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Sae5waip

145 karma · joined September 16, 2013

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Sae5waip··on [dead]
Or not.
Sae5waip··on Scientists have developed a material so dark that it can't be seen
0, in a suitable color space.
Sae5waip··on EA is File Snooping with the Origin Client
> If this is what EA is doing then they had better have a really good explanation.

Or?

Sae5waip··on What will it take to get people using PGP for email?
The problem with S/MIME is that it is strictly hierarchical. That already hasn't worked well for TLS.

The aim of email encryption is in a large part to prevent government-level parties from reading the emails. It doesn't really make sense to then go back to a system controlled by the very same parties.

OpenPGPs web-of-trust model seems more appropriate.

But both approaches share a significant number of problems, so...

Sae5waip··on What will it take to get people using PGP for email?
Here are some problems, from the top of my head, in no particular order:

  - Subjects can't be encrypted.
  - Encrypted mailing lists are complicated. Do you reencrypt in the middle?
    What software do you use? The mailing list manager you use right now probably doesn't support it.
  - Enigmail still doesn't support storing e-mails decrypted*. As a consequence, full-text search doesn't work.
  - There's also S/MIME.
  - Theres no software to manage public/private keys enterprise-wide.
  - Legitimate server-side email retention requirements for enterprises
  - Many people are quite alright with "most other people won't be able my email; maybe governments can".
  - Most emails quite simply aren't that important.
  - How do you deal with lost keys?
  - Webmailers
  - Often, as a sender at a company, you can not afford to inconvenience contacts.
  - No easy way to synchronize keyrings.
  - Server side spam filtering not possible
  - Out-of-office auto-forwarding
  - The other side uses gmail.
  - Your mother keeps asking why you aren't on Whatsapp.
  - The "metadata" (who mail whom? when? how long are the emails?) is quite telling.
Please solve all of these.

Sorry for the unreadable list. Thank pg for the shitty markup format.

Sae5waip··on Inside the FBI's Fight Against Chinese Cyber-Espionage
As a German, I feel very much the same.
Sae5waip··on What if Ansible used XML for configuration management?
Because modern configuration management tools like Ansible (or Puppet, or Salt, or whatever) allow you to do more things more easily.

Also, because Bash is a particularly horrible language. I have a lot of experience writing bash scripts, and I hate bash.

Sae5waip··on Show HN: Where Adblock+ injects 20K CSS rules, HTTPSB injects one
HN is a YC marketing tool, it pays for itself quite easily.
Sae5waip··on How the FBI Cracked a Chinese Spy Ring
The article has nothing to do with Snowden. At all.
Sae5waip··on SSH Kung Fu
Yes, but it's easier to teach admins to never use "PermitRootLogin yes" "because it's bad for security" than to teach them to never use weak passwords.
Sae5waip··on SSH Kung Fu
Automated 0-day attack: fair point.

Though direct remote code execution is probably much, much more likely than authentication bypass.

Sae5waip··on SSH Kung Fu
@Passwordless sudo: Because then you have effectively made your user root, and compromising your user account is enough to get root access immediately. If you do that, then why have a seperate user at all?[3]

@Partitions: Seperating /home and / prevents normal users from filling up /. (And if you put both on LVM, you can grow them as needed.) Yes, I've only had this on some of the servers I've run.

@Impractical: it's one additional command for something I do quite often[4], and I still don't see the benefit (reminder: I fully agree with never using "PermitRootLogin yes").

[3] Granted, it does provide some context seperation in the sense that if you want to perform an administrative task, you have to explicitly use sudo. But it doesn't increase security, and it offers no advantage over "direct root access + normal user account".

[4] Not just scp, but also things like "less /var/log/messages" or "git clone root@host:/etc".

And again: what does "PermitRootLogin no" gain you over "without-password"? Why restrict it for no additional benefit?

Sae5waip··on SSH Kung Fu
tl;dr: "disallow root login entirely, everything else is bad" is cargo culting.

I said "impractical", not "impossible". Of course I can use sudo. But it's more work. I require root access a lot. It adds up quickly.[2]

And I hate typing passwords/passphrases. In fact, many of my passwords I can't remember. I've got an SSH agent for that, which reduces passphrase entry to yes/no (tab-space/space, actually).[1]

Also, I prefer my normal user account not to be a sudoer at all.

Besides, please consider that disallowing root access actually only gets you protection against root password guessing anyway. The "stolen key + passphrase" scenario in a sibling subthread is so absurd I felt the urge to bang my head against my desk. Sudo won't help you there either.

[1] Now please don't suggest "passwordless sudo".

[2] And there is another inelegance: /home is usually on a different partition than /, so your way will involve an additional copy. If /home is even large enough to fit that file.

Sae5waip··on SSH Kung Fu
Did you ever stop and think about this or are you just repeating something you read on "Hacker""news"?

Getting by /without/ direct SSH root access is often impractical (think about scp), and without-password is a secure way to have it.

Also, the more people know about "without-password", the less people will set PermitRootLogin to "yes".

Sae5waip··on SSH Kung Fu
Because then root login would be disabled entirely. With "without-password" SSH-key based login is still possible (and no, that's not much of a security risk).
Sae5waip··on Hack Rifle
Electrically powered multicopters can carry DSLRs quite easily. If it's supposed to carry expensive equipment, you'll want to use a hexa- or octocopter though.

Of course multicopter flight times, especially with payloads, are problematic.

Sae5waip··on Could folks please help me get DigitalOcean onto wikipedia? (deleted thrice)
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a company index.
Sae5waip··on Tptacek's Review of "Practical Cryptography With Go"
I don't. So is mine, but resizing it for each individual website is unnecessary work. And some websites have a legitimate need for a wider format, so you can't even say "all websites should be like this".
Sae5waip··on A French labor agreement bans work emails after 6 PM
Anyone want to host their mission critical project with a team so small that individual employees have to be on call 24/7?

If the company requires more than what can be done in a 40-hour work week, it should hire more employees.

Sae5waip··on Heartbleed should bleed X.509 to death
That's precisely why you only use subkeys in daily life and only use the root key for keysigning (and ideally store it safely and offline).
Sae5waip··on 2048 is why we can’t have nice things
That maybe nghst should take a step back from HN and consider that normal people may find the original 2048 fun and may not care about its variants at all.

Giving an example is a perfectly valid way to make a point. Circumstantial doesn't mean wrong.

Sae5waip··on Linux 3.14 out
It's you. Linux has followed a bi-monthly schedule for quite a while now.

FYI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel#Maintenance

Sae5waip··on GCHQ and NSA Targeted Private German Companies
No, I don't.

a) We (my country and the US) are allies.

b) I may be less not ok with spying on high-ranking politicians. But any spying on companies and normal citizens is right out.

Sae5waip··on GCHQ and NSA Targeted Private German Companies
Unfortunately, I have a huge problem with a foreign country - the USA - spying on my country and me.
Sae5waip··on Obama to Call for End to N.S.A.’s Bulk Data Collection
And only for domestic spying.

People that aren't US citizens still get no protection at all.

Sae5waip··on Thoughts on Keybase.io
> If you meet me in person and I say "I'm sgentle", that's a weaker proof than if I post a comment from this account.

That's why (for PGP) you, as an assurer, generally don't upload the signature yourself but send it to the e-mail address the assuree claims to own. The proof that they own that account is that they are able to receive the mail with the signature. They can then publish it themselves.

Sae5waip··on Show HN: Snip.ly, the link shortener that drives conversion
Seriously?

a) You'd just write your take next to the link, instead of hiding it behind. Your example is far-fetched.

b) This is obviously meant for ads. (And the examples on their landing page make that perfectly clear.)

Quote: "You can essentially advertise on any website for free!"

Sae5waip··on Show HN: Snip.ly, the link shortener that drives conversion
It can not be used with good intentions.

There is never any advantage for the users who click on the links.

Sae5waip··on Edward Snowden: ‘They’re setting fire to the future of the Internet’
I'd like to add that "everyone else is doing it too" is commonly used by governments like the US to "excuse" their spying.
Sae5waip··on Thieves Break Into Cars Using Mysterious 'Black Box'
I've recently seen a presentation about attacks on a widely used system used in current cars.

There are a couple of different ways that are significantly better than brute force (as in: works against real cars in seconds to a few minutes). (Though since key length is only 48 bit, even brute forcing might be practical.)

This might interest you:

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurit...

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