Well, of course there are still MAC addresses. But ARP indeed went away. There are now ICMPv6 solicitation and advertisement messages which provide the MACIPv6 connection.
Everyone has the ability to get an IPv6 tunnel. When deployed, it's not much different than a native IPv6 connection. SixXS has 4 PoPs in the USA but only 220 users there so far. Go sign up! You just have to want to. Saying it's not used is plain wrong and helps noone.
IPv6 addresses are not cryptographic keys, even if their space is as big. Relying on the ability to "hide" in the address space is so bad, you shouldn't even begin thinking about it. Better keep your services up-to-date and secure.
Also, IPv6 NAT should never ever see the light of day.
Sorry, I must have misread something. But I still think this is FUD.
Yes, the address is four times as long, but since many checks for valid options can be removed and routing tables are going to get smaller, the additional overhead is small or non-existent, maybe even negative. What is a simple check of an address against a table of addresses with a (now fixed!) mask compared to the complex logic to verify the validity of 6 additional options?
However, comparing a packet's address to a target address involves four times as many bits in IPv6 as in IPv4.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong! Do you think the target address is scattered randomly through every packet? No, it has a fixed place in the header.
Additionally, there are less options in IPv6, making the logic to analyze a packet even more simple than for IPv4.
Random Google result:
The improved routing, or movement of information from a source to a destination, is more efficient in IPv6 because it incorporates a hierarchal addressing structure and has a simplified header. The large amount of address space allows organizations with large numbers of employees to obtain blocks of contiguous address space. Contiguous address space allows organizations to aggregate addresses under one prefix for identification on the Internet. This structured approach to addressing reduces the amount of information Internet routers must maintain and store and promotes faster routing of data. In addition, as shown in figure 5, IPv6 has a simplified header because of the elimination of six fields from the IPv4 header. The simplified header also contributes to faster routing.
That lazy attitude of "let the hardware do it" brings us more and more bloatware and fewer and fewer programmers concerned with good coding practices.
It looks like you caught my quip from the wrong angle. I'm all for good coding practices. At the same time, I'm all against optimizations that introduce side effects or break the general design of a system. I wasn't saying that's the case with Linux in particular. I just rephrased an expression because I thought it came from someone who would still code everything in assembler in order to squeeze every bit of speed out of a system while neglecting maintainability and correctness.
Let me quote one of NetBSD's goals to make my intent more clear:
Microoptimizations can play a part in any system, but design is even more important. Rewriting a routine to speed it up by 80% may sound impressive, but that routine may have only been using 5% of the CPU time. Looking at the larger picture and saving 10% overall by redesigning the way an operation is carried out gives over double the benefit. There is room for both in NetBSD, but we prefer getting a design right to tweaking a poor implementation.
Or in short:
Some systems seem to have the philosophy of "If it works, it's right". In that light NetBSD could be described as "It doesn't work unless it's right".
It's good to know that even in this day and age of faster and faster computers there are still people who care about speed and efficiency instead of simply waiting for hardware to solve their problems for them.
Another way of saying this: It sucks to know that even in this day and age of faster and faster computers there are still people who cut corners and use specific hacks to gain speed instead of simply building clean and well-designed systems and let the hardware do the work.
Thank you, model citizen. As a reward for your thinking, we will not punish you.. today. As for the person who replied to you.. Well, never mind and be thankful it didn't happen to you.
However, there is a jump in level between what I post on a public website by my own hand, and cameras in the sky that monitor where I walk
What you say in public and where you go is in your own hand, too. "Noone is forcing you to do anything" is a dangerous argument here, because essentially you are forced to behave differently through the knowledge that somebody is watching. It's a psychological thing. That's how oppressive regimes work and I don't think you realize this yet. People under control limit themselves, that's the beauty of it.
The main goal is to have freedom, not to make sure that nothing can be held against you. That is not freedom. Having to be careful 24/7 about what you do is not freedom.
How do you pay for your gas or purchases?
Agreed. Where I live, paying with cash is still the standard way to do it, so that's why didn't immediately think about non-cash payment. But that's basically the same thing as Payback schemes.
It's my fault if I put anything on the social sites that could be used against me in the future (see: retarded bank robbers who post pictures of their "loot" with masks off on their MySpace pages) as the site is public by its very definition (well, the publicly non-friend sections that is).
I'd be wary about this. By the same logic, would you agree to full-scale public surveillance in picture and sound combined with massive computing power to dig out any detail and hold it against you, because it's public anyway?
Example: I don't participate in Payback schemes, because there is a difference between
1) the local gas station clerk knows what I bought in his station only and can maybe remember my face for some days.
2) the gas company knows what I bought nation-wide and can dig through it with unlimited accuracy.
If you have to be careful all the time about what you say publicly, guess what you have? Ask people from before-1989 easter germany or a chinese citizen. They can tell you.
PIN sounds like it's gonna be a short number, instead of a fully-fledged passphrase. Your ATM code may be a 4-digit number, because brute forcing doesn't really work there (slow to try and locked after 3 attempts), but using it to encrypt data on a computer would be royally stupid. That'd be only 10000 combinations.
So, question: is it really a _number_ or a passphrase?
I would always run a VPN on top of anything wireless, especially when carrying sensitive information for a company. If you are unsure about the security of a solution, run security that you are sure of on top.
Although "poison the DNS MX records" doesn't make much sense, I know what you mean. And yes, if you can somehow intercept mail for just a short period, you basically subverted the whole idea of CAcert - at least for those simple certs that only include a common name.
As said, there are certs which include more information but which you have to provide to some trusted party in person. There are assurers in several countries which perform this task for CAcert.
The reverse is that one shouldn't place much trust in the binding signed by those simple certs. Basically, they provide confidentiality but questionable authentication which one needs to be aware of, because confidentiality doesn't help a lot if the guy you're sending your data to is not the one you thought.
You have to be "in control" of the domain you want a cert for, that is you have to be able to receive mail at root@domain or what the username was. This reflects in the cert that you get, i.e. the only field that is going to be filled is the common name, as that is the only piece that CAcert can verify (sans DNS spoofing to take over a domain for a short time to intercept mail to root@domain).
To get more details in the cert, like organization, you have to take additional steps to get your identity verified, like meeting someone in person.
Apart from that, no CA "checks the validity" of any site. All a CA does is bind a key to a common name, that is a name that has some specific semantics a web browser can verify, AKA a fully-qualified domain name.
If there is a ligitimate site www.onlinebank.com and you manage to register a phishing domain online-bank.com, then any CA will most likely give you a cert for it, since they only verify that online-bank.com belongs to you. Whether that site is in conflict with another site is totally out of the scope of a CA. I think this "problem" is mostly unknown to people. They assume "cert == legitimate site" and automatically trust the site itself.
There was an article on/. regarding this: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/13/214 3251 Basically, what the evil guys were doing was to grab a domain name (mountain-america.net) that looked similar to a bank's domain name (mtnamerica.com) and then get a cert for it. Which was totally ok, since the domain in fact belonged to them. The problem was that people who got hit by the phish basically had no idea what the real bank's domain was. And that was their problem. It's not the CA's task to only sign "legitimate" domain names or to tell people which domain names bank x uses.
To say it again: All a CA does is bind a key to a name, making sure that the person presenting the key in fact controls the name.
Let's assume the seller knew the laptop was defective, as he likely did. As a layman, he may have assumed that no data was actually accessible anymore. Thus his intention surely was not to sell all his private data. That can be considered an unfortunate side effect.
Law, however, often makes a distinction between what actually happened and what someone intended. Thus, I can remotely see how someone could construct a claim that the buyer, although being scammed in another way, can't claim a right to publish all the private details and copyrighted(!) photos.
At least in Germany, law protect errors and misconceptions of people by taking into account what someone most likely intended instead of looking at cold hard facts. If I mistakenly place a bid of 1000,-EUR on an item that's currently at 5,-EUR and whose value is maybe 50,-EUR at most, the seller can't step in immediately and claim 1000,-EUR from me. I can always claim a mistake on my side because it's pretty obvious that I made an error. And the seller would most likely lose.
Of course you have an obligation to correct your mistake as soon as you notice in order to claim protection. If it's clear that you knew some fact and went on regardless, things could turn against you.
I think in this case it is pretty clear that the seller did never intend to sell all his private and intimate data. The fact that he scammed the buyer is bad in itself, but a totally different case. That's how a proper justice system works. You don't weigh one wrongdoing against another. You treat them separately.
Slashdot Mirror
MAC<->IPv6, sorry.
Well, of course there are still MAC addresses. But ARP indeed went away. There are now ICMPv6 solicitation and advertisement messages which provide the MACIPv6 connection.
Everyone has the ability to get an IPv6 tunnel. When deployed, it's not much different than a native IPv6 connection. SixXS has 4 PoPs in the USA but only 220 users there so far. Go sign up! You just have to want to. Saying it's not used is plain wrong and helps noone.
IPv6 addresses are not cryptographic keys, even if their space is as big. Relying on the ability to "hide" in the address space is so bad, you shouldn't even begin thinking about it. Better keep your services up-to-date and secure.
Also, IPv6 NAT should never ever see the light of day.
Sorry, I must have misread something. But I still think this is FUD.
Yes, the address is four times as long, but since many checks for valid options can be removed and routing tables are going to get smaller, the additional overhead is small or non-existent, maybe even negative. What is a simple check of an address against a table of addresses with a (now fixed!) mask compared to the complex logic to verify the validity of 6 additional options?
Additionally, there are less options in IPv6, making the logic to analyze a packet even more simple than for IPv4.
Random Google result:
http://www.cybertelecom.org/dns/Ipv6.htm
If you keep spreading FUD instead of doing a simple Google search we will never get IPv6.
I hope you do it over TLS/SSL only with strict cert checks, otherwise you'd be in for a surprise if you did this around my AP. :)
Don't think every open wireless network is managed by the clueless and not monitored and sniffed.
Let me quote one of NetBSD's goals to make my intent more clear:
Microoptimizations can play a part in any system, but design is even more important. Rewriting a routine to speed it up by 80% may sound impressive, but that routine may have only been using 5% of the CPU time. Looking at the larger picture and saving 10% overall by redesigning the way an operation is carried out gives over double the benefit. There is room for both in NetBSD, but we prefer getting a design right to tweaking a poor implementation.
Or in short:
Some systems seem to have the philosophy of "If it works, it's right". In that light NetBSD could be described as "It doesn't work unless it's right".
Just saying..
So, will we see even more ugly hacks^W^Wapplications that won't build anywhere else than on Linux?
Here are the correct ones:
"Attention! Program X requires blah bla blah. To do that blah blah blah. Do you really want to blah blah blah?"
*90% of users click yes* There, malware exempted. Those people who get malware[1] in the first place won't be helped by this at all.
[1] The open-this-attachment-to-get-owned type, not the Windows-is-a-piece-of-shit-automatically-owned type.
Waitaminute, what about the old saying? On the Internet, men are men, women are men and little girls are FBI agents? :)
Yes. Next question?
PS: I never said that everything is still fine and dandy. On the contrary, I'm very worried we're way too far down the hill already.
Excellent post.
Thank you, model citizen. As a reward for your thinking, we will not punish you.. today. As for the person who replied to you.. Well, never mind and be thankful it didn't happen to you.
The main goal is to have freedom, not to make sure that nothing can be held against you. That is not freedom. Having to be careful 24/7 about what you do is not freedom.
Agreed. Where I live, paying with cash is still the standard way to do it, so that's why didn't immediately think about non-cash payment. But that's basically the same thing as Payback schemes.
Example: I don't participate in Payback schemes, because there is a difference between
1) the local gas station clerk knows what I bought in his station only and can maybe remember my face for some days.
2) the gas company knows what I bought nation-wide and can dig through it with unlimited accuracy.
If you have to be careful all the time about what you say publicly, guess what you have? Ask people from before-1989 easter germany or a chinese citizen. They can tell you.
PIN sounds like it's gonna be a short number, instead of a fully-fledged passphrase. Your ATM code may be a 4-digit number, because brute forcing doesn't really work there (slow to try and locked after 3 attempts), but using it to encrypt data on a computer would be royally stupid. That'd be only 10000 combinations.
So, question: is it really a _number_ or a passphrase?
I would always run a VPN on top of anything wireless, especially when carrying sensitive information for a company. If you are unsure about the security of a solution, run security that you are sure of on top.
s/while it's running//
The only way to "clean" a compromized system is by reinstalling it. End of story.
I'm always amazed by people wasting their time and ignoring fundamental security practices by fumbling with hosed Windows systems.
Although "poison the DNS MX records" doesn't make much sense, I know what you mean. And yes, if you can somehow intercept mail for just a short period, you basically subverted the whole idea of CAcert - at least for those simple certs that only include a common name.
As said, there are certs which include more information but which you have to provide to some trusted party in person. There are assurers in several countries which perform this task for CAcert.
The reverse is that one shouldn't place much trust in the binding signed by those simple certs. Basically, they provide confidentiality but questionable authentication which one needs to be aware of, because confidentiality doesn't help a lot if the guy you're sending your data to is not the one you thought.
You have to be "in control" of the domain you want a cert for, that is you have to be able to receive mail at root@domain or what the username was. This reflects in the cert that you get, i.e. the only field that is going to be filled is the common name, as that is the only piece that CAcert can verify (sans DNS spoofing to take over a domain for a short time to intercept mail to root@domain).
/. regarding this: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/13/214 3251 Basically, what the evil guys were doing was to grab a domain name (mountain-america.net) that looked similar to a bank's domain name (mtnamerica.com) and then get a cert for it. Which was totally ok, since the domain in fact belonged to them. The problem was that people who got hit by the phish basically had no idea what the real bank's domain was. And that was their problem. It's not the CA's task to only sign "legitimate" domain names or to tell people which domain names bank x uses.
e p590/06wi/lectures/ to be very enlightening, especially the lecture by Brian LaMacchia at http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/cse p590/06wi/lectures/asx/csep590tu_8_2.asx which deals with exactly this problem: What do certificates and PKI do and who trusts what?
To get more details in the cert, like organization, you have to take additional steps to get your identity verified, like meeting someone in person.
Apart from that, no CA "checks the validity" of any site. All a CA does is bind a key to a common name, that is a name that has some specific semantics a web browser can verify, AKA a fully-qualified domain name.
If there is a ligitimate site www.onlinebank.com and you manage to register a phishing domain online-bank.com, then any CA will most likely give you a cert for it, since they only verify that online-bank.com belongs to you. Whether that site is in conflict with another site is totally out of the scope of a CA. I think this "problem" is mostly unknown to people. They assume "cert == legitimate site" and automatically trust the site itself.
There was an article on
To say it again: All a CA does is bind a key to a name, making sure that the person presenting the key in fact controls the name.
I found the course at http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/cs
Alright, IANAL. But here goes:
Let's assume the seller knew the laptop was defective, as he likely did. As a layman, he may have assumed that no data was actually accessible anymore. Thus his intention surely was not to sell all his private data. That can be considered an unfortunate side effect.
Law, however, often makes a distinction between what actually happened and what someone intended. Thus, I can remotely see how someone could construct a claim that the buyer, although being scammed in another way, can't claim a right to publish all the private details and copyrighted(!) photos.
At least in Germany, law protect errors and misconceptions of people by taking into account what someone most likely intended instead of looking at cold hard facts. If I mistakenly place a bid of 1000,-EUR on an item that's currently at 5,-EUR and whose value is maybe 50,-EUR at most, the seller can't step in immediately and claim 1000,-EUR from me. I can always claim a mistake on my side because it's pretty obvious that I made an error. And the seller would most likely lose.
Of course you have an obligation to correct your mistake as soon as you notice in order to claim protection. If it's clear that you knew some fact and went on regardless, things could turn against you.
I think in this case it is pretty clear that the seller did never intend to sell all his private and intimate data. The fact that he scammed the buyer is bad in itself, but a totally different case. That's how a proper justice system works. You don't weigh one wrongdoing against another. You treat them separately.