No Circus
Sunday, July 20th, 2008I am tempted to channel the spirit of Juvenal and state that, what with all the slack we gave them, the least our leaders could have done was put on a circus or two. Instead, we get a shadow play about bogeymen being chased by armed men with more enthusiasm than training.
Trust Works All Ways
Monday, May 19th, 2008Over the weekend, I’ve been thinking about last week’s disclosure concerning Debian’s OpenSSL package, which in effect stated that all keys and certificates generated by this compromised code have been trivially crackable since late 2006.
There’s a pretty good subjective analysis of the nature of the error on Ben Laurie’s blog (thanks, Rich), and of course [...]
Stop Bad Errors
Thursday, May 8th, 2008I recently upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04, which comes with the most recent beta of Firefox 3.0. The new version of Firefox has a number of interesting features, not the least of which is a set of measures to reduce drive-by infection of PCs.
If they wander from the beaten path, people now see a big red [...]
Gooooolag
Monday, March 17th, 2008UPDATE: How wrong could I be about the severity of this threat? Very wrong, apparently. I haven’t confirmed it yet, but it’s hard to imagine how this week’s mass server hack could have happened without tools like the one described below. I’ll write more about this in this week’s column….
Heh, cute:
Cult of the Dead [...]
#@)(!*^ing Encryption
Friday, February 29th, 2008A few words about the title: The first seven letters are written using a very simple code, or cypher. Each of the letters in the original word is replaced by the non-alphabetical character to which it is closest on a US keyboard. The process of hiding a message by substituting other letters, numbers or symbols [...]
Idea: Personal Navajo
Friday, February 29th, 2008Instead of exposing the painful ritual of public/private key exchange, software developers should instead be using metaphors of human trust and service.
A ‘translator’ service, for example. The user ‘invents’ an imaginary language, then decides who among her friends is allowed to speak it with her. She then instructs her ‘translator’ (e.g. her own personal Navajo) [...]
The Coconut Wireless
Friday, February 8th, 2008Last week’s column introduced a broad but important topic about current trends in technology. Over the next few weeks, we’ll take some time to look in more detail about the issues of privacy and access to information. What are the current trends? How are they going to affect us here in Vanuatu? What can we [...]
Ghost in the Machine
Tuesday, November 20th, 2007In the most recent RISKS mailing list digest, Peter Neuman includes a brief article by Adi Shamir describing a method of exploiting minor faults in math logic to break encryption keys in a particular class of processor.
Titled Microprocessor Bugs Can Be Security Disasters, the article makes an interesting argument. In fairly concise terms, Shamir outlines [...]
Black Smoke and Storm Clouds
Friday, September 21st, 2007Every weekday morning, in every street in Port Vila, we see a steady stream of people walking into town. On the road beside them, innumerable buses and cars drive by, belching black smoke into their faces. Just as regularly, we see complaints in the local media about this smoke. But nothing ever gets done about [...]