The Washington Post seems to have kicked a crypto hornets nest recently, with their suggestion that Apple (and other phone manufacturers, though I’ll stick with Apple as an example) should include a golden escrow key to allow law enforcement to decrypt suspects’ phones. This provoked the expected reaction from everybody who gets it that escrow is a terrible idea. Fair enough. But what’s the least worst escrow system we can devise?
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Lots of great articles in the October 13, 2014 New Yorker, all connected by the common theme of knowledge is power. Who knows what and when gives one a considerable edge. Nothing surprising, but reading about it from several perspectives reveals just how true the old saying is.
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Reflections on a few security vulnerabilities; some recent, some less so.
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For the past few years, I’d been opting out of the new airport scanners. Initially I had several reasons for this decision, but over time things changed, and after some reflection I realized the most compelling rationale I now had each time I opted out was “I opted out last time.”
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“Startup culture starting to resemble a pyramid that has folded in on itself, exploring funding topologies Ponzi never dreamed of” - Pinboard
Funding topology is definitely a subject worthy of further research.
Copying another idea from Old New Thing and porting to unix. This time it’s Piping to notepad. Instead of starting a new notepad process, let’s feed stdin to any existing window.
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At the g2k14 hackathon in July, I thought about a new interface for SSL connections. One of the most frequent complaints from OpenSSL users was that it was too much work to do anything, and one of the most frequent complaints from advanced users was that it was too much work to do anything correctly. Notably, failure to check the hostname in the cert against the hostname of the network connection is an unfortunately common mistake. And so was born the ressl (reimagined SSL) interface. Joel Sing (jsing) ended up implementing it first, putting the libressl in LibreSSL.
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OpenBSD has lots of version numbers, each incremented at their own pace and for their own reasons. Here’s a rundown.
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They’re potato chips. Why would they have gluten? “Gluten free” is the new “won’t turn pink in the can”.
Matthew Green asked for a password generator that’s easy to enter on a phone.
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