fishagain
After about a year off, I've returned to using OpenBSD. The primary reason for previously departing was due to lack of WPA2 support, which was fairly inconvenient given how much time I spend on the road. If I'd had the time, I happily would have helped port it myself, but that hasn't really been the case, of late.
Doubtless there will be new hurdles, putting the os on a current-gen hardware...but with some luck, I'll be able to stick with it at least until another new protocol becomes ubiquitous...
comes with broken bits
...assuming anyone even noticed the downtime.
Was a little surprised to have a terminal hardware failure before software. Never even quite filled that hard drive to capacity :(
So some bits of content may be missing (like three entire sites of photos), but got most of the domains back online, and will be re-igniting the rest as quickly as I can figure out how...
for the freshman cs-majors
This should be required reading for anyone entering a computer science program. Certainly wish I'd seen it about a decade ago, rather than finding it on /.
responsible law-making
Last night, my mother started a conversation with me about ``responsible disclosure''. This was somewhat surprising, as she's not a security researcher, and it doesn't seem to be a topic exposed to the public at large by mass media. NPR aired a
piece last night about the MIT students being sued by the MBTA for attempting to publish their research on the vulnerabilities found in their smart-card system (by pure chance, I was actually at ground-zero when they found out, and got to see them sprinting down a hallway...).
In discussing this with my mom, I was seriously disturbed to hear her repeating to me an argument made in the NPR broadcast, to the effect of ``they broke an unwritten law''.
The very idea of a law being ``unwritten'' is unfathomable to me. This is not a case of national security - the flaws generally represent a loss of income/reputation for the MBTA. But the fundamental issue is that a judge somehow decided that talking in a public forum is the same thing as breaking in to a system. As a member of full-disclosure (
charter), I'm obviously a bit biased here. My mom is generally among the more skeptical of people out there (I'm fairly sure I inherited my skepticism from her). If the general public's first introduction to vuln. disclosure leads them to believe that rfp's
guide was somehow a law that was ratified by Congress, there are going to be serious problems...
EFF takes on the case.EFF Coder's Rights project.
new theory
Only computers touched in some way by humans are fallible.
(and a site note - currently reading ``The Black Swan''. expect more of this nature)
