Security quotes of the week
But we really did use to use ROT13 a lot. We used it to keep secrets. And it worked.— Cory DoctorowWhy it worked is a fascinating look at all the different meanings that "security" has.
ROT13 was once a mainstay of online conversations on Usenet and message boards.
It was essential to joke forums (where it was used to scramble punchlines) and media forums (where it was used to scramble spoilers).
You see, "security" doesn't exist in the abstract. Every security measure is a counter to a threat.
[...] The threat that ROT13 defended against was…you. It was a way to prevent you from accidentally reading something you didn't want to know – a counter to your haste and/or curiosity.
But ‘if you build it, they will come’. If device vendors are compelled to install remote surveillance, the demands will start to roll in. Who could possibly be so cold-hearted as to argue against the system being extended to search for missing children? Then President Xi will want to know who has photos of the Dalai Lama, or of men standing in front of tanks; and copyright lawyers will get court orders blocking whatever they claim infringes their clients’ rights. Our phones, which have grown into extensions of our intimate private space, will be ours no more; they will be private no more; and we will all be less secure.— Ross Anderson introduces "Bugs in our Pockets: The Risks of Client-Side Scanning"
This is where a competent and responsible government would thank the journalists for finding the vulnerability and disclosing it in an ethical manner designed to protect the info of the people the state failed to properly protect.— Mike MasnickBut that's not what happened.
[...] And then, it got even worse. Missouri Governor Mike Parson called a press conference in which he again called the journalists hackers and said he had notified prosecutors and the Highway Patrol's Digital Forensic Unit to investigate. Highway Patrol? He also claimed (again) that they had "decoded the HTML source code." That's... not difficult. It's called "view source" and it's built into every damn browser, Governor. It's not hacking. It's not unauthorized.
Posted Oct 21, 2021 9:04 UTC (Thu)
by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
[Link]
They haven’t been ours for quite a long time. A basic principle of democracy is checks and balances, avoiding concentrating power in a single place.
Making a handful of cloud giants responsible for security choices “because the user can not make educated choices” was always going to fail (it would have failed the same way if you replaced cloud giants by Linux distributions that removed users from security choices, the decision process needs to be kept distributed otherwise it is ripe for takeover).
Posted Oct 21, 2021 11:37 UTC (Thu)
by PengZheng (subscriber, #108006)
[Link] (12 responses)
Surprised and disappointed to read the above clueless bull***t in my favorite tech media.
Posted Oct 21, 2021 20:32 UTC (Thu)
by jschrod (subscriber, #1646)
[Link] (6 responses)
Just look at the democratic Honk Gong opposition, to get an example.
Posted Oct 22, 2021 2:07 UTC (Fri)
by PengZheng (subscriber, #108006)
[Link] (5 responses)
The record you talk about seems quite absurd from the point of view of Mainland China residents, so to speak.
Posted Oct 24, 2021 7:40 UTC (Sun)
by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted Oct 25, 2021 10:05 UTC (Mon)
by PengZheng (subscriber, #108006)
[Link] (3 responses)
A single individual is seldom qualified to judge a country.
Posted Oct 25, 2021 10:32 UTC (Mon)
by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784)
[Link] (1 responses)
The record of human history is saturated with state behaviour that cannot reasonably claim the supposed lack of qualifications of a single individual as a defence against judgement.
Posted Oct 25, 2021 11:13 UTC (Mon)
by PengZheng (subscriber, #108006)
[Link]
I see no contradiction here.
Posted Oct 26, 2021 5:07 UTC (Tue)
by rbtree (guest, #129790)
[Link]
As a poor soul whose country is moving towards greater and greater authoritarianism, the evasions I'm reading here are honestly scary to watch. Most technical measures were copied from China after our Glorious Leader visited China and liked what he saw. At least the population is very skeptical at the moment, though this could change with time as I can plainly see.
Posted Oct 22, 2021 6:51 UTC (Fri)
by wsy (subscriber, #121706)
[Link] (4 responses)
Using VPN to circumvent the GFW is ilegal, don't use that as an excuse.
Posted Oct 25, 2021 10:21 UTC (Mon)
by PengZheng (subscriber, #108006)
[Link] (3 responses)
As for google, it refused to obey China's law at first, and the DragonFly effort to return to China is stopped by the US, period.
Posted Oct 25, 2021 19:47 UTC (Mon)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Oct 26, 2021 1:15 UTC (Tue)
by PengZheng (subscriber, #108006)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Oct 26, 2021 13:54 UTC (Tue)
by corbet (editor, #1)
[Link]
Posted Oct 23, 2021 19:37 UTC (Sat)
by porridge (subscriber, #15054)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Oct 27, 2021 18:53 UTC (Wed)
by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604)
[Link]
Posted Oct 27, 2021 19:45 UTC (Wed)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link]
Cheers,
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Of course you're entitled to ignore whatever you dislike.
However, there's simply no division of China and the rest of the world, and the so called "us" is the absolute minority in terms of population.
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I think you have taken this about as far as it can go, especially given that it is pretty far off-topic for LWN. Let's stop this here? Thank you.
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Wol