Matt Brown writes about StartCom, the Israeli issuer providing basic SSL certificates for nothing. In fact I’ve been using StartSSL certificates for about three years now, but I get them issued to Level 2 verification which incurs a fee. (It’s more expensive now than when I was first validated, but still good value.) StartCom are…
A little civil disobedience
For many months I’ve wondered what would happen if one completed half a census return online and half on paper. Tonight, finally, I get to find out. (for international readers: it’s the night of the U.K. census, which with a little imagination has the potential for all sorts of fun.)
Response from ALLOW Ltd.
I’ve had a very courteous email from one of the founders of ALLOW, following my analysis of their password reset procedure. “Thank you for your feedback regarding the security of our platform. We are constantly reviewing these processes and regard our members security as paramount, whilst ensuring our processes are navigable to the majority of…
Privacy specialists should hire security specialists
I was interested to hear about a company here in the UK called ALLOW Ltd., offering marketing database management under a “we’ll get you off lists, then pay you to go back on at your pleasure” basis. That sounds a fair deal to me, so I decided to sign up for it. “Our technology is built…
Point Release Security Co-ordinator
In ‘Bits from the Security Team‘ a few weeks ago, Thijs Kinkhorst wrote: Since a couple of years we’ve been handing off security issues of minor or theoretical impact but for which a fix would be desirable at some point, like certain classes of denial-of-service attacks, off to stable point updates. We’re looking for a…
RCBW, week… fourish.
Just one this week: #609304 (pimd): backport the unstable fix for testing-proposed-updates (which nearly gave me heart failure when it FTBFS on mipsel, but it was an unrelated problem).
RCBW, week three
This week: #607958 (apt): replied and tagged ‘moreinfo’; jmm later downgraded it to normal #606951 (nsca): agreed with the submitter and reverted the change, uploaded straight to unstable #605784 (nagios-statd): thanks to the great debugging work of the submitter, uploaded a fix to DELAYED/2 (giving the maintainer time to make his own planned upload) #598588…
RCBW, week two
This week: #606151 (nordugrid-arc-nox): cherry-picked a patch from upstream and uploaded to DELAYED/1 #606670 (minitube): removal bug filed at request of maintainer #607762 (dbus-glib): bumped the build-dependency and uploaded to DELAYED/7 (later pushed into DELAYED/0 at maintainer’s request) #607427 (opensc): applied security fixes from upstream and uploaded immediately Not quite one fix per day, as…
Snow
This time we didn’t escape it, and this time it was fairly spectacular. It snowed from about 07:00 to about 16:00 – 6-7 inches in the end, depending where it’s measured.
The perfect gpg-agent setup
When I first started using Debian properly, I played with gpg-agent and pinentry but I didn’t really understand the various bash initialisation scripts, and my botched setup annoyed me so much I disabled it again quite quickly (for example, if I left the machine logged in to GDM at home then logged in through SSH,…