If Microsoft opened up Windows Update for 3rd-party applications, how many do you reckon would actually use it?
Yup, it would be sweet to have one central updating facility, and it's one of the few *u*x things I miss in Windows; I just don't see it ever going to work in the Windows ecosystem (an Appstore for phone/tablet might, but that wouldn't cover desktops and legacy software).
They aren't full-auto, though, and check for updates relatively seldom. And when Joe User sees a "please shutdown your browser to install update" right in the middle of his browsing session, he's going to click "nah, postpone" and forget all about it. Until next time the prompt pops up... in the middle of his browsing session. The Flash updater is notoriously lame, not offering a "retry" button.
People are quick to slam IE, but in fact most malware goes in through Flash, Java or Acrobat Reader. Internet Explorer certainly isn't perfect, but security-wise it's come a long way; IE8 or IE9 combined with Vista/Win7 on proper UAC'ed accounts is actually pretty decent these days, and the sandboxing helps a fair amount against exploits for the aforementioned three pieces of crapware.
That said, I run FireFox even though it's technically less secure - I prefer the higher HTML standards compliance and addons.
No, but why should they be running as superuser just to open their email client?
Beats me, that's why I have them run Vista (SP1 or later) or Win7.
The people who are going to ignore warnings and click yes on the UAC prompts wouldn't be any safer off on other operating systems, they'd happily type in their user credentials and get their fresh copy of Mac Defender or whatever.
When you consider that an eight hour day actually means 6 hours of productive work time, waste an hour of two in meetings, now your down to 4 hours of productive work, 20 minutes starts to look like a big deal.
I fully agree - but not everybody lives in the real world... it's easy to think an 8 hour work day means >=8 productive hours if you're a basement dweller, or still in college with a Ritalin prescription.
And before people saying "lulz, 500 seconds a day isn't that much" start posting, please keep in mind that you lose more effective time, because your workflow is interrupted and it takes a bit of time "getting into the zone" again.
Even if it amounts to just, say, 20 minutes less of productive time, developer (dis)satisfaction is also worth factoring. Want grumpy or happy developers? Happy ain't worth the ridiculously low price of an additional monitor? Fine, I'm going elsewhere:)
Sounds like you should have contacted SpiderOak technical support? They're pretty responsive on their forums.
Also, are you certain that DB + TC actually does work properly? Can it (reliably) sync a container that's in use, or does it only update one the container is dismounted? And does it always detect a container dismount and sync the file?
Well at the end of the day all my transactions to my bank are secure, encrypted etc. If I worked in the bank I can still look up someone's accounts and it's probably trivial to empty their account if I wished to.
1) your bank has probably never denied that employees have this kind of access.
2) I'm much more likely to trust a bank to have proper access control and audit trails than DropBox, especially because of the previous lies.
3) IANAL, but I expect there's some pretty heavy regulatory stuff in the case of banks.
Ideally however they should encrypt data stored in the backend with a key unique to the person.
That what other services do, but I don't think DropBox is going to - cross-account deduplication saves them a fair amount of storage space and bandwidth. It's fine they do this, as long as they're not trying to hide it... and IMHO they're still not being very open about this, even with the privacy info update and all.
I personally don't have a problem with how the DropBox service works, there's definite advantages to it in terms of convenience. What I have a problem with is that they lied about the security; it's obvious to the technically minded of us that cross-account deduplication can't happen with DB having access to your files, but that's not obvious to your regular Joe Enduser - and that's who DB is marketed to.
Even with the privacy statement update that means DB aren't technically lying anymore, it's still a very small and innocent-looking part, and they're still plastering terms like "secure", "SSL" and "AES 256 encrypted" all over the place. Misleading much? Yeah.
For.zip, it depends on the.zip version your compression tools support. Old-style zip password protection is definitely insecure, but more recent versions have AES support; haven't checked if the implementation is decent, though.
Also, RAR might be a proprietary system, but decompressor source code is available so the implementation can be checked. It supports encryption of file data as well as metadata (at least the file names).
Have a look at SpiderOak - a very nice thing about them is that, apart from applying zero-knowledge encryption, they have decent (techy!) explanation of how the stuff works. Pretty nice blog as well, with some interesting developer tidbits here and there.
Disclaimer: I'm a SpiderOak user myself:)
Good question, I honestly don't know how (or if) it's implemented.
But, basically, you've got a pub/privkey per user, protected by logon credentials; each file has a different symmetric cipher protected by the pubkey. So if you don't bruteforce the user credentials, you're not getting access to the files.
My point is simply that if you've got physical access to the machine, any of the major OSes today (with a standard configuration) can be broken into with ease. A traditional *u*x system is even a bit easier than windows, since if you're root you can read everything - if you're mounting somebody else's NTFS disk on a Windows system, you'll first have to reset/modify individual file permissions before you can access everything.
Resetting user passwords is as easy on Windows as it is on Linux - but keep in mind that if NTFS per-file encryption is used, you won't get access to those files without bruteforcing the user password, rather than just resetting it.
Protect your valuable data in a TrueCrypt container (or dedicated partition) rather than having the system partition encrypted, coupled with Prey or some other service. Best of both worlds?
Slashdot Mirror
If Microsoft opened up Windows Update for 3rd-party applications, how many do you reckon would actually use it?
Yup, it would be sweet to have one central updating facility, and it's one of the few *u*x things I miss in Windows; I just don't see it ever going to work in the Windows ecosystem (an Appstore for phone/tablet might, but that wouldn't cover desktops and legacy software).
They aren't full-auto, though, and check for updates relatively seldom. And when Joe User sees a "please shutdown your browser to install update" right in the middle of his browsing session, he's going to click "nah, postpone" and forget all about it. Until next time the prompt pops up... in the middle of his browsing session. The Flash updater is notoriously lame, not offering a "retry" button.
People are quick to slam IE, but in fact most malware goes in through Flash, Java or Acrobat Reader. Internet Explorer certainly isn't perfect, but security-wise it's come a long way; IE8 or IE9 combined with Vista/Win7 on proper UAC'ed accounts is actually pretty decent these days, and the sandboxing helps a fair amount against exploits for the aforementioned three pieces of crapware.
That said, I run FireFox even though it's technically less secure - I prefer the higher HTML standards compliance and addons.
No, but why should they be running as superuser just to open their email client?
Beats me, that's why I have them run Vista (SP1 or later) or Win7.
The people who are going to ignore warnings and click yes on the UAC prompts wouldn't be any safer off on other operating systems, they'd happily type in their user credentials and get their fresh copy of Mac Defender or whatever.
HKLU - the unholy bastard child of local machine and current user; making-of flesh movie coming to a theater near YOU!
Oh, I see - scientists have found the crApple fans actually have brains. Who would'a thunk?!
+5 hilarious.
When you consider that an eight hour day actually means 6 hours of productive work time, waste an hour of two in meetings, now your down to 4 hours of productive work, 20 minutes starts to look like a big deal.
I fully agree - but not everybody lives in the real world... it's easy to think an 8 hour work day means >=8 productive hours if you're a basement dweller, or still in college with a Ritalin prescription.
And before people saying "lulz, 500 seconds a day isn't that much" start posting, please keep in mind that you lose more effective time, because your workflow is interrupted and it takes a bit of time "getting into the zone" again.
Even if it amounts to just, say, 20 minutes less of productive time, developer (dis)satisfaction is also worth factoring. Want grumpy or happy developers? Happy ain't worth the ridiculously low price of an additional monitor? Fine, I'm going elsewhere :)
Good point wrt. the forums, I had forgotten you don't even get read-only access to them without a login/pass - that is rather obnoxious.
When I'm working in the container, I'm usually writing, which means the container is updating every third sentence (yes, I'm a compulsive Ctrl-S'er).
I got into that habit back in the amiga days, and it's saved me quite a few times :)
Sounds like you should have contacted SpiderOak technical support? They're pretty responsive on their forums.
Also, are you certain that DB + TC actually does work properly? Can it (reliably) sync a container that's in use, or does it only update one the container is dismounted? And does it always detect a container dismount and sync the file?
Well at the end of the day all my transactions to my bank are secure, encrypted etc. If I worked in the bank I can still look up someone's accounts and it's probably trivial to empty their account if I wished to.
Ideally however they should encrypt data stored in the backend with a key unique to the person.
That what other services do, but I don't think DropBox is going to - cross-account deduplication saves them a fair amount of storage space and bandwidth. It's fine they do this, as long as they're not trying to hide it... and IMHO they're still not being very open about this, even with the privacy info update and all.
Basically: a cute idea that's never going to amount to anything ;)
For anything more than that, head over to bitcoin.org once it's no longer slashdotted, they have a PDF explaining the theory behind it.
I personally don't have a problem with how the DropBox service works, there's definite advantages to it in terms of convenience. What I have a problem with is that they lied about the security; it's obvious to the technically minded of us that cross-account deduplication can't happen with DB having access to your files, but that's not obvious to your regular Joe Enduser - and that's who DB is marketed to.
Even with the privacy statement update that means DB aren't technically lying anymore, it's still a very small and innocent-looking part, and they're still plastering terms like "secure", "SSL" and "AES 256 encrypted" all over the place. Misleading much? Yeah.
How does "supplier, don't lie" sound to you?
For .zip, it depends on the .zip version your compression tools support. Old-style zip password protection is definitely insecure, but more recent versions have AES support; haven't checked if the implementation is decent, though.
Also, RAR might be a proprietary system, but decompressor source code is available so the implementation can be checked. It supports encryption of file data as well as metadata (at least the file names).
Have a look at SpiderOak - a very nice thing about them is that, apart from applying zero-knowledge encryption, they have decent (techy!) explanation of how the stuff works. Pretty nice blog as well, with some interesting developer tidbits here and there. Disclaimer: I'm a SpiderOak user myself :)
Eloquently put, and I hope people will realize the importance of this - even if it's something DropBox can legally get away with.
Why would you do such an ass-backward thing instead of using a decent zero-knowledge service like SpiderOak?
Just the standard account passwords - a vanilla setup :p
The kind of person that would use encrypted /home on Linux would hopefully use BitLocker or TrueCrypt (or at least NTFS encryption) on a Windows box.
and backed up to a dropbox account (encrypted before backed up of course).
Good call, considering how untrustworthy dropbox are - consider checking out SpiderOak instead, zero-knowledge crypto ftw.
Good question, I honestly don't know how (or if) it's implemented.
But, basically, you've got a pub/privkey per user, protected by logon credentials; each file has a different symmetric cipher protected by the pubkey. So if you don't bruteforce the user credentials, you're not getting access to the files.
My point is simply that if you've got physical access to the machine, any of the major OSes today (with a standard configuration) can be broken into with ease. A traditional *u*x system is even a bit easier than windows, since if you're root you can read everything - if you're mounting somebody else's NTFS disk on a Windows system, you'll first have to reset/modify individual file permissions before you can access everything.
Resetting user passwords is as easy on Windows as it is on Linux - but keep in mind that if NTFS per-file encryption is used, you won't get access to those files without bruteforcing the user password, rather than just resetting it.
Protect your valuable data in a TrueCrypt container (or dedicated partition) rather than having the system partition encrypted, coupled with Prey or some other service. Best of both worlds?
...as opposed to *u*x user accounts, which are hard to break into if you've got physical access to the machine? ;)