Notices by cynicalsecurity :cm_2: (cynicalsecurity@bsd.network)

One of the key discussion points in the HBO series “Chernobyl” is how secrecy about the accident, fallout, etc. had to be maintained by the Soviet State.

I would like to share the experience of a teen living in Northern Italy when this happened.

The first cloud arrived over Northern Italy just in time to catch heavy rainfall, indeed, the Ticino region of Switzerland, geographically beyond the barrier of the Alps and adjacent to Northern Italy was badly…

Update: Ubuntu 18.04 LTS under #OpenBSD VMM “how to”… :flan_hacker:

So, everything you read on the ‘net is, fundamentally, rubbish :flan_laugh:

Just grab the “mini.iso” image, create a dastardly disk and then

vmctl start banana -d mini.iso -d LeDisk.img -n transit -n nottransit -c

Then, once booted, select “command line install”, TAB, edit to change vga=off and, at the end, console=ttyS0,115200u8.

Install in peace. :flan_set_fire:

I have taken a conscious decision to turn off notifications for boosts & favourites: the birdsite has programmed us to write content and then see how popular it is but we should not be writing content to be loved, at least i don't. I am here to have interesting discussions, to learn from others and to share what I believe is interesting or might be of interest.

"The end of Ego-boosting" :flan_think:

The Declaration of War against Cryptography (aka "The 2nd War against Cryptography") has been issued by the "Five Eyes":

https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/about/national-security/five-country-ministerial-2018/access-evidence-encryption

Some choice extracts as an image for posterity attached to this toot and the close:

"Should governments continue to encounter impediments to lawful access to information necessary to aid the protection of the citizens of our countries, we may pursue technological, enforcement, legislative or other measures to achieve lawful access solutions."

I am amazed at the amount of centralisation on "other people's machines" which the free/open-source movement blindly supports.

Just one of them going out of business or going Evil and so much would be lost.

How many projects rely on Google in some way? How many on Github? How many on Microsoft?

At times I wonder what exactly HTML-enabled e-mail has improved:

* phishing, definitely,
* illegible e-mail because fonts & stuff never look the same at the other end,
* bandwidth wastage,
* forcing people to "load remote content".

Once I was in an argument where HTML e-mail was meant to help those visually impaired but surely a text reader has a much better chance of getting it right with plain text?

@mulander @lattera @mwlucas sadly not everyone can afford to use mobile phones only to answer calls.

For those interested in computing history there has been a slow movement towards "liberating" old Byte columns which sat behind a paywall for no good reason.

The latest freed work is the BeView column by Scot Hacker which is now archived in its totality here:

http://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/

Note that BeOS "lives on" as Haiku (http://haiku-os.org/) and its most amazing feature at the time was the multitasking "smoothness" allowing multiple video streams to play at the same time.

This instance needs a special "embargoed" tag which goes beyond the "content warning" and locks the content until the end of the embargo.

Let's be the first with "responsible tooting".

To ensure that things happen how we want them we run three computers with different hardware and software developed by independent companies to the same specifications. Then we test them to these specs. Then we run them comparing each other’s output and taking majority decisions should there be a dissenting opinion.

This is the model I sought with the Chimaera Processor: you have different cores using different architectures, if your syscall() output differs then you have a problem.

I am going to share a thought here which is inappropriate for the birdsite simply because it would be RT’d endlessly without any understanding of its meaning.

What struck me in a particularly harsh way yesterday at Real World Crypto is the “fashionable research” syndrome.

Allow me to elaborate: the papers presented all had “side-channel” in them. Side-channel is the fashionable security of the ‘10s.

Indeed, very exciting, but now that is literally all that is being looked into!