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dlitz

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My ISP changes the prefix on a regular base (and on request)

I found this was the case (with Telus) until I reconfigured the DHCPv6-PD client on my gateway, mainly to stop it from sending DHCPv6 Release messages and to have it explicitly request the prefix I was previously assigned.

OpenWRT in particular seemed to be built not to save any dhcp client state in non-volatile memory, resulting in a lot of unnecessary address and prefix churn when rebooting the router. I've had the same stable prefix for over a year now, using systemd-networkd with the following configuration (the important parts are SendRelease=no, RequestAddress= and PrefixDelegationHint=; the rest of the options are just insurance):

https://gist.github.com/dlitz/487d733140aa784559d73e4cd6f723...

I don't believe rms is seriously in favor of child sexual exploitation, but that's a red herring.

The concern for me is has been the accounts of far more directly-relevant behaviour, such as (iirc):

  * repeated phone calls to someone from different phone numbers

  * leering

  * breaking the ground rules for an event, and justifying it on the basis that he's personally exempt from any rules

  * singling out a teenage girl attending one of his talks (as in "oh wow, a GIRL")

  * single her out again while telling his questionable 'EMACS virgins' joke

  * saying in an interview that he didn't know any women who have contributed to GCC, when there had been at least 4
It all adds up to several accounts of people saying they've left the free software movement (or avoided it entirely) because of his behaviour combined with his stature. As a community leader who supposedly leads by example, he needs to do better, and if he doesn't, the community needs to hold him accountable. That's happening now.

Personally, I think this is a good thing, and I'm glad that he's made the decision to step aside (even if under pressure) rather than fight bitterly and see the community divide along these lines.

It also seems like a good opportunity for him to pass the torch and see what happens, or at least take a long hiatus to get some caring advice and to sort himself out, like Linus did last year. The FSF will eventually need to become an institution that can carry on its mission without him, and this will be a good test of that. If things go off the rails, he can pen another manifesto and I'm sure a bunch of us will read it.

The important thing is that tags are signed and up-to-date, like how git tags work or how Debian signs its entire repository as a unit (via the Release file) rather than having developers just sign individual packages. Otherwise, even if it's signed, it's subject to downgrade attacks.

Installing known-vulnerable old versions of legitimate software can be just as bad as installing custom malware.

I think yall are using the terminology differently from each other in this thread. "Checksum" historically did not imply resilience against intentional modifications.

Nowadays, it's arguably a best-practice when designing a new protocol or storage format to simply make all checksums cryptographically strong unless there's a reason not to. I think that might be where the confusion is coming from.

Misfortune 10 years ago

The "auto" in "autopilot" stands for automatic, not autonomous. Autopilot systems have existed for decades, and they've always referred to systems that automate the most tedious parts of operating a vehicle, while still requiring a human operator to handle new/unexpected situations.

I'd like to see a good CLI design involving sandboxing-by-default, and handling object-capabilities (e.g. file descriptors) as first-class objects.

Right now, "convert a.jpg b.png" passes the strings "a.jpg" and "b.png" to ImageMagick's convert command, but that command is free to open whatever files it wants, since there's no distinction between strings vs resources such as filenames, network sockets, etc.

You can do this with pipes in simple cases, and bash has some support for this, but it's very primitive and the syntax is cumbersome.

Error 1005 Ray ID: 2bc55074399a2a5b • 2016-07-02 21:50:36 UTC Access denied What happened?

The owner of this website (www.fas.org) has banned the autonomous system number (ASN) your IP address is in (6939) from accessing this website.

You also want the passphrase to be easily changed, separately from the master key (because changing the master key is slow and resource-intensive).

Even if you have a strong passphrase, there's some probability of leaking some number of bits of it via side-channels every time it's entered (e.g. surveillance cameras, fingerprints on the screen, shoulder surfing, vulnerable code, TEMPEST, etc). Plus, people often keep a backup copy of their passphrases (unique, strong passphrases are hard to remember), so there's also a cumulative risk of the backup leaking over time, as well.

Long-term confidentiality is just surprisingly hard in the real world.

Is there any way to see exactly what this system does, aside from faking a suicidal episode on my timeline and getting friends to report it?

I've heard that early versions of this system basically inserted barriers between suicidal people---who are already overwhelmed---and their support networks.

Considering Facebook's poor track record when it comes to handling vulnerable populations (nym policy, location support in Messenger, etc.), I'd strongly discourage anyone from using this reporting system without a complete understanding of what it actually does.

Heed should also be paid to the effect of having more than one of these systems being triggered at the same time. The last thing I need when I'm feeling overwhelmed is a dozen apps on my phone suddenly changing their behavior.

How does this guarantee a secret ballot, i.e. that voters remain unable to prove to a third party that they voted in a particular way?

Low-value elections don't necessarily need secret ballots, but it's important for high-value elections, like selecting the POTUS.

I don't see the big problem. Lots of other libraries already work this way. Perhaps most of them.

If you're shipping binary packages, you need to build them in a clean chrooted environment anyway (such as pbuilder/sbuilder/docker or a VM) or you're going to end up with binaries that depend on the latest glibc point release that happens to be installed on your system.

It's still pretty expensive for very little added security benefit, which the added complexity might negate. How many bits of security does this add? 5 or 6? Maybe 32?

People deploy ad hoc obscurity hacks like port-knocking because we have doubts our standard access-control infrastructure (e.g. libssl, SSH). It would be less wasteful to take the resources being spent on these hacks, and pool them together into projects that would boost our confidence in the infrastructure, instead.

I can think of lots of security infrastructure projects that could probably use more resources:

- The various libssl projects could probably use more resources.

- There is at least one team working on formal proofs of implementation correctness for libssl.

- Sandstorm.io is developing ways to move web access control (including CSRF protection) to an intermediate layer, rather than relying on individual web applications to get it right.

- U2F is trying to bring cheap hardware tokens to web users, but it needs better support across the web.

- Let's Encrypt/ACME is working on making it feasible to deprecate plaintext HTTP. There's still a lot of distro integration work to be done.

- There's an IETF working group working on moving transport security into TCP itself (tcpinc). If it's done well (i.e. gets enough eyeballs), this could replace "libssl version hell" with straightforward socket file descriptors.

- Most developers have no idea how to develop formal proofs of implementation correctness alongside their code. Educational materials would be great, here!

- There are many, many legacy systems running still known-insecure software/protocols that need to be upgraded or worked around.

XMPP "when encrypted and compressed" seems fairly pointless; it's insecure.

The CRIME attack demonstrated that compress-then-encrypt fails to provide confidentiality if it mixes confidential data with attacker-controlled data.

Any decent doctor should know this

It sounds like they did, at first, and the manufacturer (ostensibly the experts on this particular drug) pushed back hard.

It would be nice if bash had a more discoverable version of the 'help' command for new users.

Right now, someone (say, a bright 12-year-old) who opens up a terminal for the very first time and types "help" is greeted with this lovely mess:

     compgen [-abcdefgjksuv] [-o option]  >  return [n]
     complete [-abcdefgjksuv] [-pr] [-DE] >  select NAME [in WORDS ... ;] do COMM>
     compopt [-o|+o option] [-DE] [name ..>  set [-abefhkmnptuvxBCHP] [-o option->
     continue [n]                            shift [n]
     coproc [NAME] command [redirections]    shopt [-pqsu] [-o] [optname ...]
     declare [-aAfFgilnrtux] [-p] [name[=v>  source filename [arguments]
     dirs [-clpv] [+N] [-N]                  suspend [-f]
     disown [-h] [-ar] [jobspec ...]         test [expr]
     echo [-neE] [arg ...]                   time [-p] pipeline
     enable [-a] [-dnps] [-f filename] [na>  times
     eval [arg ...]                          trap [-lp] [[arg] signal_spec ...]
     exec [-cl] [-a name] [command [argume>  true
     exit [n]                                type [-afptP] name [name ...]
     export [-fn] [name[=value] ...] or ex>  typeset [-aAfFgilrtux] [-p] name[=va>
     false                                   ulimit [-SHabcdefilmnpqrstuvxT] [lim>
     fc [-e ename] [-lnr] [first] [last] o>  umask [-p] [-S] [mode]
     fg [job_spec]                           unalias [-a] name [name ...]
     for NAME [in WORDS ... ] ; do COMMAND>  unset [-f] [-v] [-n] [name ...]
     for (( exp1; exp2; exp3 )); do COMMAN>  until COMMANDS; do COMMANDS; done
     function name { COMMANDS ; } or name >  variables - Names and meanings of so>
     getopts optstring name [arg]            wait [-n] [id ...]
     hash [-lr] [-p pathname] [-dt] [name >  while COMMANDS; do COMMANDS; done
     help [-dms] [pattern ...]               { COMMANDS ; }
    user@host:~$

How often does it happen, though? You don't need a human on every flight in order to deal with that. Build a few ground-based emergency remote-control centers across the continent, and train the autopilots (or the air traffic controllers) to call them when things get bad.

Open-Source Watch 11 years ago

It's not a mistake, it's a feature! 100% Arduino compatibility can make things much more approachable for casual enthusiasts.

I've seen some non-programmer _artists_ get Arduino stuff working---barely---which is awesome! If they'd had to start by figuring out how to get a cross-compiler working (especially on Windows), they'd probably have given up.