Browsing the web for a bit, noticed the laptop fan come on. This is quite unusual on my new X1 Carbon, but maybe there’s some eyeball counting javascript gone wild? Close the tab, fans stay on. More unusual.

Run top. Mysteriously, the system is busy but all the processes seem idle. Watch it a bit more, pound the spacebar, and finally notice the occasional login_passwd flickering among the top processes. There’s probably a more scientific means to discover what’s up, but this worked well enough. I’m not logging in, so who is? Check /var/log/authlog.

Apr  5 08:08:10 carbolite sshd[15309]: Failed password for root from 43.255.190.148 port 50211 ssh2
Apr  5 08:08:10 carbolite sshd[15309]: Failed password for root from 43.255.190.148 port 50211 ssh2
Apr  5 08:08:10 carbolite sshd[30446]: Failed password for root from 43.255.190.154 port 49092 ssh2
Apr  5 08:08:11 carbolite sshd[15309]: Failed password for root from 43.255.190.148 port 50211 ssh2
Apr  5 08:08:11 carbolite sshd[30446]: Failed password for root from 43.255.190.154 port 49092 ssh2
Apr  5 08:08:11 carbolite sshd[30446]: Failed password for root from 43.255.190.154 port 49092 ssh2

Ah, yes, of course. That would make the fans go.

root:$2b$12$criWVll1Nov9AXQpDU2GyO/tczU87cNGYcWpcUyQx/zimHWA7HgjC:0:0:daemon:0:0:Charlie &:/root:/bin/ksh

At close to half a second per guess, 3 guesses per second will keep things busy.

carbolite:/var/log> grep "root from 43.255" authlog | wc  
    2056   28784  205001

And that will keep things warm.

Usually my laptop is safe and sound inside my network and not prone to remote thermal control, but it happened to be connected to a public net today. How else would anyone hunt for root’s Easter Eggs?

The OpenBSD 5.7 release is still a month away, but the changes have been done for some time. The release page lists lots of changes, though certainly not all, and sometimes it’s hard to tell the big changes from the small changes. Annoying perhaps, but rewarding to someone who reads through the entire list looking for hidden gems. A few notes about changes I found personally interesting.

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Security may be a process, not a product, but security patches are definitely a product. Some reflections on a few recent experiences making security sausage, er, patches.

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The primary product of the OpenBSD project is the OpenBSD operating system, but sometimes other artifacts are produced as byproducts. Avant-garde web site design, funny email threads. Also, reusable code that can be beneficial to other developers, outside the strict confines of OpenBSD.

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Some early followup from efforts to improve browser security with more details about possible refinements to W^X.

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WTF is this? No, this is not a git mirror. Not here, not there, not anywhere.

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What’s the difference between the following length and pointer pairs?

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I’m guessing only a few wikipedia editors view articles about smartphones using a smartphone.

At least now I know the iPhone 6 has a slate form factor.

Recently was reminded of an old string handling function I used for programming interviews.

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The OpenBSD Firefox package includes the en-GB dictionary. This results in lots of red squiggly lines. There are additional en language packs localized for AU, CA, GB, and ZA, but no US package. There is also a firefox-i18n-en-US package but it doesn’t do anything except print a message that you can change the useragent locale from its default of... en-US.

If you want an Americanized spelling dictionary, you’re out of luck. Debian to the rescue! Start with the hunspell source package page and download the big orig.tar.gz file. Extract it and copy the two en_US files to /usr/local/share/mozilla-dicts/. Restart Firefox and right click in a text area to change language.

Save a step! This is apparently just a bug in Firefox because it should also be looking in /usr/local/lib/firefox-*/dictionaries which includes US dictionary files. These files are a little different (smaller), but they too could simply be copied or symlinked into the above location.