Notices by Alexander Bochmann (galaxis@mastodon.infra.de)

How can it possibly still be "private mode" when I'm logged in to your service?

Woah, #PaloAlto: Silently fixed a pre-authentication remote code execution vulnerability in their VPN portal a year ago, and did not notify their customer. Anyone who didn't update their PanOS during the past year is still vulnerable (CVE-2019-1579).

http://blog.orange.tw/2019/07/attacking-ssl-vpn-part-1-preauth-rce-on-palo-alto.html

#infosec

*sigh* This should have been ready like four years ago...

The forum post this photo is from has been updated with a walk through the steps for a manual assembly of the various #Pyra handheld components: https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/threads/some-personal-stuff-and-prototypes-building.83584/

So, yeah. While I did never move up the infosec ladder up far enough to have to deal with law enforcement on a regular basis, I did once, in the early 2000s, hold a presentation on WiFi wardriving at an education institution of the regional police force.

It's also absolutely clear that, as an infosec professional, you cannot have reservations on getting into contact with law enforcement, as far as your job is concerned. Working in infosec is not a vigilante operation, despite unusual freedoms.

WTF is this spam trying to do now? Got several of those to various addresses, and no, there really isn't anything more in that mail.

Hey @pinafore - is there a way to bind a Pinafore install to a single Mastodon instance - something like "add instance" is pre-filled, and not editable? Or provide a list of permitted instances as a selection?

*snicker* from poking through old comp.mail.sendmail posts:

> Why is it so difficult to do this in sendmail?

Because sendmail makes the easy hard, the hard hard and the impossible hard.

Taking a break from the retrocomputing stuff...

@vertigo @clacke Hey, I bought a 2600 game in 2012 (now available for free): https://starcastle2600.blogspot.de/p/star-castle-2600-story.html

Psion ad in a german magazine, 1992

#retrocomputing

...though what I really was looking for was that cute little 486SLC mainboard I know I should have, to install that old Novell DOS on. Found these two instead (AMD 386, and a 386 board with a 486DLC) - but they are going into the bin now. Not going to repair the damage from those corroded batteries on both of them...

https://mastodon.infra.de/media/NkPaKUIbwWjSLpD-U0k https://mastodon.infra.de/media/qNzy9tGjRFWHLGHkDS8 https://mastodon.infra.de/media/QtlxbAOZuD4-ct_16dU

Vendors are running into the first UNIX epoch problems...

Checkpoint:
Connectivity between SmartDashboard / SmartDomain Manager and Security Management / Multi-Domain Management Server R77.30 and below fails on fresh installation after January 24th 2018

The Internal Certification Authority (ICA) certificate is valid for 20 years. Starting on January 2018, the internal CA certificate expiration date will exceed the maximum Unix epoch time (January 19, 2038)

https://supportcenter.checkpoint.com/supportcenter/portal?eventSubmit_doGoviewsolutiondetails=&solutionid=sk122612

Not much later, things had been moved to the other end of the room, whith a severely reduced PC zoo - thanks to OS/2, which made it possible to easily run several lines of the FidoNet hub on one machine (and it was still usable for other work, too).

https://mastodon.infra.de/media/XlWAUjgxAj4luzZGYAI

Heh. Found this picture of the BBS operations desk in one of the "old files" folders, maybe 1996?

Looking at that I realized that I still have one of those monitors on my retrocomputing desk, and at least two others (including the Atari SM124) stored somewhere - and the minitower PC case in the center is in active use for my home server (though with none of the original components remaining)...

I did trash those stacks of c't magazines at some point, though 😉

https://mastodon.infra.de/media/-KFVxeRrCYVsgmQGzcg

Can't find an english language news source for this, but it seems that #Microsoft Defender is flagging files that contain short strings (like "Squeamish Ossifrage" or "malicious_x = %p") from the #Spectre PoC as malware: https://m.heise.de/security/meldung/Microsoft-stuft-das-PoC-Programm-zu-Spectre-als-boesartig-ein-3959995.html

This is obviously useless for actual threat detection, so are they trying to find people who are playing with the PoC code?

#infosec

Intel's #spectre microcode update causes random reboots on "Broadwell and Haswell CPUs for both client and data center".

https://newsroom.intel.com/news/intel-security-issue-update-addressing-reboot-issues/

@vertigo @djsundog Going off-topic, but Amiga + FPGA has lead me right down the rabbit hole and reminded me I narrowly avoided buying a MiST FPGA board several times now (just as a user of existing cores for retrocomputing stuff). And now I know about the MiSTer board (built around a Terasic DE10-nano instead of custom design, but no connectors for retro equipment like Atari Joysticks and MIDI).

https://github.com/mist-devel/mist-board/wiki
https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Main_MiSTer/wiki

@djsundog @craigmaloney @ajroach42 The correct way was of course to buy the TI99 expansion box. (Or later, a Geneve.)

Boy, were those unattainable back in the day.

https://mastodon.infra.de/media/ouORyRvAt0opg658Vp4

@szbalint @kaniini Got any easily quotable sources for that claim? Could use that for my next Bitcoin discussion...