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

How I explained REST to my wife posted March 2014

great read!

Wife: You mean http like the beginning of what I type into the browser?

Ryan: Yeah. That first part tells the browser what protocol to use. That stuff you type in there is one of the most important breakthroughs in the history of computing.

http://www.looah.com/source/view/2284

Hashes, MACs, Signatures posted March 2014

I was very confused when I was introduced to signatures and macs because I thought they were just Hashes. I got to understand what it was and... it's actually super simple.

Here's a great explanation on the crypto stackexchange but here's mine:

• I have a huuuge message that I want to transfer to a friend. I'm scared some of the words would change during transit. Solution? I just hash it and send the hash with the message. hash = Hash(message). A hash is pretty small (for example a md5 hash is 32 characters) so it's no trouble. My friend then receives the message and the hash, he can Hash(message) it and see if it gives him the same hash. If it doesn't then he knows that the message was changed and he can ask me for a new copy.

You can also call that an unkeyed hash, simply because it doesn't use a key. You just apply the algorithm to the message, no other arguments are given to the hash function.

• Okay now, We had some problems because some bad guy has sent numerous bad messages to my friends pretending he was me. I still want to hash my message but I also want to tell my friend it was me who wrote it. So, like a symmetric cipher, I generate a key that I share with my friend. And I hash my message with that key Hash = HMAC(key, message). My friend can now hash it with the same key when he receives the message and see that we have the same hash.

We just used a (symmetric) keyed hash or a HMAC (Hash-based message authentication code). Note that we could have used a MAC based on a Cipher as well (CMAC).

• So me and my friend have been writing many messages to a community of coders. We want to sign each messages with our name, but that's not enough, another bad guy is posting bad stuff signed with our names on different websites. So let's use a Hash that people can verify, like an asymmetric cipher, we generate both a secret key and a public key, we hash the message with our secret key and we post the message, the hash and the public key. Hash = Sign(secret_key, message). People can then verifiy that Hash with the public key. Voila ! We just used a Signature or how I like to call them a asymmetric keyed hash. It allows for integrity of data, thanks to the hash, authentification of the authors, thanks to the secret key (this is a MAC), non-repudiation thanks to the public key (and now we have a signature).

So if you got it right, Hash < Mac < Signature. They're all useful and you should use the one relevant according to the context.

I'll just copypasta the table on the stackoverflow answer, because it's a real nice summary:

Cryptographic primitive | Hash |    MAC    | Digital
Security Goal           |      |           | signature
------------------------+------+-----------+-------------
Integrity               |  Yes |    Yes    |   Yes
Authentication          |  No  |    Yes    |   Yes
Non-repudiation         |  No  |    No     |   Yes
------------------------+------+-----------+-------------
Kind of keys            | none | symmetric | asymmetric
                        |      |    keys   |    keys

I made a LTC chart posted March 2014

I wanted something I could display on my TV continuously, I think I did a pretty good job.

This shows how much is a LTC in US dollar in real time, it's made with a bit of python and a bit of javascript, you can check it here

Atom invites posted March 2014

I have two invites for the new IDE by github. I can't try it because I don't own a mac and there are no versions for windows at the moment (not even linux). Weird, but eh, if you own a mac and want an invite just ask me in the comments !

https://atom.io/