Security quotes of the week
The NSA would have had to weigh its collection programs against the possibility of public scrutiny. Sony would have had to think about how it would look to the world if it paid its female executives significantly less than its male executives. HBGary would have thought twice before launching an intimidation campaign against a journalist it didn't like, and Hacking Team wouldn't have lied to the UN about selling surveillance software to Sudan. Even the government of Saudi Arabia would have behaved differently.
Posted Jul 16, 2015 0:38 UTC (Thu)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted Jul 16, 2015 9:50 UTC (Thu)
by ewan (guest, #5533)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Jul 16, 2015 17:07 UTC (Thu)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link]
Posted Jul 16, 2015 17:19 UTC (Thu)
by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
[Link] (1 responses)
In this specific case no one actually got near the protected materials, they breached the outermost and softest layers (a couple of fences, whoop-de-do), to do some political vandalism, for an actual threat to the protected material you'd have to get _all_ the way in to the facility and _all_ the way back out again in one piece which is a different problem entirely.
It's hard to have any meaningful dialog about security issues when under the grips of fear, it drives the imagination to heighten the risks and deepen the consequences far beyond what actually happens in the real world.
Posted Jul 16, 2015 21:11 UTC (Thu)
by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)
[Link]
Not only that, but you'd have to bring a meaningful amount of the material out with you. Unless it's already enriched to weapons grade, enough material for one bomb is more than it's practical for one person to carry.
Posted Jul 16, 2015 1:07 UTC (Thu)
by xtifr (guest, #143)
[Link] (6 responses)
1. The favicon downloads are apparently because of a Debian-specific patch; Debian doesn't want to ship a set of non-free icons. Makes a certain amount of sense. (Might make even more sense to cache them, but that's extra work for already overloaded Debian folks.)
2. The safebrowsing.google thing apparently only sends a *partial* hash. Which may not be perfect, but still makes me feel a lot better. And you can reportedly disable it with:
Security > Block reported attach sites
(I haven't tested this part.)
I'm still a little uncomfortable with the whole thing, but less so than I was at first.
Posted Jul 16, 2015 4:22 UTC (Thu)
by ncm (guest, #165)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jul 16, 2015 15:35 UTC (Thu)
by jwarnica (subscriber, #27492)
[Link]
Your DNS server knows what host you are going to, I don't think this leaks out much more.
Posted Jul 16, 2015 17:29 UTC (Thu)
by flussence (guest, #85566)
[Link]
Unless you take steps to completely avoid the default new tab page in Firefox (with thumbnails of frequently-visited sites), it also starts loading some of those pages in their entirety without asking, executing scripts and so on, to update those thumbnails every few times you view it.
Better yet, this action bypasses any privacy-oriented extensions you may have installed — if any of those pages have "share" buttons, Mozilla is helpfully letting Facebook/Google/etc. know you visited them often.
Posted Jul 18, 2015 7:27 UTC (Sat)
by debacle (subscriber, #7114)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jul 18, 2015 7:46 UTC (Sat)
by debacle (subscriber, #7114)
[Link]
Posted Jul 23, 2015 16:33 UTC (Thu)
by gerv (guest, #3376)
[Link]
Safe Browsing downloads databases of bad URLs and checks against those locally. The only time data is sent to Google is:
a) when you hit a URL present in the downloaded anti-phishing database; Firefox checks to make sure it's not been removed since the database was downloaded, e.g. because it was a false positive
The first of these would be pretty rare; the second perhaps a bit less rare, but Google don't get the file contents, or find out where you got it from. This feature can also be disabled without disabling the standard SafeBrowsing service.
It seems to me that the current way the feature works manages to protect users from what are serious, ongoing internet threats (phishing and malware are big, big problems) in the most privacy-preserving way possible.
Gerv
Posted Jul 23, 2015 17:38 UTC (Thu)
by davidgerard (guest, #100304)
[Link]
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia-favicon...
It is, however, trademarked. Is that a universal DFSG dealbreaker?
Security quotes of the week
Don't exaggerate. They breached the external perimeter (which was not that secure), and this facility certainly doesn't store weapon-grade uranium.
Security quotes of the week
Security quotes of the week
Security quotes of the week
Security quotes of the week
for an actual threat to the protected material you'd have to get _all_ the way in to the facility and _all_ the way back out again in one piece
Security quotes of the week
and
Security > Block reported web forgeries
Security quotes of the week
Security quotes of the week
Security quotes of the week
Non-free icons (was: Security quotes of the week)
Don Armstrong is the one with the artistic streak:
Non-free icons (was: Security quotes of the week)
for icon in ebay google wikipedia bing; do
convert -size 16x16 xc:white -pointsize 8 \
-font 'DejaVu-Sans' -fill black \
-stroke none \
-draw "text 0,7 '${icon:0:3}'" \
-draw "text 0,14 '${icon:3:3}'" \
${icon}.png;
done;
Security quotes of the week
b) when you download a non-common binary file; in that case, a hash of the file is sent to check if it's known malware.
Wikipedia favicon non-free?
