True randomness... exists? posted April 2014

A great article from AskAmathematician about true randomness.

The question is actually geared towards physicists and the tl;dr is: true randomness exists. Take that causality believers.

And as I expected, the experience to prove this is done with photons:

http://www.askamathematician.com/2009/12/q-do-physicists-really-believe-in-true-randomness/

Bitcoins posted April 2014

I just gave a talk about bitcoins at my uni, here are the slides

Decentralized Market Place posted March 2014

Some people from Stanford are planning to build an anonymous market place. As Silk Road as shown, such a project can only fall with time unless it is decentralized. With all the new ideas and technologies coming into place (in protocols such as bitcoins, namecoins (for dns)), they are thinking of applying them for a decentralized market place as well.

More info here: https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/liberationtech/2014-March/013304.html

And a new github repo to watch out for!

https://github.com/goshakkk/decentralized-anonymous-marketplace-concept

WPA2 cracked ? posted March 2014

They say that this wireless security system might now be breached with relative ease by a malicious attack on a network. They suggest that it is now a matter of urgency that security experts and programmers work together to remove the vulnerabilities in WPA2

it is the de-authentication step in the wireless setup that represents a much more accessible entry point for an intruder with the appropriate hacking tools. As part of their purported security protocols routers using WPA2 must reconnect and re-authenticate devices periodically and share a new key each time.

In the meantime, users should continue to use the strongest encryption protocol available with the most complex password and to limit access to known devices via MAC address.

http://sciencespot.co.uk/wpa2-wireless-security-cracked.html

Prezi got pwned posted March 2014

1. they allowed "file://" to be fetched from their servers when they should have restricted it to "http(s)://"

2. they were using servers that were part of a network to do some private stuff, didn't filter those ips, people on the same network could perform those tasks.

http://engineering.prezi.com/blog/2014/03/24/prezi-got-pwned-a-tale-of-responsible-disclosure/

Just learn Vim posted March 2014

The editor I'm using the most is Sublime Text 3. It's just super easy to use and super useful when you combine it with the right plugins and snippets.

But I love switching editors. I've used Frontpage, Dreamweaver, PHP Designer, Netbeans, Notepad++... and others I can't remember. I've recently tried the beta of Light Table and Brackets (that is truly amazing!), and I am eagerly waiting for Atom the open source IDE of github.

I also love spending time with Emacs. It's hard to master but I dig the "you don't need a mouse" aspect. One thing I found really annoying though is that most software use Vim by default. Wanting to master emacs, I didn't want to spend time learning Vim as well and I started tweaking the settings so that software X would use emacs by default. And that works well until... But then you run into some complications, for example I'm still trying to figure out how to do a git diff with emacs, or you run into a machine without emacs, and then it's either nano, which is shitty, or something else that is installed on the machine... and vim is (almost?) always installed by default.

So I decided to just learn Vim. And it was actually easier than it sounded and I feel like I'm going to avoid a lot of headaches now. Sometimes it's better to learn and adapt rather than try to use our own tools.

And if you're like me, you'll actually have a lot of fun learning vim :)

You just went to the Google home page. What just actually happened? posted March 2014

I run into a lot of great reads these days, so let me share one more with you,

Jean-Baptiste Quéru tries to explain how deep it goes when you just query google.com in your browser.

https://plus.google.com/+JeanBaptisteQueru/posts/dfydM2Cnepe

Twitter is giving up on encrypting direct messages... posted March 2014

...At least for now.

This shows how unnecessary encrypting is sometimes. Some people like to encrypt and encrypt everything, and don't consider a solution "usable" if it not fully protected.

I'd argue that twitter has always been a very "public" and "exhibitionist" kind of websites where the private messages have never been a core feature (and it's actually not a really well done message system) and no user is obviously going to use it for "serious" matters. So why spend time encrypting it ?

http://www.theverge.com/2014/3/19/5523656/twitter-gives-up-on-encrypting-direct-messages-at-least-for-now