August 2008
9 posts
Perspectives, an SSL certificate checking Firefox... →
iPhone SSH clients reviewed →
And here’s another opinion. At least these all have a Ctrl key, unlike the original iPhone terminal.
Trusting the Untrustable Internet
We may well look back on 2008—coincidentally my 10th year “in the business”—as the year when we finally realized, in black and white, that the internet cannot be trusted.
Sysadmins have known this for a long time; it’s the reason why no one ever uses telnet for remote shell access, and why OpenSSH is so paranoid about not letting you connect to a server whose key...
Fallout from Debian OpenSSL fiasco gets worse...
While researching SSL for Pro PHP Security, I discovered that Certificate Revocation Lists are generally ignored by browsers and http-fetching libraries. Perhaps I was too cynical at the time (this was 2004, in the middle of MSIE’s browser stagnation plan), but I chalked it up to business as usual: CRLs just aren’t a visible part of security infrastructure, therefore developers...
EEE Box
The new EEE Box probably isn’t cheap enough (at $349) to get excited about, but it’s nice to see that ASUS is thinking beyond the laptop. If Linux is supported, and the engineering is decent, it could be a lovely home/office server, media center, and wireless access point.
No solid-state drive option yet, though, so don’t install it in your car.
“Eventually, a guessed ID will match and the spoofed packet will get accepted,...”
– From I)ruid and hdm’s DNS cache poisoning code, the biggest monkey-wrench to be thrown into the workings of the internet in over 10 years.
The Sheer Utility of SMS
I spent the last two weeks on a cruise from Moscow to St. Petersburg. It was fantastic, but there was no internet on the boat, which meant we were pretty isolated. Roaming charges in Russia are $4.99/minute, and while there were internet cafes in most of our ports-of-call, I can’t even begin to tell you how difficult it would be for me to trust any of them with my email password.
But SMS...