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User: xrayspx

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  1. My question about Convergence on SSL Certificate Authorities vs. Convergence, Perspectives · · Score: 1

    I really love the idea of Convergence on the face of it, but I had one serious question:

    Convergence seems to solve the problem of a government (Iran) placing fake certs in front of their users and decrypting their GMail and FB SSL connections, and what have you. But what if the fake cert is placed much closer to the target website which is being spoofed?

    If you have a bottleneck in front of the target website you want to spoof, can't the attacker take advantage of that and put a fake cert /there/ since, if there are no other paths, all of the notaries would see the same cert, and pass it as "good". For instance, if you take the case of a large multi-hundred-million dollar website hosted in the middle of the ocean, with one pipe feeding that island, if the attacker places their fake cert and proxy at that link, then every notary in the US would agree to pass the false cert. Similarly, if, say, a major backbone carrier had a secret room, through which passed all their data, and in which sat the FBI, they could place a proxy and fake cert there, and all notaries would see that cert and pass it as real.

    That could be mitigated by having at least one notary running DNSSEC, but then you can't have a consensus, you have to have all notaries agree, and require the DNSSEC one to agree. This would work, but in that case, just use DNSSEC (Which I do /not/ like the idea of on its face).

  2. Re:They always have on Is Apple Pushing Away Professionals? · · Score: 1

    I had looked at those 3rd party docs a bit, but they're super expensive, like triple what a dock for a Lenovo T500 would be. And to me a lot of the point is to save the ports from breaking by unplugging/replugging a few times a day, especially the mini-DVI port, we've had a few users that have gone through them, and I think mine is starting to be a problem. I'm not sure my company would go for it, but I can hope.

    The "support not scaling" came from a friend who worked at a large, mostly Mac, multi-location company that we've all heard of and use. His problem was that if one of their laptops died, he'd have to call customer service, who'd tell him to take it to an Apple store, he'd say "no, here's what's going to happen, you're going to send me an empty box with a shipping label on it, I'm going to send the machine back to you, then later, you'll send it back fixed". They'd do it, but it was a hassle. Again this was a few years ago, and I seem to recall that they were working on Corporate Support as an initiative at some point recently. Maybe they fixed it. We usually deal with resellers, so if something breaks, send it back to the reseller and have them deal with it. Still, it's nothing like HP enterprise support, log into site, generate ticket, problem gets fixed (at least for server products, I have no experience with HP in the desktop/laptop space).

  3. Re:Fighter-pilot posture... on Ask Slashdot: Ergonomic Office Environment? · · Score: 1

    Huh, I organically seem to have come to the same conclusion. I lean back about 30deg or so which means I'm staring about dead center into my monitors, maybe a bit lower. It means my upper arms are not straight up and down, and I don't have a 90deg bend at the elbow, but my arms and wrists are straight all the way to the keyboard. Also, I've found that armrests on my chairs (Aerons for home and work) do more harm than good and cause elbow pain, so they're lowered out of the way, I don't miss them, and no more elbow pain.

    No RSI to speak of yet after 25 years of constant typing.

  4. Re:Good on Dutch ISP Files Police Complaint Against Spamhaus · · Score: 1

    That's what I said above: "We only automatically block IPs which send mail to our honeypot addresses", and I know for a fact that the only mail sent from said IP was in response to user action, with a user buying something, getting a password reminder, uploading something, etc. I know I'm not full of shit, so why were those specific ranges blocked?

    I've wondered if the honeypot addresses weren't super-obvious or guessable.

    This is not to say that the company I was with at the time wasn't a huge bunch of borderline-spammers, but in talks with Spamhaus they specifically told me they only (repeatedly) blocked my IPs because they got mail from those IPs. What they blocked was not a network where users lived, it was hosted web-farm only, so it's not like someone's desktop was turned into a spambot either. I really think they just had it in for us.

  5. Good on Dutch ISP Files Police Complaint Against Spamhaus · · Score: 1

    They are hugely annoying to deal with if you send any volume of mail at all. I worked at a job in which we sent tens of thousands of order status emails per day (were there upsell attempts? Of course there probably were, but the thrust of the mail was "thanks for ordering, have a confirmation number"), and all it takes is a couple of people marking them as spam to get Spamhaus to start blacklisting you, your upstream ISP, your dogwalker's busdriver's cousin's hairdresser, etc.

    I know they claim that they only blacklist IPs which send to honeypot email addresses, but I find that claim to be dubious at best, considering the IPs I've had blacklisted in the past.

  6. Re:Crypto isn't the point on US Government Seizes Email of WikiLeaks Volunteer · · Score: 1

    What makes anyone think the Obama administration is any less authoritarian than any previous administration? Did I use the word Democrat or Obama once? Nope. Until we set aside "right" and "left" and start acting for what is "right" rather than "wrong", we all lose.

  7. Crypto isn't the point on US Government Seizes Email of WikiLeaks Volunteer · · Score: 1

    The point isn't "Jake's mail should be encrypted". Jake, being a pretty well known crypto advocate and analyst, knows this. The point is that the government has seized his records and communication, with no apparent cause. Likewise, he was one of three Wikileaks affiliated Twitter users who had all access records handed to the government, and DMs as well I believe. He's been detained at nearly every re-entry into the US for the last couple of years.

    The point isn't "sucker should use crypto" or "well obey the law then", it's simple harassment of a citizen for acting, not illegally, but in ways the govt. and large private interests don't like. Had he broken a law, they've had their chance to pick him up at any number of border crossings rather than just sit him in a room and stare at him for two hours while planes are missed, etc. This is just the price of being a staunch activist for privacy and strong ubiquitous crypto today.

  8. Speaking of "Drone" on US Drone Fleet Hit By Computer Virus · · Score: 1

    Each pilot sits in a small room with a rack full of gear wheezing away all day? Eech. This is why I don't move my desk into an IDF closet.

    I remember hearing an interview on NPR not more than a few weeks ago which raised this exact issue, and in which it was brushed aside as utterly impossible, of course... "We have AIR GAPS, nothing can cross the air gaps!" Or something to that effect. I think they were talking about the video interception at the time. Meanwhile, they could ask Pfc Manning about how much information crosses the vaunted air gaps in military networks.

  9. Fix yourself first on Ask Slashdot: Calculators With 1-2-3 Number Pads? · · Score: 1

    Rather than adapting every device you touch, maybe you should look at why you need to do this.

    In fact, you've decided that the telephone way is "right" and that every computer keyboard is "wrong". Since you only interact with a couple of phones, probably, might it not be easier to change them than it is to change every computer, TI calculator, keypad, etc? Shouldn't be too hard to write an "inverted dialer" app for whatever phone you have.

    I fly on a numeric keypad, I can also dial my phone fast. The reason for that is that these are two devices that do two different things. I don't seem to have any spatial memory issues since you interact with them in different contexts.

    tldr; YIKES!

  10. Re:Out of their minds? on HTC Considering Buying Own OS · · Score: 1

    That'd be a neat trick. I'd love to have the contacts, email and texting apps again. The overall UX of the Pre was really pretty slick though too. Maybe the rumors are true about HTC considering just buying it outright. If they do, I'm positive you'll see "hack WebOS onto an existing Evo 4G" start popping up pretty soon after they launch a phone with WebOS.

  11. Re:Out of their minds? on HTC Considering Buying Own OS · · Score: 1

    The main thing that bugs me really is the busted ass HTC clock/alarm clock app. Since it syncs time based on, my best guess, a keyword search on the city name of the network egress point it sees you coming from, they seem to tend to end up in the wrong timezones every now and then. That's pretty convenient. Oh, and when using an AirRave it thinks I'm in Red Hook, NY. I'm guessing it /means/ Red Hook, NJ, which is still nowhere near where I live.

    Aside from that, adding hackers keyboard, K9 Mail and TextSecure seems to add most of what I need. The UI fluff that Palm did really well is missed, but not essential. Plus, on the palm I couldn't easily set up an SSH tunnel and then VNC over it to firewalled machines. I just stumbled across that and it's a huge point in the HTC column. However, certificate management was hugely easier on the Pre.

  12. Re:Out of their minds? on HTC Considering Buying Own OS · · Score: 1

    Have you ever used a WebOS phone? It really is what I wish Android was. The UI is very polished. The Cards paradigm is the best way to switch tasks and I was looking forward to the Pre3 for further improvements. When it became apparent the Pre3 wasn't going to Sprint, I got an HTC Evo 4G (Two actually), and while it's definitely usable, Android is nowhere near the user experience of WebOS. Palm's mail app and contacts app hands down beat anything I've used on Android or iPhones.

    It's a good OS, and Palm put a lot of resources toward UX. It struck a great balance between the dumbed-downedness of the iPhone and the power of Android. I wish they hadn't shot themselves in the face with their underpowered devices, annoying their development community and the too-ethereal-for-you creepy TV ads.

  13. Re:Is this AD or just straight LDAP? on Mac OS X Lion LDAP Vulnerability Emerges · · Score: 1

    Thanks, the articles and threads available over the weekend were kind of skimpy on detail.

  14. Re:Question on Pakistan Bans Encryption · · Score: 3, Informative

    The point of stenography is to write very fast in abbreviated form, using a set of glyphs that enable you to write very quickly in terrible chicken scratch that no one other than a trained secretary can read and which drives mortals straight past drink to heroin, also called shorthand. Stenograhpy also refers to typing quickly on a special keyboard, in order to capture as much spoken dialog as possible in-line. Often seen in courtrooms.

    The point of steganography is to obscure data within other innocuous data. This is where you hide your secret missile codes in photos of cats you post on Flickr.

  15. Is this AD or just straight LDAP? on Mac OS X Lion LDAP Vulnerability Emerges · · Score: 1

    I've been unable to reproduce this with AD authenticated Lion 10.7.1. The stories I've read referenced OpenLDAP and LDAP in general, but I haven't seen AD mentioned yet. Has anyone gotten this to work with AD?

  16. They don't cancel other boring shows on BSG Prequel Series Caprica Canceled · · Score: 1

    Granted I might have been expecting too much from Caprica, but I was watching to see the Big Steel Monster Destroy All Humans hour. It has been laborious to say the least, but I kept watching because I really wanted to try to care about the religious politics of a made up colony.

    However, SyFy still shows Stargate SG-1. A show that, unlike Atlantis with its arrays of guns and cool explosions, seems to just show meetings about ... the religious politics of a made up galaxy. And meetings alluding to the fact that at one time in the past, or perhaps some point in the future, cool explosions from arrays of awesome guns are/were a part of the show.

  17. Wow, nobody tell them on Pay Or Else, News Site Threatens · · Score: 1

    Please, no one tell this paper that the cost of hiring a lawyer to track down every internet user reading their site will likely cost 10 to 20x as much as just building the site correctly in the first place.

    "Dear /b/..."

  18. afternoons of bright sunlight on Las Vegas Hotel Vdara an Accidental Death Ray · · Score: 1

    Luckily in Vega$, that's almost never going to be a problem.

  19. Authentication on Soviet Shuttle Buran Found In a Junk Heap · · Score: 1

    To tell if it's real, we can check to see if there is a tape loop of Shirley Bassey running at all times.

  20. Really? on Paul Allen Files Patent Suit Against Apple, Google, Yahoo, Others · · Score: 3, Funny

    Does he really need another ivory backscratcher that badly?

  21. Re:Konqueror and Webkit? on KDE 4.5 Released · · Score: 1

    Instead of "Integration" I should have said "Implementation", by which I mean "Rendered like shit" when selected as the renderer in Konqueror. You could set WebKit as the default engine, but a lot of things rendered badly. Looking at the front page of /., it would render all the nicely rounded corners on the story bumpers as straight diagonal lines, for instance. They were still messed up as of the 4.5 update two days ago, but differently so.

    It's not a matter of WebKit integration into KDE, but more WebKit implementation in QT. For instance Arora had the same rendering issues though I haven't used it in a while.

    Safari, Chrome and Palm all render this kind of stuff just fine, so I'd say it's a QT/WebKit issue. Sorry for being imprecise.

  22. Re:Konqueror and Webkit? on KDE 4.5 Released · · Score: 3, Insightful

    KDE + Konqueror gave us KHTML. Apple took KHTML and extended it and gave us WebKit, which ended up being hugely popular, powering Chrome, Palm's WebOS browser, and now Flock as well is switching.

    Strangely, WebKit integration back in Konqueror has never been particularly "robust".

  23. Christ-finity? on Comcast Shoots For New Image, Rebranding As Xfinity · · Score: 1

    Good luck with all that, X-Bandwagon-Jumpers. So glad I dropped Comcast, now the latest in the "nonsense branding" war. ComCast could be shown to mean something, anything "Communications" "Broadcast" "ComCast". WTF is an Xfinity?

  24. Re:One-way gates on Fixing Security Issue Isn't Always the Right Answer · · Score: 1

    Yeah I noticed that after I posted. s/terminal/gate. The baggage claim can be reached from the street with no security everywhere I've been. The exception to this is International Arrivals gates and islands. Bermuda I think you'd have to get past their customs folks, since you get your luggage then enter the customs area, but I don't think it's considered a "secure area". Same in Jamaica and probably most island nations, since pretty much every arrival comes from overseas.

  25. Re:One-way gates on Fixing Security Issue Isn't Always the Right Answer · · Score: 1

    I was thinking more along the lines of the revolving doors many airports have, which people drag both carry on and checked baggage through. Huge, slow-moving revolving doors. Kind of a good metaphor for our security theater in a nutshell anyway.