I've met the guy. He's a techie. That's it - a normal, somewhat absent-minded (when it comes to some thing), introverted and devoted techie. He thinks that openness can make the world a better place and makes a system that tries to do that.

Also, he seems to be pretty good at it. I say good luck to him :)

Salacious smut soaks 12% of web

Only 35% ?

I thought it was more like 50%. It doesn't say if it's HTTP only, or if it includes the torrents and the like.

Anyway, 35% from 10% of the sites sounds pretty good :) Although they can do better :))

Verizon dubs sec researchers 'narcissistic vulnerability pimps'

... and have you seen the security of the physical locks?

It's a joke, plain and simple. Most locks are still bumpable (google for lock bumping, it's great fun), and most of the locks can be opened relatively easy by almost anyone with a bit of training. So, comparing computer security (which is able to stop a lot of bad people for most of the time) and physical locks (who stop mostly people who aren't trying to break in) is a bit apples and oranges.

And yes, blaming the messenger isn't the best idea. Insulting them might even make some people happier just to release what they have found, instead of doing any kind of the "responsible disclosure". Not that Verizon are known for being able to think, anyway.

Caviar Black gets 2TB model

RAID rebuild on these...

... is the main problem. A 250GB drive can be written at normal speeds (50MB/s) for let's say 5000 secods (a hour and something), 2TB drive at 150MB/s (which is pretty generous) would take ~13333 seconds(3 hours and a bit), which makes the exposure time (in which another drive failure will fuck you up) 2-3 times larger. Drives are getting bigger, but the speed to them doesn't grow as fast as we'd like it to...

Twitter profile hack pwns Mormons

Or...

People should remember to use their head to filter information and not trust blindly ANYTHING. Or, they should accept that they are bloody morons. For any mormons, this should be pretty obvious anyway.

(seriously. any idiot can post idiocies on twitter. Why should they care? And why would any organization put so much trust in a service like Twatter, if their minds aren't fully washed of any rational thought)

(and yes, I use twatter. If i say there I'm getting married, people will check with me instead of going to buy gifts, for example)

Paris, for the similarity in mental capability.