Kyle Rankin @kyle@librem.one

Confession time: I used to put on the Hackers soundtrack when skating to work in SF. I also put on Master of Puppets when working on centralized config management. #dork #soundtracks

It's strange that config files transitioned from key/value pairs into complex data structures at the same time that databases transitioned from complex data structures into key/value pairs. #devops

I told you I was super serial...

But the flood that remained when it barely rained is not going to drain as soon as you close your eyes. NO!
And every time I scratch my pen to pay my city tax I hope you spend it. WHERE DID YOU SPEND IT?

Cuz I'm HERE to remind YOU
of the mess you left whenever it rains
It's not fair to deprive me,
of the kids I bred cuz the flood won't drain
YOU YOU YOU OUTGHTA KNOW

In honor of those of you dealing with Houston's infrastructure:

I want you to know, that school's out for you
I hope that you have, a raft or a boat

I know a normal city can handle when it's rainy
It won't go down on you in a river
It drains it elegantly, so you can get your baby
And prove you are a very excellent mother

I just heard from my school district that because our local utility hasn't maintained their lines for years and have a policy now of cutting power if winds are high enough, that the school (and we by extension) have to prepare for county-wide outages lasting upwards of 3-5 days at a time!

My copy of the Snowden memoir, Permanent Record arrived! Can't wait to dig into this tonight!

I'm really missing Linux Journal today. This RMS/FSF news would have had us editors working together to publish a well-thought-out story...

I'm reading through many of my old (some a decade old) Linux Journal articles right now and I'm uncovering all of these really interesting and still-useful articles I had forgotten about.

Someone just referred to warrant canaries as a dead man's switch, so my brain went immediately to this. Apologies to Oingo Boingo:

I was struck by lightnin'
Walkin' down the street
I was served with warrants that I had to meet
It's a dead man's switch
Who could ask for more
Government is coming, leave canary at the door
Leave warrant canary at the door

Don't run away, it's canary
Don't be afraid of what you can't see
Don't run away, it's canary
Don't be afraid of what you can't see

Look what arrived! Excited to read this book. While today fascism and the far right is the existential threat that justifies any means to eradicate, it wasn't always this way. 18 yrs ago today it was radical (and non-radical) Islam and in the 1950s it was communism and the far left. This book documents CIA studies into mind control to counter the communist threat that resulted in torture of US citizens, death, and countless other atrocities.

Why is it that the best minds in our industry seem unable to improve security without creating products that coincidentally give their employer more control over people and their data? Vendor lock-in is preventing real innovation in infosec.

Ask yourself why all these companies are fighting each other to be your default DNS provider. Why do their "privacy" solutions always give them your data instead? It's valuable data and it's easy to control it yourself. #privacy https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/own-your-dns-data

Disappointed that Firefox is giving Cloudflare user DNS resolution data by default via DoH. I trust my ISP but if I didn't, I'd use a trusted VPN to protect *all* my traffic. DoH is just a DNS-only VPN. What's worse, if you do use a VPN for #privacy FF will still leak your DNS data to Cloudflare by default. https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/09/06/whats-next-in-making-dns-over-https-the-default/

"The researchers have named their attack NetCAT, short for Network Cache ATtack"

Seriously, netcat? I guess what they say about the two hardest problems in computer science is true... #infosec https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/weakness-in-intel-chips-lets-researchers-steal-encrypted-ssh-keystrokes/

Marshmallow technique is important. Crisp, toasted (not burnt) outside, melted inside. #camping #smorn

The insult "ten miles of bad road" is much more devastating now that I've just driven ten miles of bad road. #vanlife

Check out my new pocket computer! Ok not exactly new, it's a Tasco Pocket Arithometer from the '40s. #vintagecomputers

ElasticCo made Elasticsearch an #opencore product w/ basic security features in a proprietary plugin.

Search Guard made basic ES security features an open core product w/ enterprise auth as a proprietary plugin.

ElasticCo freed code for security plugin recently and now accuses Search Guard of copying both proprietary and #FOSS code. #fossdrama
https://www.elastic.co/blog/dear-search-guard-users