Posts Tagged ‘technology’
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/01/05
A small quote from the very interesting TURKTRUST Incident Raises Renewed Questions About CA System | threatpost article:
“Subordinate certificates have long been identified as a point of weakness in the CA system. They are typically granted unconstrained power to issue certificates for any domain name. Thus, a leak of one subordinate certificate is seen as equivalent to a leak of authority equivalent to all CAs combined. Worse, subordinate certificates need not be explicitly trusted by the software that authenticates encrypted SSL connections typically your web browser. They inherit their trust from the explicitly trusted CAs that have been vetted by your browser vendor,” Steve Schultze, associate director of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University, wrote in an analysis of the TURKTRUST incident.
A CA (Certificate Authority) issues certificates, most of which are used for domain validation by web-browsers, email and applications. This allows you to make sure when you communicate with your bank (through a web browser or banking app on your phone) to verify the server of the bank is in fact the server of your bank. Or your email program really talks to the server of your email provider and not some intermediate that spoofs your mails.
If fraudulent certificates get issued for certain domains (sometimes specific like http://www.google.com, sometimes generic like *.yahoo.com, or *.*.com), then you cannot trust those domains any more, nor your communication with them. So communication with your bank could be intercepted and changed, thereby loosing money.
That’s exactly what happened in 2011 and late 2012:
The heart of the problem is twofold:
- if a CA somehow (by mistake, hacking or whatever) issues a rogue certificate, it takes a relatively long time to find out it is rogue. In the mean time, everyone trust the rogue certificate, and a lot of damage can be done.
- it takes a relatively long time for people to patch their systems making the window of opportunity even bigger (heck, I regularly see systems that have not been patched for months or years).
While a IETF proposal to log all intermediate and end-entity certificates tries to fix 1., make sure you fix 2. by keeping your systems patched.
–jeroen
via TURKTRUST Incident Raises Renewed Questions About CA System | threatpost.
Posted in Opinions | Tagged: browser vendor, ca certificate, ca certificates, certificate authority, domain validation, email provider, fake certificates, google, internet, software, ssl connections, technology, web browsers | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/01/04
Wow, it seems that the most popular posts have nothing to do with software development (:
Happy new year everyone!
–jeroen
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
About 55,000 tourists visit Liechtenstein every year. This blog was viewed about 260,000 times in 2012. If it were Liechtenstein, it would take about 5 years for that many people to see it. Your blog had more visits than a small country in Europe!
Click here to see the complete report.
Posted in About, Personal, Power User, SocialMedia, WordPress | Tagged: annual report, blog, blogging, excerpt, happy new year, helper monkeys, new year, software development, technology | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2012/12/30
Just noticed that in openSUSE 12.x, A plain halt will not shutdown the system properly.
On my system, it would leave the screen as shown on the right:
Only halt -p works, none of the other hints in the shutdown does not power off thread work, nor the acpi=off or acpi=oldboot settings.
The odd thing: a plain reboot still works properly.
If someone knows a better workaround: please let me know in the comments.
I hope they will fix this in a future openSUSE version; at least for 12.1 they have a “CHECKIT” marker in the documentation, but it has disappeared as of the 2.3 docs, but still fails:
5.4. systemd: System Shutdown
CHECKIT for 12.3. Is this entry still required?
To halt and poweroff the system when using systemd, issue halt -p or shutdown -h now on the command-line or use the shutdown button provided by your desktop environment.
Note: A plain halt will not shutdown the system properly.
Luckily, my openSUSE is a VM, which I can reboot from the ESXi host.
On a physical system, you will end up without any option to resurrect the system.
Later
After installing antivir, a plain halt works sort of: it says it is halted, but ESXi still thinks it is not:
After installing antivir, a plain halt appears to work, but it doesn’t.
ESXi is sure the system didn’t actually power down.
–jeroen
Posted in *nix, Linux, openSuSE, Power User, SuSE Linux | Tagged: acpi, computer, desktop environment, documentation, odd, openSUSE, reboot, shutdown button, software, SUSE, system shutdown, technology, thread work, vm | 4 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2012/12/29
WordPress.com silently restored the Please restore the tab order the way it worked 2 weeks ago problem.
I wished they’d send update notifications on those fixes (it seems the underlying ticket 21340 was fixed about 2 months ago in changeset 22250 when I was on a long holiday), so I’m glad to announce it works again.
Even better: you don’t need the tab key to go from “Edit” next to “Publish immediately” into the Month field:
When you press “Edit” the focus automagically shifts to the Month field.
Thanks!
–jeroen
Posted in SocialMedia, WordPress | Tagged: computer, focus, notifications, software, technology, wordpress | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2012/12/29
Just got my free Flickr holiday gift: 3 months of Pro membership.
If you have a free Flickr account, it will give you three months of Pro to try it.
Yay!
You have now activated your Flickr Holiday Gift.
We’ve extended your Flickr Pro subscription for an additional 3 months at no charge.
Your Pro Account expires on 16th December, 2013
–jeroen
Posted in About, Flickr, Personal, Power User, SocialMedia | Tagged: flickr, gadgets, technology | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2012/12/18
As of December 3rd, 2012, a WordPress.com blog stat page (https://wordpress.com/#!/my-stats/) now shows unique visitors in addition to total views.
The hint for each bar even does the views per visitor math (seems to average around 1.25 views per visitor on this blog, will update this when a longer period has passed).
The Your Unique Visitors from the Blog at WordPress.com explains some more details.
–jeroen
Posted in Power User, SocialMedia, WordPress | Tagged: blogging, google, stat, technology, unique visitors, wordpress | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2012/10/22
LPG is Liquefied Petroleum Gas. CNG is Compressed Natural Gas. Both are good fuels for cars. I favour LPG, for two reasons. First, it often can be obtained as a rest-product of cracking crude oil, second it has a much higher energy density than CNG.
For each country, you should
- download the POI files (preferably in the OV2 format)
- download the icon bitmap file
- make sure the name portion of the files are the same
- copy those files to your device using the something like the MyPOI manager or the instructions at TomTom POI updates in TomTom forum – GPS POI.
Germany, Austria & Switzerland
Note: In Switzerland, there are relatively few LPG stations, but many CNG stations.
Download section for getting LPG and CNG stations in Germany, Switzerland and Austria: LPG & CNG Tankstellen (download).
For TomTom devices, just download the LPG or CNG files for POI and Icon:
Italy and other countries
Start your downloads at LPG Autogas in Italy – Petrol GPS POI data directory for TomTom, Garmin, Navman, SmartPhones and other GPS devices. – GPS POI Data.
Then press the Download POI File button to download the OV2 and BMP file.
–jeroen
Posted in Power User, Windows | Tagged: autogas, bmp file, cng stations, compressed natural gas, energy density, forum gps, gadgets, germany austria, germany switzerland, gps devices, liquefied petroleum gas, technology, transportation | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2012/10/18
It seems quite a few people cannot access their GMail, but are able to access Plus, Contacts, Calendar, etc.
Only when accessing GMail, they get this:
| We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes.If the issue persists, please visit the Gmail Help Center »Try Again Sign Out |
It happened to me about 90 minutes ago.
After doing the obvious (making sure I have a fresh browser without plugins, logged off the Google account, cleared cookies, restarted the browser, have Google send me a new 2 factor login code to my phone), I followed the GMail Help Center link, then filed a ticket at the please let us know link.
Hopefully this gets resolved soon…
–jeroen
Posted in GMail, Google, Power User | Tagged: error 500, gmail account, google, inconvenience, software, technology | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2012/10/06
While fooling around with Microsoft Surface, you are astonished with the number of fingers it supports: 10 is no problem on the Samsung SUR40 which can also do full HD resolution (more specs here).
Not so with the standard Windows 7 touch support: that has only 2.
As I want to increase that to better mimic the development environment to the actual environment a few notes:
–jeroen
Posted in .NET, Development, Microsoft Surface, Microsoft Surface on Windows 7, Software Development, Windows 7, Windows 8 | Tagged: 3m, computing hardware, development environment, fingers, gadgets, hd, microsoft, microsoft surface, pc hardware, real world, samsung, stack overflow, technology | 1 Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 
