On the Internet, there exists a meme called Godwin's Law. Simply put, "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one," (where probabilities are specified as floating point values between 0.0 (0%) and 1.0 (100%)). It is usually at this point that the discussion is considered completely derailed and no longer worth following.
It seems that a similar phenomenon is occurring more and more often in the twenty-first century, in which online discussions of cryptographic or security software will eventually lead to someone bringing up Ken Thompson's famous paper Reflections …
Since the NSA revelations began coming a couple of times a week for the past month, an all too common set of dialogues has been cropping up again and again and again in practically every forum that one would care to visit. While the discussion itself isn't perfectly replicated the overall pattern is. It goes something like this:
Brief description of vulnerability. Mitigating tactic.
Mention of a vulnerability elsewhere in the user's system.
Description of a slightly more esoteric vulnerability.
A couple of weeks ago, HacDC added a new tool to the workshop, a laser cutter from Full Spectrum (which, I've just discovered, was a Kickstarter campaign). We've been saving up for it for a while, but one of the nights I was there I got to see its unboxing and (with the permission of the folks there) I took some pictures.
A couple of weekends ago Lyssa, Laurelindel and I did something that we've wanted to do for months, which was visit the International Spy Museum in downtown DC. This year their big thing is a 50 year James Bond retrospective, where they had props and models from the movies on display in addition to their other exhibits. Unfortunately, my camera was in macro mode the whole time so not all of the pictures I took came out the way I'd hoped. I kept the best of the photographs.
A couple of months ago we ported Byzantium Linux to the RaspberryPi. I took a couple of photographs during the development sprint and then promptly forgotten that I'd done so. While cleaning out my camera's SD card a few days ago I rediscovered them.
For no good reason today I decided to run some cryptsetup benchmarks on Windbringer. The only really significant change to the systemware configuration is that Windbringer is now running Linux kernel version 3.9.4-1-ARCH.
At the DC Cryptoparty in October of 2012 I did two presentations: One on GnuPG and one on whole disk encryption. While I'd put the GnuPG presentation online I hadn't done the same for the disk encryption one because I had to update it after the cryptoparty to take into account new information acquired that afternoon regarding MacOSX and Windows. I did so, converted the OpenOffice Presentation deck into a PDF, PGP signed them, and uploaded them this afternoon.
v1.0 of the WDE presentation is now available for download:
Older denizens of the Net probably remember the name Gareth Branwyn. His name and visage were well known amongst people who were active in what came to be known as the cyberculture of the late 1980's and early 1990's, that weird mish-mash of hacker culture, people who identified as cyberpunks, psychedelic culture, rave culture, and other tiny social groups so far out on the fringe that they never really coalesced but instead moved in the cracks and fissues left in the wake of those other groups. Most of us remember two major projects he worked on at the time, the …
