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last updated at 2010-02-04 23:46

welcome to #rantsville, Massachusetts. you are guilty until proven innocent. please take a number.

3D glasses explained
posted by seti at 2010-02-04 23:46

From the Economist: a big Fuck You to Bill Kristol
posted by seti at 2010-02-04 20:29

seti: QFT: "Being gay doesn't make one less able to perform as a soldier, unless we assume that everyone around them is disruptively homophobic. Luckily, though, Mr Kristol is not representative of the average military man."

Debunking the myth of the New Atheists
posted by seti at 2010-02-04 16:54

http://duplicity.nongnu.org/features.html
posted by thelink at 2010-02-04 14:51

thelink: not sure how much benefit the encryption is ... "Right now the archive format adds predictable byte sequences per block in order to recover from errors." for example
thelink: also "Sparse file support? How important is this?"
thelink: but tar is better than zip, because when you corrupt a (encrypted) zip by flipping just a few bits, there's not much chance of recovery ... with (compressed) tar and the right crypto you should be able to get something back
thelink: i imagine
thelink: but also, cpio is better than tar or was anyway
thelink: rsync is very slow for local backups, because it syncs files one-at-a-time, not benefitting from buffering ... cpio with some scripting to decide which files to backup is better in that case
thelink: cpio or tar .. this duplicity uses tar as well as rsync diffs, so should be pretty good in that respect
thelink: the question is always, do you want to be able to get your data back, or not? if you do, why are you encrypting it? if not, why are you backing it up? pick one.
thelink: if you want the data to be safe, why are you housing it somewhere where you feel you need to conceal it's content?

The controversy of the chinese CA is so easily defused that it is transparently irrelevent, viz:
posted by thelink at 2010-02-04 09:12

thelink: "It would be nice if at a minimum Mozilla stored certificates presented in an easy to grasp form even if duplicates of a name, so that folks could dig around if needed. Perhaps that is already done."
thelink: ie, if the browser keeps old 'superseded' certs, then the theoretical MITM attacks can easily be detected, and this countermeasure is TRIVIAL so the proposed attack can actually be considered unlikely, since a government isn't going to base a national surveillance program around an attack that can TRIVIALLY be defused.
thelink: the entire discussion is therefore CRAP. the CA should be allowed or disallowed on the exact same usual principles that mozilla ALLOWED it on and reviewed on the exact same principles as usual also.
thelink: and the countermeasure proposed should be implemented, if it has not already.
thelink: and of course a measure to store certs should be controlled by the user just the way the storage of cookies should be, and should be disabled by default since govts are MORE LIKELY to (A) persecute people for the sites they've visited, than to (B) hijack their connections, A being trivial compared with B
thelink: yes, cookies and cache should be emptied on exit by default
thelink: and history and all that shit. and you would rather spend your time arguing about whether to allow a CA body or not because they are in a particular country. get a perspective.
thelink: another trivial countermeasure: "Or please modify the UI to make the action of remove CNNIC CA root certificate easier for user." which should obviously be implemented

http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.security.policy/msg/ed8fd1121dc56db3
posted by thelink at 2010-02-04 08:45

thelink: "As you well know, Firefox also has a checkbox to disable updates. This checkbox is ignored, and when Mozilla pushes out updates it always interrupts the flow of what's being done. "I told you never to update, you stupid piece of $#!+!" is often heard around here, and I'm never the one who says it. As you may or may not know, this qualifies as 'unauthorized code execution' on any machine that I run."
thelink: <secret mozilla> yeah, but if it didn't check for updates, our overlords couldn't by arsefondling our servers, use us to spy on everyone
thelink: WTF happened to mozilla? did every cuntorprick from microsoft start to work there or something?
thelink: these kind of things are EXACTLY why sysadmins ever used to recommend, and take the time and effort to deploy themselves, Firefox (TM)
thelink: Firefox, you are now brnaded with the corporation fuckoff Trademark symbol, which means to all sensible programmers, get right the fuck away from me you shithole spyware crapvendor
thelink: branded
thelink: this branding is subject to review In My Own Good Sweet Time
    
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