Who said the field of security cannot have humour! An Android app to
control the commode in Japan (you know the
land of fully programmable toilets, I kid you not) has announced a
vulnerability because the bluetooth pairing code is hardcoded.
Curious about several peculiar Apple related 404 errors for images in my web
server logs, I decided to find what is going on, and became knowledgeable about
yet another nugget that I really didn’t want to know. (sigh)
photo by zebedee
Just now read a rather disturbing article from Sophos security. The article describes the interpretation of the law by NSA and some of the internal policies that they use in surveillance.
They also reveal that courts don’t always determine who’s targeted for surveillance because that discretion is practiced by the NSA’s own analysts, with only a percentage of decisions being reviewed by regular internal audits.
To make those decisions, NSA analysts use information including IP addresses, potential targets’ statements, and public information and data collected by other agencies.
A scene from the ‘Touch of Evil’ (1958). Flickr image by Luisru León
In this day and age of the surveillance state, a quotation worth remembering from the legendary Orson Welles over 50 years back.
A policeman's job is only easy in a police state. -- Charlton Heston as Mike Vargas in the movie "Touch of Evil"(1958), Orson Welles (screenwriter and director) Curiously, a similar statement was made over a decade back, in fact a couple of years before 9/11, before the world changed, or actually before the United States’ war on terror changed the world.
High Scalability had an interesting link today about a project that combines Raspberry
PI, btsync and owncloud to create essentially a personal Dropbox
replacement with none of the costs or the storage limitation. Also very importantly, keeping up with
the hot topic nowadays, the peace of mind from knowing that you are not making it easy for
intelligence agencies to go through your most important and personal data.
’tabata-ramen’ by Danny
Another “hey there is a term for it” moment today!
Years ago when I was running a business of my own, my intention was never to be wildly successful. All I wanted to do was to make my ends meet, learn a lot of stuff, do a lot of work on stuff that really interested me, and work in a way that made sense. After giving this some time, and when I am somewhat self-sustaining, the next stage was to organically scale up with a set of productized services (as an Opensource focused company normally does) which will fund the next stage which was to come out with actual products which really rakes in the moolah.
In a sensational release yesterday, Guardian has revealed scary
details of how Microsoft has been collaborating with NSA to give access to its
customer data for PRISM purposes. The extent of privacy breach is shocking:
There is no doubt that Wordpress is a wonderful blogging system. But being a dynamically generated website, all the nightmares of scripting languages kick in. Patches come regularly to Wordpress and until you login and update, it keeps nagging you inside and ruins your happiness.
There is an alternative - hosting on wordpress.com directly. But not only does it cost unnecessary money (I already have a shared hosting account), it is also severely limited by what you can run on it - no plugins or themes or custom javascript other than what is provided.
For a while I have been puzzled why Nautilus doesn’t allow me to simply unmount an USB pen drive from the context menu. The only options I could see for USB pen drives was - eject and safely remove drive, which was puzzling on its own as them meant the same to me.
Selecting “eject” or “safely remove” drive does the same thing for USB drives - it unmounts the drive and powers it down.
One of the first things that irked me after my Precise installation was how DNS suddenly seemed slow. I normally use dnscache for local DNS caching and while setting it up this time, I noticed that oddly, 127.0.0.1 was already setup as my name server. Netstat told me that this was handled by DNSMasq for some reason. No worries, I thought, and I setup dnscache on 127.0.0.2 instead. I added the IP to the prepend nameserver option in /etc/dhcp/dhclient.
