You're quite right. PHP has done more evolution over the years than most languages (and it needed to). A modern Laravel'd-up ORM-driven annotated PHP application is completely unrecognizable as the same language as "mysql_connect in the middle of the page" PHP from 15 years ago. And a Zend/Smarty app from 8 years ago is a third kind of beastie from either of those.
Unfortunately, people will look at the codebase of some of the most popular PHP products out there (cough cough, WordPress) and think that it's a reflection of modern PHP. It totally isn't... it's a reflection of trying to stay code-compatible for way too long. Also bad, if you don't know the difference, there are endless amounts of "PHP 2002-style" books, videos, StackOverflow posts, etc out there to trip you up.
Gotta concur with that one. CPAN is plain misery. The PHP community, for all its warts, has had a major revitalization in the last four years largely because they've gone from a slog of a CPAN-clone to Composer/Packagist, which learned a lot of neat tricks from other languages' package managers that have improved in the modern era. CPAN feels like it come from an era when digital watches and Anonymous CVS were pretty neat ideas.
I'm just a little fascinated that you know as much about Yubikeys as you do and don't seem to mention U2F mode. Which does pretty much what he needs. And, while it does need 'special software' (for now), the special software in this case is Google Chrome... the most popular browser in the world.
You're discussing the classic 'keyboard style OTP' Yubikey protocol (their first products, circa 2008). Still an available option in some devices, but decidedly legacy at this point. The U2F standard came along later (~2014) and is based on elliptic-curve PKI, not the shared-secret protocol in question.
That's baked. It's called FIDO U2F. (Almost) exactly what you're describing, but with a few plusses. Google refers to it as a 'security key'. The YubiKey is the best known model, but it's an open standard and there's a half-dozen manufacturers of U2F keys on Amazon. Limitations... only works in Chrome (and Firefox betas) right now, only available on a limited number of sites (but that does include some big ones like Google, Facebook, and GitHub).
Welcome to the world of FIDO U2F (fidoalliance.org). The best-selling U2F device these days (the YubiKey line... note that FIDO U2F is only one mode those work in) does not do biometric authentication before responding with one-time public-key-based security, but there are more expensive U2F devices out there already that do local biometric unlock.
The breach is annoying. It's also almost an inevitable thing.
Can we *now* start talking about moving beyond "a ten-digit number and some generally publicly-researchable information is enough to do almost anything as you"?
I mean, seriously. Next year will be the 40th anniversary of the publishing of the RSA algorithm. Secure smartcards have been around for 25 of those years, and some countries have been issuing them for 15+ years now. Bit of biometric, and Alice is your digitally-signed aunt.
No... we're still in a country minting pennies and shuffling 19th century bank-draft checks around, aren't we? Oh, and the exact same people who are freaking out about 'Voter ID protects the sanctity of the vote' simultaneously go bat-guano crazy if you propose an actually secure ID card system.
U2F really does whip the proverbial llama's ass. I wouldn't say, though, that your password is 'not very important'.... your password is still your second factor for a lost/stolen U2F key.
It is slowly gaining market share. One major financial firm (Vanguard mutual funds/brokerage) has enabled U2F logins, hopefully more to follow.
There's nowhere that overbuilding competition in entirely illegal (Federal Telecom. Act of 1996), but there are lots of places where the local kickbacks pay to keep it virtually so. Rules that forbid (much cheaper) aerial drops, for instance, even though the incumbents are grandfathered with the right to aerial drops. Rules that say a new provider must provide 100% citywide coverage in three months of getting a franchise (when the incumbent doesn't really have 100% coverage), etc.
AT&T in particular (CenturyLink and others to a lesser degree) will fight this primarily because it might threaten their constant feed of "rural broadband improvement" money. The millions mentioned in the story above. Sure, they've been getting millions in "rural broadband improvement" funds every year for 20 years straight now. Sure, they haven't gotten around to it yet. Sure, they're actively ripping out copper POTS lines and turning off DSLAMs in rural areas that had gotten at least that far. But, why would you cut off their USF subsidies? Don't you support rural broadband? Do you hate real 'Muricans?
Two things that make me more productive... and sadly my workplace is too nickel-and-dime to actually buy for me.
The JetBrains IDE all-access pass. I didn't like IDEs until JetBrains. Eclipse... still not friends with. All the extendable code editors (Sublime, Atom, whatever)... meh. IDEA, RubyMine, PyCharm, PHPStorm? F. Ing. Brilliant. When I see people stumbling through without code completion and good breakpoint debuggers (and that's very common in scripting-language web development to this day)... it's like I'm on cheat mode.
And I debate it but keep up my subscription to O'Reilly (and partners) Safari Books Online, because I have it locked in from a special at $199/yr. At double that (the normal rate), I'm not sure it'd be worth it, but I use it just enough that having virtually every IT book I need available is worth $0.75 a day to me.
In as tech, Linux, and retro community as Slashdot, I give a particular shout to "pass" (passwordstore.org). Takes a little time to realize how simply powerful it is. And, it's literally nothing but GPG, Git, and a long but easy-to-read Bash script. Also, works really, really well for a team that needs a secrets vault. Back when we did that with KeePass, we'd always get out of sync. Now? It's a git-merge, just like the code.
Want more advanced security than that? My teams' GPG keys (and SSH keys for Git) are on a smartcards (Yubikeys to be specific) which means the actual private keys are never on our (day to day) computers.
In the broader sense of the question, yes, you should use a password manager. I have 300+ passwords (and password-like little bits of info). All different, all randomly generated. I never forget one. Not sure how you do that without a pw manager.
Inconveniently, they're non-searchable PDFs. But, go read em. Every one of them is a non-exclusive franchise agreement, because exclusive ones have been illegal since the Telecoms act of 1996. True story.
Now, reality on the ground is that 'overbuilding' has basically lead to bankruptcy every time it's every been tried due to the huge first-mover advantage. And, it's not that government is blameless... they'll usually demand 100% coverage of a region not pick-n-choose customers. But, it's wrong to say that the Franchise Agreements are exclusive.
Every time I see a "new big features" announcement from the big 3-5 cloud vendors (AWS, Google, Azure, etc). I keep hoping that one or the other is going to really buy in to IPv6. And I keep being disappointed.
There are some ways to get them playing moderately nicely with IPv6 (especially if you're buying load-balancing services from them), but most of their networks are IPv4 internal-routing subnets.
Meanwhile, the middle range VM places (Linode, DigitalOcean, etc) are far more IPv6 friendly. My understanding is that is because they use standard commercial networking gear. While the biggest clouds (AWS, Google, etc) have totally custom network stacks which trade affordable performance for full feature sets.
Between the cloud vendors poorly supporting IPv6 and insanity like the Cogent-v-Hurricane split of the IPv6 internet (holy crud... it's SEVEN years now since Hurricane baked Cogent that cake begging them to peer with the world's largest IPv6 network... and it's still broken), it's amazing IPv6 has as much traffic as it does.
Grandma on the other hand likely had no issue what so ever. Windows 8 was really easy for someone to pick up and use. However it was a jarring screwup for the power user.
My take: Windows 8 (esp. pre-8.1) was, arugably, a decent UI for a total blank slate user. It was a mildly annoying UI for a hard-core power user. It was, however, a complete and total disaster for the hundreds of secretaries and teachers I was dealing with at the time who were just barely computer savvy, but had at that point accumulated 15-20 years of hard-earned "Start Menu like this, click this/double-click that, files work this way" folk wisdom, and Win8 broke rather a lot of that.
Interesting coming from a company that will sell you a 3y9m old machine today (http://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro?product=MD101LL/A&step=config#). Reports are that they still sell rather a lot of them, because they're upgradable, repairable, and work just fine.
As for me, my 2010 MBP literally came out of a garbage skip. Found it with a bulging/burst lithium battery (far from an Apple-only issue). $50 worth of eBay grey market battery later, and I have a pretty solid machine for XCode and Mac testing. If it weren't for that, I just wouldn't test or dev anything for Macs. Couldn't afford to.
The Samsung Pay magnetic induction method is patented tech, from a company called LoopPay which Samsung bought.
AFAIK, they aren't licensing it to any other manufacturers at this time, because it gives them a clear distinctive advantage in an otherwise pretty-commodity marketplace.
Newer Yubikeys (Yubikey 4) allows up to 4k RSA keys, as well as some elliptic-curve keys. Mind you, smartcard-based 2048-bit RSA encryption is wildly better encryption than 99.9% of the world. Especially if you're not really thwarting the NSA, 2k is FINE.
But in general you're absolutely right. Carrying around an easily copied keyfile is really no spectacular increase in security. Smartcards (where the decryption step happens on a completely separate micro-micro-processor, right there inside the same physical chip as the memory) is by far the best answer we've got.
As for the question on safekeeping? The extreme paranoia method is to generate your keys on a totally airgapped (no network) old laptop and save the backup private keys in an encrypted volume. Then copy the private keys onto a smartcard/Yubikey for daily use (most smartcards allow a one-way push of a private key from PC->smartcard, but no retrieval of the private key).
What does a decently-spec'd MBP or non-Apple equivalent and a mid-grade commercial IDE cost these days? $2k at the most?
Even if you are hiring 18-year-olds in rural South Dakota, you are looking at $50k a year ($35k salary + other direct costs), the $2k is *nothing*. 16GB laptops, SSDs, giant screens, and huge backup arrays are close to nothing.
Don't be that cheap guy. Don't work for that cheap guy. If you are you own boss and are the one cheaping out on your own self... look in a mirror, do a Stuart Smalley Daily Affirmation and step away from cheapness-first.
Where does this penny-pinching come from in IT? I think I know where it comes from, because I was there. Let's take a random year like 1989. A new 'fancy' machine, like, say a Mac IIci with a color monitor was over $10,000 ($20k in 2016 dollars). No joke. Half a year's salary. If you were able to do much of the same stuff on a cobbled-together PC/AT clone for a third of the price, you were ahead. Great. I grew up poor, with a bunch of nerdy poor friends, and we were scrambling to put together thrown-out old Zenith 8088s. Great.
It's not 1989. Especially when you compare, say, a two-year-old Thinkpad for under $500 to 'making things work, mostly' on a slightly cheaper Chromebook (I'd want the former, no question)? It's Just. Not. Worth. It.
You want your developer to have the oomph to play with VMs and Docker and whatever cool crap comes out tomorrow.
As for everything else? With all my tooling scripted up and in version control, I can go from an Ubuntu iso to basically fully operational in about 90 minutes. Might suck a lot more with Windows fiddle-twiddling (especially if you're not big enough for images and domain-centric centralized management). Syncing, teamwork, and deployment are already covered... and it's not the IDE's bailiwick.
Right with you there. Look, I've been a Linux user, one way or the other, for even a little longer than that (Slashdot ID checks out). I've been whatever-coexisting with Windows for the last decade or so. The period where sound and wifi were sucking on Linux (and IE ruled the web) coincided with me having enough income to buy new-out-of-box laptops. So, grew to live in a Windows desktop, Linux server peace. Actually didn't hate Win8/8.1 for my own needs (though I agree it was a UI disaster for non-power-users).
Between the Win10 spycrap and the nag screens, though, I finally said 'fark it'. I'm back to 100% desktop Linux, 100% of the time, for the first time in over a decade. It's really, really refreshing.
Early 1995, still in high school. I was in a small town in Kansas. Absolutely disconnected from the pre-web internet. No BBSes or anything that wouldn't be a long-distance call. And my parents were fairly poor (okay... lower-middle income but horrible with money), so no long distance.
But geeky. My dad bought into the TI-99 after TI pulled out of the home computer industry because he could buy a computer for $50. There was a whole community of people who did fairly amazing things with 15-year-old hardware well into the mid-1990s (heck, there's still a few around today, like old Atari/Amiga/Apple ][, etc groups). One day, along with the shareware TI 5-1/4" floppies that we were mailing around with other users, there was a Slackware CD. I had recently scrounged together a 486 that was capable of running it. And Bob's your uncle.
Really addicted to mine. I have my private SSH key on there (via GPG/PGP), so that's never on my working machines. Use the standard OTP on several personally-run sites. Use U2F security for Google apps. Use the TOTP (a.k.a. Google Authenticator/Authy) app. Use the challenge-response mode as a second factor on my KeePass database. Amazing gadget.
The question regarding the teardown is... "so"? Even with full pin access to the A7005 chip, you *STILL* wouldn't have access to my GPG/SSH private key or my TOTP generators within it. That's the point of a secure element. You'd have to dissolve the casing of the A7005 chip and have a decent microscope lab to get those bits of data out of the chip. You would be able to use my U2F/OTP/TOTP-generated-code functionality. But, you could do that just by stealing my Neo and plugging it into a USB slot without any acetone bath involved.
As said above, SSA doesn't have any sort of biometric verification of "who you are".
And, as said above, your SSN shouldn't be used as an identifier. If we need a common citizen ID number, fine, but it shouldn't be anything but identifying (i.e., effectively public knowledge).
It's the gorram 21st century. We've had public-key encryption figured out for over 30 blessed years now. Most people in the first world are carrying around several crypto smartcard devices already (EMV compatible credit cards and other smartcard tech).
Much of the world now has ID cards with cryptographic chips in them. When you open a line of credit, you prove, through RSA/elliptic-curve signatures that you are YOU via your ID chip. If you lose your ID, it gets put on the centralized revoke list, the issuing agency goes through whatever in-person process to verify you are you, and gives you a new ID. This can extend to online purchasing, online voting, etc, etc.
But, we're so freaked out about government black helicopters that we just accept the whole fraud thing as inevitable.
Is it, though? It was infinitely easier to carefully (okay, obsessively) portion out the 1700 kCal per day I could eat and maintain just-under-obese status when I was single and nearly a hermit. Married (to a gal with better metabolism than me), there's simply endless, "hey, I made cookies" or "hey, I'm just springing on you that we're going out with friends for fish-n-chips tonight" temptations.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't recommend PasswordStore (passwordstore.org) highly enough. ~400 lines of (quite readable) Bash. GPG. Git. That's the extent of it.
Combined with my GPG credentials being on a smartcard, I feel like I'm doing the best I can.
You're quite right. PHP has done more evolution over the years than most languages (and it needed to). A modern Laravel'd-up ORM-driven annotated PHP application is completely unrecognizable as the same language as "mysql_connect in the middle of the page" PHP from 15 years ago. And a Zend/Smarty app from 8 years ago is a third kind of beastie from either of those.
Unfortunately, people will look at the codebase of some of the most popular PHP products out there (cough cough, WordPress) and think that it's a reflection of modern PHP. It totally isn't... it's a reflection of trying to stay code-compatible for way too long. Also bad, if you don't know the difference, there are endless amounts of "PHP 2002-style" books, videos, StackOverflow posts, etc out there to trip you up.
Gotta concur with that one. CPAN is plain misery. The PHP community, for all its warts, has had a major revitalization in the last four years largely because they've gone from a slog of a CPAN-clone to Composer/Packagist, which learned a lot of neat tricks from other languages' package managers that have improved in the modern era. CPAN feels like it come from an era when digital watches and Anonymous CVS were pretty neat ideas.
I'm just a little fascinated that you know as much about Yubikeys as you do and don't seem to mention U2F mode. Which does pretty much what he needs. And, while it does need 'special software' (for now), the special software in this case is Google Chrome... the most popular browser in the world.
You're discussing the classic 'keyboard style OTP' Yubikey protocol (their first products, circa 2008). Still an available option in some devices, but decidedly legacy at this point. The U2F standard came along later (~2014) and is based on elliptic-curve PKI, not the shared-secret protocol in question.
That's baked. It's called FIDO U2F. (Almost) exactly what you're describing, but with a few plusses. Google refers to it as a 'security key'. The YubiKey is the best known model, but it's an open standard and there's a half-dozen manufacturers of U2F keys on Amazon. Limitations... only works in Chrome (and Firefox betas) right now, only available on a limited number of sites (but that does include some big ones like Google, Facebook, and GitHub).
Welcome to the world of FIDO U2F (fidoalliance.org). The best-selling U2F device these days (the YubiKey line... note that FIDO U2F is only one mode those work in) does not do biometric authentication before responding with one-time public-key-based security, but there are more expensive U2F devices out there already that do local biometric unlock.
The breach is annoying. It's also almost an inevitable thing.
Can we *now* start talking about moving beyond "a ten-digit number and some generally publicly-researchable information is enough to do almost anything as you"?
I mean, seriously. Next year will be the 40th anniversary of the publishing of the RSA algorithm. Secure smartcards have been around for 25 of those years, and some countries have been issuing them for 15+ years now. Bit of biometric, and Alice is your digitally-signed aunt.
No... we're still in a country minting pennies and shuffling 19th century bank-draft checks around, aren't we? Oh, and the exact same people who are freaking out about 'Voter ID protects the sanctity of the vote' simultaneously go bat-guano crazy if you propose an actually secure ID card system.
U2F really does whip the proverbial llama's ass. I wouldn't say, though, that your password is 'not very important'.... your password is still your second factor for a lost/stolen U2F key.
It is slowly gaining market share. One major financial firm (Vanguard mutual funds/brokerage) has enabled U2F logins, hopefully more to follow.
There's nowhere that overbuilding competition in entirely illegal (Federal Telecom. Act of 1996), but there are lots of places where the local kickbacks pay to keep it virtually so. Rules that forbid (much cheaper) aerial drops, for instance, even though the incumbents are grandfathered with the right to aerial drops. Rules that say a new provider must provide 100% citywide coverage in three months of getting a franchise (when the incumbent doesn't really have 100% coverage), etc.
AT&T in particular (CenturyLink and others to a lesser degree) will fight this primarily because it might threaten their constant feed of "rural broadband improvement" money. The millions mentioned in the story above. Sure, they've been getting millions in "rural broadband improvement" funds every year for 20 years straight now. Sure, they haven't gotten around to it yet. Sure, they're actively ripping out copper POTS lines and turning off DSLAMs in rural areas that had gotten at least that far. But, why would you cut off their USF subsidies? Don't you support rural broadband? Do you hate real 'Muricans?
Two things that make me more productive... and sadly my workplace is too nickel-and-dime to actually buy for me.
The JetBrains IDE all-access pass. I didn't like IDEs until JetBrains. Eclipse... still not friends with. All the extendable code editors (Sublime, Atom, whatever)... meh. IDEA, RubyMine, PyCharm, PHPStorm? F. Ing. Brilliant. When I see people stumbling through without code completion and good breakpoint debuggers (and that's very common in scripting-language web development to this day)... it's like I'm on cheat mode.
And I debate it but keep up my subscription to O'Reilly (and partners) Safari Books Online, because I have it locked in from a special at $199/yr. At double that (the normal rate), I'm not sure it'd be worth it, but I use it just enough that having virtually every IT book I need available is worth $0.75 a day to me.
In as tech, Linux, and retro community as Slashdot, I give a particular shout to "pass" (passwordstore.org). Takes a little time to realize how simply powerful it is. And, it's literally nothing but GPG, Git, and a long but easy-to-read Bash script. Also, works really, really well for a team that needs a secrets vault. Back when we did that with KeePass, we'd always get out of sync. Now? It's a git-merge, just like the code.
Want more advanced security than that? My teams' GPG keys (and SSH keys for Git) are on a smartcards (Yubikeys to be specific) which means the actual private keys are never on our (day to day) computers.
In the broader sense of the question, yes, you should use a password manager. I have 300+ passwords (and password-like little bits of info). All different, all randomly generated. I never forget one. Not sure how you do that without a pw manager.
"That sort of thing" stopped, technically, in 1996 by federal law. No, really.
Here's the NYC cable franchise agreements: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doit...
Inconveniently, they're non-searchable PDFs. But, go read em. Every one of them is a non-exclusive franchise agreement, because exclusive ones have been illegal since the Telecoms act of 1996. True story.
Now, reality on the ground is that 'overbuilding' has basically lead to bankruptcy every time it's every been tried due to the huge first-mover advantage. And, it's not that government is blameless... they'll usually demand 100% coverage of a region not pick-n-choose customers. But, it's wrong to say that the Franchise Agreements are exclusive.
Every time I see a "new big features" announcement from the big 3-5 cloud vendors (AWS, Google, Azure, etc). I keep hoping that one or the other is going to really buy in to IPv6. And I keep being disappointed.
There are some ways to get them playing moderately nicely with IPv6 (especially if you're buying load-balancing services from them), but most of their networks are IPv4 internal-routing subnets.
Meanwhile, the middle range VM places (Linode, DigitalOcean, etc) are far more IPv6 friendly. My understanding is that is because they use standard commercial networking gear. While the biggest clouds (AWS, Google, etc) have totally custom network stacks which trade affordable performance for full feature sets.
Between the cloud vendors poorly supporting IPv6 and insanity like the Cogent-v-Hurricane split of the IPv6 internet (holy crud... it's SEVEN years now since Hurricane baked Cogent that cake begging them to peer with the world's largest IPv6 network... and it's still broken), it's amazing IPv6 has as much traffic as it does.
Grandma on the other hand likely had no issue what so ever. Windows 8 was really easy for someone to pick up and use. However it was a jarring screwup for the power user.
My take: Windows 8 (esp. pre-8.1) was, arugably, a decent UI for a total blank slate user. It was a mildly annoying UI for a hard-core power user. It was, however, a complete and total disaster for the hundreds of secretaries and teachers I was dealing with at the time who were just barely computer savvy, but had at that point accumulated 15-20 years of hard-earned "Start Menu like this, click this/double-click that, files work this way" folk wisdom, and Win8 broke rather a lot of that.
Interesting coming from a company that will sell you a 3y9m old machine today (http://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro?product=MD101LL/A&step=config#). Reports are that they still sell rather a lot of them, because they're upgradable, repairable, and work just fine.
As for me, my 2010 MBP literally came out of a garbage skip. Found it with a bulging/burst lithium battery (far from an Apple-only issue). $50 worth of eBay grey market battery later, and I have a pretty solid machine for XCode and Mac testing. If it weren't for that, I just wouldn't test or dev anything for Macs. Couldn't afford to.
The Samsung Pay magnetic induction method is patented tech, from a company called LoopPay which Samsung bought.
AFAIK, they aren't licensing it to any other manufacturers at this time, because it gives them a clear distinctive advantage in an otherwise pretty-commodity marketplace.
NFC is also hugely more secure.
Newer Yubikeys (Yubikey 4) allows up to 4k RSA keys, as well as some elliptic-curve keys. Mind you, smartcard-based 2048-bit RSA encryption is wildly better encryption than 99.9% of the world. Especially if you're not really thwarting the NSA, 2k is FINE.
But in general you're absolutely right. Carrying around an easily copied keyfile is really no spectacular increase in security. Smartcards (where the decryption step happens on a completely separate micro-micro-processor, right there inside the same physical chip as the memory) is by far the best answer we've got.
As for the question on safekeeping? The extreme paranoia method is to generate your keys on a totally airgapped (no network) old laptop and save the backup private keys in an encrypted volume. Then copy the private keys onto a smartcard/Yubikey for daily use (most smartcards allow a one-way push of a private key from PC->smartcard, but no retrieval of the private key).
What does a decently-spec'd MBP or non-Apple equivalent and a mid-grade commercial IDE cost these days? $2k at the most?
Even if you are hiring 18-year-olds in rural South Dakota, you are looking at $50k a year ($35k salary + other direct costs), the $2k is *nothing*. 16GB laptops, SSDs, giant screens, and huge backup arrays are close to nothing.
Don't be that cheap guy. Don't work for that cheap guy. If you are you own boss and are the one cheaping out on your own self... look in a mirror, do a Stuart Smalley Daily Affirmation and step away from cheapness-first.
Where does this penny-pinching come from in IT? I think I know where it comes from, because I was there. Let's take a random year like 1989. A new 'fancy' machine, like, say a Mac IIci with a color monitor was over $10,000 ($20k in 2016 dollars). No joke. Half a year's salary. If you were able to do much of the same stuff on a cobbled-together PC/AT clone for a third of the price, you were ahead. Great. I grew up poor, with a bunch of nerdy poor friends, and we were scrambling to put together thrown-out old Zenith 8088s. Great.
It's not 1989. Especially when you compare, say, a two-year-old Thinkpad for under $500 to 'making things work, mostly' on a slightly cheaper Chromebook (I'd want the former, no question)? It's Just. Not. Worth. It.
You want your developer to have the oomph to play with VMs and Docker and whatever cool crap comes out tomorrow.
As for everything else? With all my tooling scripted up and in version control, I can go from an Ubuntu iso to basically fully operational in about 90 minutes. Might suck a lot more with Windows fiddle-twiddling (especially if you're not big enough for images and domain-centric centralized management). Syncing, teamwork, and deployment are already covered... and it's not the IDE's bailiwick.
Right with you there. Look, I've been a Linux user, one way or the other, for even a little longer than that (Slashdot ID checks out). I've been whatever-coexisting with Windows for the last decade or so. The period where sound and wifi were sucking on Linux (and IE ruled the web) coincided with me having enough income to buy new-out-of-box laptops. So, grew to live in a Windows desktop, Linux server peace. Actually didn't hate Win8/8.1 for my own needs (though I agree it was a UI disaster for non-power-users).
Between the Win10 spycrap and the nag screens, though, I finally said 'fark it'. I'm back to 100% desktop Linux, 100% of the time, for the first time in over a decade. It's really, really refreshing.
If it's legally impossible to request a review of them, why bother with creating and storing the paper tapes in the first place?
Which leads, I guess, to the next question. If it's legally impossible to review an election, why bother holding them in the first place?
Early 1995, still in high school. I was in a small town in Kansas. Absolutely disconnected from the pre-web internet. No BBSes or anything that wouldn't be a long-distance call. And my parents were fairly poor (okay... lower-middle income but horrible with money), so no long distance.
But geeky. My dad bought into the TI-99 after TI pulled out of the home computer industry because he could buy a computer for $50. There was a whole community of people who did fairly amazing things with 15-year-old hardware well into the mid-1990s (heck, there's still a few around today, like old Atari/Amiga/Apple ][, etc groups). One day, along with the shareware TI 5-1/4" floppies that we were mailing around with other users, there was a Slackware CD. I had recently scrounged together a 486 that was capable of running it. And Bob's your uncle.
Really addicted to mine. I have my private SSH key on there (via GPG/PGP), so that's never on my working machines. Use the standard OTP on several personally-run sites. Use U2F security for Google apps. Use the TOTP (a.k.a. Google Authenticator/Authy) app. Use the challenge-response mode as a second factor on my KeePass database. Amazing gadget.
The question regarding the teardown is... "so"? Even with full pin access to the A7005 chip, you *STILL* wouldn't have access to my GPG/SSH private key or my TOTP generators within it. That's the point of a secure element. You'd have to dissolve the casing of the A7005 chip and have a decent microscope lab to get those bits of data out of the chip. You would be able to use my U2F/OTP/TOTP-generated-code functionality. But, you could do that just by stealing my Neo and plugging it into a USB slot without any acetone bath involved.
As said above, SSA doesn't have any sort of biometric verification of "who you are".
And, as said above, your SSN shouldn't be used as an identifier. If we need a common citizen ID number, fine, but it shouldn't be anything but identifying (i.e., effectively public knowledge).
It's the gorram 21st century. We've had public-key encryption figured out for over 30 blessed years now. Most people in the first world are carrying around several crypto smartcard devices already (EMV compatible credit cards and other smartcard tech).
Much of the world now has ID cards with cryptographic chips in them. When you open a line of credit, you prove, through RSA/elliptic-curve signatures that you are YOU via your ID chip. If you lose your ID, it gets put on the centralized revoke list, the issuing agency goes through whatever in-person process to verify you are you, and gives you a new ID. This can extend to online purchasing, online voting, etc, etc.
But, we're so freaked out about government black helicopters that we just accept the whole fraud thing as inevitable.
Is it, though? It was infinitely easier to carefully (okay, obsessively) portion out the 1700 kCal per day I could eat and maintain just-under-obese status when I was single and nearly a hermit. Married (to a gal with better metabolism than me), there's simply endless, "hey, I made cookies" or "hey, I'm just springing on you that we're going out with friends for fish-n-chips tonight" temptations.