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Blogging's been light recently due to a presentation I gave to
fellow geeks on recently-discovered flaws in Secure Sockets
Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocols and
their implementations. These are the protocols on which a lot
of network security depends, so flaws tend to be a pretty big deal.
If you'd like to get the gist, a bunch of links I used in preparation are here. I especially liked this illustration of how much easier things were, security-wise, back in the olden days:
Click for the full-size version. Very funny.
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In addition, the latest version of my Linux distribution-of-choice,
Fedora 12, was released earlier
this week. It's now running on my work desktop machine;
very little pain involved, other than that I voluntarily inflicted
upon myself:
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A fresh install, rather than an upgrade. My idea was that I could
re-customize the system with only the features I wanted, possibly
shedding some of the cruft that builds up on a system after months
of experimentation and use.
That's fine, but re-installing the "wanted" features on top of the clean install took a little time.
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Fedora 12 installs "Security-Enhanced Linux" (SELinux)
by default. It sounds like such a swell idea! Who could be against
security?
The problem being that SELinux "enhances" security by preventing a lot of things I was used to doing (quite securely, thank you). There are workarounds, but each new SELinux error requires its own special workaround, involving interpretation of obscure messages. I was up to around 50 before I gave up.
I'm in concurrence with Jamie Zawinski:
This is the biggest, most uselessly time-wasting piece of shit since the last time they rewrote the firewall code from scratch.
That's one of the milder things he says. -
While I was whacking on stuff, I dismayed about all the
terminal windows cluttering my screen. (Yes, I'm kind of old-school: I do most
of my work in terminal windows, hopelessly devoted to the Linux
command line.) Most of these windows get created en
masse by a startup script; I want them around, but not in my
face. Is there any way to get them to be created in a minimized
state (i.e., down in the task bar)?
Yes, as it turns out. I installed the Devil's Pie utility, a very flexible beastie that will watch the windows created during your session and automatically do any number of things based on one or more of their characteristics. Very nice!
The home machine gets upgraded this weekend. The plan is to attempt a repartitioning of its hard drive with no data loss. And my wireless card was a huge pain to get working on an existing Fedora 11 base; hopefully a fresh install will go cleaner.
But if you hear howls and curses from the general direction of Rollinsford, New Hampshire over the next few days, you'll know it didn't go exactly as planned.
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A fresh install, rather than an upgrade. My idea was that I could
re-customize the system with only the features I wanted, possibly
shedding some of the cruft that builds up on a system after months
of experimentation and use.
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Which brings us to: Cracked's article on Linux.
For example, you might have heard of Ubuntu:
Ubuntu, and all of its incarnations, is touted as being Linux for everyday people. Of course, that's like saying that heroin is for people who aren't comfortable taking aspirin, but you know. Whatever.
That's the longest quote I could find in the article that wasn't filthy, so be prepared if you click over. -
Good article on Sarah Palin from Jonah
Goldberg. I thought this was particularly apt:
I'm fairly certain that if you read many of her public-policy positions but concealed her byline, many of her worst enemies would say "that sounds about right," and some of her biggest fans would say "that sounds crazy." But most people would say that her views are perfectly within the mainstream of American politics. She may be more religious than coastal elites in the lower 48, but that is something some bigots need to get over, anyway.
Nov
20
2009
URLs du Jour
2009-11-20