Technology/Internet
Google outrage at ‘NSA hacking’
Outrageous, OUTRAGEOUS I says!
Yeah yeah, the NSA didn’t pay you for the data this time?
Google outrage at ‘NSA hacking’
Category: FreeBSD • Technology
India to Impose eMail Restrictions
The cloud is public and ephemeral. Never trust important data to anyone else’s hardware.
India and Brazil are getting it. Finally.
The USG is still moving data to the cloud. It will be an interesting day when it is realized the US isn’t the only country companies like Google and Amazon do business in that have national security data access requirements.
India to impose email restrictions
Category: Politics • Technology
posthumous hack
I just got an email from a friend of mine, which might not seem particularly atypical, and this turned out to be hack-spam from his Yahoo account. What was jarring about seeing mail from him in my inbox is that he has been dead for six months.
IRL, we move people to cemeteries or other repositories of the dead and keep our interaction space for the living. On social networks and other digital interaction spaces, there’s no particular cost and some respect shown by leaving the presence of those that have passed as it was when they last touched it. But in time, all social networks will fill with the static presence of the passed on. It may be a little less cheerful to log in to facebook when your friend’s list is dominated by those who can no longer answer a poke.
Category: Odd
Google APIs Suck
Off-Site scripts are annoying and privacy invasive. They are a vector for malware, waste your computer’s resources, and generally add limited capability. They’re a shortcut for developers but rarely add real value that can’t be replaced by locally-hosted, open-source scripts and always compromise your privacy (or the privacy of your site’s visitors).
To explain – I use noscript (as everyone should) with Firefox (it doesn’t work with Chrome: I might consider trusting Google’s browser for some mainstream websites when it does, but I don’t really like that Chrome logs every keystroke back to Google and I’m not sure why anyone would tolerate that). NoScript enables me to give per-site permission to execute scripts.
The best sites don’t need any scripts to give me the information I need. It is OK if the whizzy experience is degraded somewhat for security’s sake, as long as that is my choice. Offsite scripting can add useful functionality, but the visitor should be able to opt out.
Most sites use offsite scripting for privacy invasion – generally they have made a deal with some heinous data aggregator who’s business model is to compile dossiers of every petty interest and quirk you might personally have and sell them to whoever can make money off them: advertisers, insurance companies, potential employers, national governments, anyone who can pay. In return for letting them scrounge your data off the site, they give the site operator some slick graphs (and who doesn’t love slick graphs). But you lose. Or you block google analytics with noscript. This was easy – block offsite scripts if you’re not using private browsing or switch to private browsing (and Chrome’s private browsing mode is probably fine) and enjoy the fully scripted experience.
But I’ve noticed recently a lot of sites are borrowing basic functionality from Google APIs. Simple things, for which there are plenty of open source scripts to use like uploading images – this basic functionality is being sold to them in an easy to integrate form in exchange for your personal information: in effect, you’re paying for their code with your privacy. And you either have to temporarily allow Google APIs to execute scripts in your browser and suck up your personal information or you can’t use the site.
If you manage a website, remove as many calls as you can, including removing calls back to wordpress and fonts. These are all data collection mechanisms that seem to make it easy in exchange for aggregating data on users. I recommend three browser plugins to significantly improve privacy and reduce data collection. They break some sites, but those sites are so privacy violating that you shouldn’t be visiting them anyway.
LocalCDN
Local CDN redirects CDN calls to locally cached copies, which improves performance and protects privacy. CDNs make good money off your private data without your consent and the features they provide are easily replaced with local delivery. This seems to have zero impact on browsing experience.
For firefox, you might try Decentraleyes.
Privacy Badger
EFF’s privacy badger is great. It can be your only ad blocker if you, say, support ad-monetized content but just don’t want to be tracked. EFF’s goal isn’t so much to end advertising but to give the user a tool to reject the more privacy invasive elements of such advertising or other mechanisms of tracking. The “learning” mode is disabled by default because using it is, itself, trackable.
uBlock Origin
The ur-privacy plugin, uBlock Origin is by default fairly agressive in blocking and so not only protects privacy, but blocks scripts that slow your computer down, waste your costly energy doing free work for advertisers, and speeds up browsing. It does, however, break some pages including things like logins and redirects, so become familiar with the mechanisms for selectively disabling blocking of scripts or sites that are important.
Category: Politics • Privacy • Security • Technology
openldap-server-2.4.33_2
With FreeBSD 9.1 out, it is time get all my ports upgraded in advance of doing the OS update. The process is fairly painless, but occasionally, especially if you are slacking in the updates, a change in configuration causes the usually completely automatic “portupgrade -ra
” to fail.
One such update was “Upgrading 'openldap-sasl-server-2.4.31' to 'openldap-server-2.4.33_2
” which failed with a
===> openldap-server-2.4.33_2 conflicts with installed package(s): openldap-sasl-client-2.4.33_1 They install files into the same place. You may want to stop build with Ctrl + C. ===> License OPENLDAP accepted by the user ===> Found saved configuration for openldap-server-2.4.33 ===> openldap-server-2.4.33_2 conflicts with installed package(s): openldap-sasl-client-2.4.33_1 They will not build together. Please remove them first with pkg_delete(1). *** Error code 1 Stop in /usr/ports/net/openldap24-server.
But because this is FreeBSD and the open source community actually provides support, unlike, say Microsoft, where such an error would languish for months, if not years, with out a patch or any advice on how to fix it, the port maintainer, Xin Li, answered my question in less than 20 minutes with the following advice:
cd /usr/ports/net/openldap24-server make configCheck “SASL” is checked?
Following his directions, everything compiled perfectly.
Windows Suckz
I will never understand why companies choose to spend good money developing software and systems around Windows. How can they be so stupid as to pay for absurd and byzantine licensing of inferior, insecure, opaque operating systems on which to build their products the regular failure of which only serves to damage the reliability of their applications and harm their reputation while reducing profit and increasing cost?
On the plus side, seeing BSODs and hang screens in public places is always good for lulz.
Category: Technology • Travel
Cleaner, More Efficient Windows 7
One of the things I hate about Win 7 is the automatic “smart” folders like Homegroup, Favorites, Libraries, and the User folder. They are ass and unbelievably annoying. I have a folder called work that is well organized, but way too often I’d end up the the Library “work” which is just idiotically bizarre. I want my pictures organized the way I want them, typically topically, not all lumped into a folder called “Pictures” and segregated from another folder of “videos.”
Why someone at Microsoft thought that dynamically self-organizing file structures was a good idea is beyond me. They are in love with this insanely stupid premise that it is somehow helpful that every time you click on a menu or open a folder it is organized differently that the last time based on some algorithm you can’t control. It is like having Clippy restructure your documents for you.
They should have a central “turn off all features where MS engineers think they can organize things for you automatically and let me organize my computer myself, OK?” But they don’t, and while it is a bit tedious, it is possible keep Microsoft’s meddling fingers out of your organization with a few regedits.
Remove Favorites: https://web.archive.org/web/20131005200518/http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/window-on-windows/remove-favorites-from-windows-explorer-in-windows-7/3461
Remove User Folder: https://web.archive.org/web/20210315084556/https://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/48123-user-folder-add-remove-navigation-pane.html
Remove HomeGroup: https://web.archive.org/web/20130925000911/http://www.techrepublic.com:80/blog/window-on-windows/remove-homegroup-from-windows-explorer-in-windows-7/3425
Remove Libraries: https://web.archive.org/web/20130917233557/http://www.techrepublic.com:80/blog/window-on-windows/remove-libraries-from-windows-explorer-in-windows-7/3401
And regain control of your computer.
Category: Technology
28C3 Scariest Talk of the Day
We attended Effective Denial of Service attacks against web application platforms by Alexander “alech” Klink and Julian | zeri where they described a really, really easy to implement denial of service attack that exploits an artifact of hash checking which is computationally intensive when the hash table is filled with hash collisions. It is fairly easy to find 2-4 character hash collisions for a given hash functions (and there are only a few variations in use) and as hash operations are performed by default on all POST and POST-like functions, which take (by default) from 2-8MB of data, one can easily tie up a computers CPU effectively indefinitely.
The researchers tested the attack on most web languages in use (and all in common use – only Perl is deployed safe (since 2003) and Ruby 1.9 has a patch available. Every other OS is vulnerable. Today. The attack is only a POST option with a table of delimited hash collision values. You could copypasta a working exploit, it is that easy. The vast (vaaast) majority of sites on the web run PHP, and 1 Gbps of attack vector bandwidth could take down 10,000 cores. With ASP.NET, that 1 Gbps can hold down 30,000 cores cRuby 1.8 (not patched, about half of Ruby installs): that 1 Gbps can keep a million cores tied up.
Yow.
Category: Events • Technology • Travel
You can’t read this at the Westin
Oddly, this server is blocked by the network at the Westin Grand, Berlin. Everything else seems to work, even www.dis.org (which is blocked by sites that subscribe to the Barracuda filter list, cause any site with information on radios is frequented by hackerz). It does not seem to be a national level block as I get plenty of visitors from Germany.
Easy enough to get around by VPN, but odd. Very odd indeed.
Category: Hotels • Self-publishing • Technology • Travel
Oh Google… you’re so cute.
Sure you’re the largest data harvester in the world and you’ve convinced more people than even microsoft to migrate their personal and business data away from their relatively secure and relatively private personal computers and company servers onto your public, ephemeral servers where you make their data to every government in the world you do business with and all the hackers in China, and even in those circumstances where you do actually provide some measure of security, your services have helped eliminate any residual rational discomfort people might have had about giving Big Brother direct editorial review of every communication they have, every document they create, every question they think about. More than any other company, if only by dint of your scale, you have made an Orwellian informational panopticon reality.
But who can stay mad when you’re so damn cute. Barrel roll :-)
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