* Posts by ParksAndWildlife

6 publicly visible posts • joined 24 May 2019

Mozilla returns crypto-signed website packaging spec to sender – yes, it's Google

ParksAndWildlife

Re: Can we get Web caching back, please?

Frankly, you don't have a clue about cryptography.

Encryption protects confidentiality. Signing protects integrity.

All versions of SSL and TLS can be decrypted through man-in-the-middle attacks. All the HTTPS encryption of the origin does not guarantee that the content received is from the origin. Signed content from the origin does improve the integrity, whether that content is sent encrypted or not.

We ain't afraid of no 'ghost user': Infosec world tells GCHQ to GTFO over privacy-busting proposals

ParksAndWildlife

Re: Here we go again...

The key to stopping this is to turn around the argument "if you've done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to fear.". If law enforcement and spies want to set up surveillance of public places, let them, but only if that surveillance is made available to the public who pay for it (and I mean just as available as it is to LE and spies). If LE and spies wants to spend taxpayer's money to backdoor encryption by being added to the conversation, then the general public should be able to backdoor encryption and be added to the LE and spies' conversations.

Of course, they're going to whinge and claim they should be held to a different standard. When they do, ask them to prove it and don't accept "because terrorism", "because national security", "because official secrets", ore even "think of the children" without making them produce evidence. In reality, the majority of classification, secrets, emails, and conversations are not, in fact, about such things.

We listened to more than 3 hours of US Congress testimony on facial recognition so you didn't have to go through it

ParksAndWildlife

Re: Wrong Problem

The solution is not to protect anyone - including the police, government officials, and everyone else. Surveillance data collected by government is public property and should be available to everyone. In the United States of America, this falls under the equal protection amendment. If the police can track members of the public, the members of the public should be able to track them and their political masters. After all, if they have nothing to hide....

Never let something so flimsy as a locked door to the computer room stand in the way of an auditor on the warpath

ParksAndWildlife

Re: Recalcitrant doors

A friend of mine who was in the Santa Fe prison riot of 1980 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Mexico_State_Penitentiary_riot discovered that the solution to wire in glass security windows is a fire extinguisher. No need for filing cabinets, until you get to the prison records room and carefully pile up all the records except the sex offenders and light the bonfire.

Minecraft's my Nirvana. I found it hard, it's hard to find. Oh well, whatever... Never Mined

ParksAndWildlife

Re: Sorry, none of this means anything..

Sorry, every computer, no matter how serious its intended purpose, has had that toy aspect. The first US government computer I "repurposed" in 1972 was either a Teledyne-Ryan, SDS Sigma 7, or HP 200C at the Department of Defense Computer Institute (DODCI). I went into the computer lab with my father on a Saturday during his training course about computers and played a game of "Star Trek" (Mike Mayfield's 1971 version) on the teletype. When I got bored with that, I discovered the programming language behind it (somewhat BASIC-like) and reprogrammed it to calculate Fletcher Pratt's Naval Wargame ship values (long before World of WarShips). In my case, the game was used to familiarize Silent Generation Officers with these new-fangled computers. My reprogramming showed the future flexibility and general-purpose of computers (Teledyne-Ryans were used in the Field Artillery Digital Automation Computer system).

ParksAndWildlife

Re: Sorry, none of this means anything..

The problem with GPS inaccuracies is that the mapping algorithms know they exist and try to compensate for them. I have many times found the GPS flavor of the day telling me that I'm on a road that I'm not. Sometimes it's a simple transposition from the access road to the major highway, but the really fascinating ones are from the passenger train to the parallel highway. When they diverge, the GPS tries desperately to keep me on that highway and usually falls over dead when the distance gets too great.