Security quotes of the week

[Posted May 4, 2016 by jake]

How to panic a current @grsecurity kernel as any user: $ script /dev/null </dev/zero (seriously, WTF)

— Hector Martin shows how to get banned by grsecurity

Not all leaks are alike, nor are their makers. Gen. David Petraeus, for instance, provided his illicit lover and favorable biographer information so secret it defied classification, including the names of covert operatives and the president’s private thoughts on matters of strategic concern. Petraeus was not charged with a felony, as the Justice Department had initially recommended, but was instead permitted to plead guilty to a misdemeanor. Had an enlisted soldier of modest rank pulled out a stack of highly classified notebooks and handed them to his girlfriend to secure so much as a smile, he’d be looking at many decades in prison, not a pile of character references from a Who’s Who of the Deep State.

— Edward Snowden

So, the guy in the US government is upset that the public is more safe, and the guy that people want to accuse of being a traitor is proud of helping Americans to better protect themselves. Maybe we ought to reverse their roles...

— Mike Masnick on the NSA estimate that the Snowden revelations sped up the adoption of encryption

Security quotes of the week

Posted May 5, 2016 5:57 UTC (Thu) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link] (5 responses)

I had been asking why Grsecurity wasn't in mainline.

That twitter thread answered my question.

Security quotes of the week

Posted May 5, 2016 13:58 UTC (Thu) by jond (subscriber, #37669) [Link] (1 responses)

It's a pretty damning example of bad community management, that's for sure. As a result of that, I was exposed to a bunch of GRSec criticism that I'd otherwise not have seen, which has been food for thought.

Security quotes of the week

Posted May 6, 2016 7:15 UTC (Fri) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link]

Streisand effect, huh. Yeah, being open about imperfections is rule 1 of handling community, at least in the tech world but probably everywhere.

Speaking of twitter conversations...

Posted May 7, 2016 22:43 UTC (Sat) by cwillu (guest, #67268) [Link] (2 responses)

how the heck does one go about reading them? Please tell me it's really not a matter of opening multiple user pages and rethreading the conversation myself?

Speaking of twitter conversations...

Posted May 8, 2016 2:04 UTC (Sun) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

Good question. From what I've figured out, Twitter threads are structurally similar to Slashdot ones (in terms of how the comments nest and collapse), except there's zero visual indentation cues.

Speaking of twitter conversations...

Posted May 8, 2016 11:09 UTC (Sun) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]

If you click on a tweet and it has "answers", you go to some "conversation mode". When the tweet itself is an answer to another tweet, you have a link "view conversation" that opens the same mode; but the first tweet does not have that link. Furthermore, if some answer opens a different subthread, you hav a link "view other replies" on it. The "back" button on the browser brings you back to the last view if you click on that. Yes, it's kind of baroque.

HTH,