Notices by Kyle Rankin (kylerankin@mastodon.social)

@kylerankin So ultimately human teachers become a luxury good and cash-strapped school boards save money by hiring fewer teachers and buying heavily-subsidized tech to replace them.

This post-mortem of today's Matrix prod compromise is great for its transparency and cautious response. Also a clear demonstration why dev infrastructure (Jenkins or otherwise) should not be allowed to access prod. #keepemseparated #infosec #devops https://matrix.org/blog/2019/04/11/security-incident/index.html

It says something about the proprietary mess that is modern messaging apps that a single tech company has 3 incompatible messaging networks and making them compatible with each other is newsworthy. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/technology/facebook-instagram-whatsapp-messenger.html

My Mom got a new phone 6 months ago and only shared her new # with me and 3 others. Months later she bought a new laptop and registered Microsoft Word (which apparently requires her phone # now?). A day or two later she started getting a stream of telemarketing calls. #privacy

I'm struck by how similar the Russian influence ops were to traditional Internet direct marketing campaigns. Make organic ad copy masked as legit content (guides, etc), buy targeted GOOG/FB/etc ads pointing to content. Main diff is payload: manipulating your vote, not your purse.

@kylerankin Sadly, current e2e msg apps, including Signal, built a world *worse* than CAs in this respect. If WhatsApp backdoors e2e for ad data or for govts (why not both?), to revoke trust you must convince all your friends to revoke trust, or else fall back to insecure SMS.

@kylerankin Applied to CAs, this means if a CA violates your trust, you should be able to revoke your trust in them but still be able to browse the web securely. And if you don't trust, say, Verisign's CA, you can anchor your trust in another vendor and web browsing is secure.

The thing I am most excited about with the Librem Key is its integration with Heads to make detecting tampering easy. It's something that doesn't exist anywhere else and in this deep dive post I explain the technical details. #infosec https://puri.sm/posts/the-librem-key-makes-tamper-detection-easy/

Today I realized I have been using Linux as my default personal desktop OS for 20 years. Everybody jokes about the year of Linux on the Desktop but for me that year was 1998. Here are more words that date me: Red Hat 5.1, floppy install disks, fvwm95.