Schmidt said: I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines—including Google—do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example…
Created May 21, 2005. Last updated January 10, 2014. Thanks to Aryeh Leib Taurog for the hover code.
There are several ways two people can divide a piece of cake in half. One way is to find someone impartial to do it for them. This works, but it requires another person. Another way is for one person to divide the piece, and the other person to complain (to the police, a judge, or his parents) if he doesn’t think it’s…
This morning Time.com published the final result for their annual TIME 100 Poll. Time reports that the new owner of the title ‘Worlds’s most influential person, is moot’. What T…
I screwed up. Big time. Not just with Adblock Plus users but with the Mozilla community at large.
Encrypting data: Use AES in CTR (Counter) mode, and append an HMAC . AES is about as standard as you can get, and has done a good job of resisting cryptologic attacks over the past decade. Using CTR mode avoids the weakness of ECB mode, the complex (and bug-prone) process of padding and unpadding of partial blocks (or…
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Last week, revelation of yet another NSA surveillance effort against the American people has rekindled the privacy debate. Those in favor of these programs have trotted out the same rhetorical question we hear every time privacy advocates oppose ID checks, video cameras, massive databases, data mining, and other…
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From time to time it’s good to take a break from all the ultra-low-level stuff, like e.g. chipset or TXT hacking, and do something simple, y...
Sometimes mediocre encryption is better than strong encryption, and sometimes no encryption is better still. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Iraqi, and possibly also Afghan, militants are using commercial software to eavesdrop on U.S. Predators, other unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, and even piloted…
At Mozilla , we regularly get anguished emails from people who have paid to download Firefox, and have then discovered a) that it's actually free, and b) that it's very hard to get the company they paid to stop charging their credit card. For those who have never had the misfortune to visit one of these trap sites, I…
This is an excellent lesson in the security problems inherent in trusting proprietary software: After two years of attempting to get the computer based source code for the Alcotest 7110 MKIII-C, defense counsel in State v. Chun were successful in obtaining the code, and had it analyzed by Base One Technologies, Inc…
At one site where I provide technical assistance, access to the network is all done via ssh over the Internet. However, one can't get access to the machines directly; one must first make an ssh connection to a gateway box I'll call martha. martha doesn't allow one to use regular passwords or keys, though. We're all…
Google’s GMail blog has some “handy” advice on how pick a good password to project your email account. Don’t use dictionary words, use mixed case,…
I bet 10 years ago none of us thought that 140 characters would change the landscape of Social Media quite so much. However, with close to 289,000,000 active users sending around 6,000 tweets every second Twitter has proven its critics wrong. Obviously, having gotten over …
The `ldd` utility is more vulnerable than you think. It's frequently used by programmers and system administrators to determine the dynamic library dependencies of executables. Sounds pretty innocent, right? Wrong! In this article I am going to show you how to create an executable that runs arbitrary code if it's...
I am speaking today at BSDCan'09 about my work on the scrypt key derivation function. In the context of hardware brute-force attacks, scrypt is thousands of times more secure than existing "best practice" solutions such as bcrypt and PBKDF2; in fact, under reasonable assumptions it is provably as strong as possible…
