April 15, 2014

Charlie Crist and Lt. Governor Carlos Lopez-Cantera (after Crist's speech)

No ‘Good-time Charlie’ in West Palm, Crist hits hard at Scott in Forum Club speech

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/news/good-time-charlie-disappears-as-crist-gets-serious/nfZbq/

WEST PALM BEACH — Former Gov. Charlie Crist is known for speaking off the cuff with sunny optimism and interrupting his remarks with shout-outs to members of whatever audience he’s wooing.

Monday’s appearance at a nonpartisan Forum Club of the Palm Beaches lunch was different. Donning glasses to read from a prepared text, Republican-turned-Democrat Crist delivered a multi-pronged attack on GOP Gov. Rick Scott, accusing the incumbent of being beholden to “fat cats” and the tea party and of not caring about teachers, students, the environment, sick people and middle-class families.

This story continues on our new premium website for subscribers, MyPalmBeachPost.com.

April 14, 2014

question about Open SSL versus a proprietary SSL solution

I know the advantage of open source. A bug becomes known, an army of coders moves in to patch it, life is good. However, I've read that only a few people actively work on Open SSL.

Other than Open SSL being a donation (or free), why choose it over a proprietary one ? Are the commercial SSL solutions really expensive and difficult to deploy ? I'm NOT being anti-open source here, just asking a sincere question. Thanks.

Steve

April 14, 2014

The Heartbleed Hit List: The Passwords You Need to Change Right Now (list of web sites)

http://mashable.com/2014/04/09/heartbleed-bug-websites-affected/

*Long list of web sites, much too long to list here*

April 14, 2014

Heartbleed exploit, inoculation, both released

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/04/14/heartbleed_exploit_patch_both_released/

As the Heartbleed fallout continues, the good news is that code to protect against similar such attacks has been released. The bad news is that exploit code is also available.

Let's start with the latter, released by a chap who took up Cloudlare's challenge to coders in the hope someone, somewhere, would be able to use Heartbleed to extract a private SSL key from an undefended server it erected.

As we noted over the weekend, the challenge was met. The code for the 7th-fastest “solution” to the challenge is now available here.

The author apologises for the inelegance of the Python code he spent a day working on. Cloudflare says the winner took just nine hours to crack the server and run off with the SSL certificate.

more at link above

April 14, 2014

Bidiya Oman 108 F world's highest for April 13

http://www.wunderground.com/history/station/41293/2014/04/13/DailyHistory.html?EditMetar=1

April 13, 2014

Otter browser 0.4.01 (Opera 12 clone using Qt5)

http://otter-browser.org/

So far, so good, using it to post this thread. No flames, no smoke, no zombie invasion...yet

April 12, 2014

Tropical Cyclone Ita still ravaging Australia

http://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/south-pacific/2014/Tropical-Cyclone-Ita

April 12, 2014

What was the first computer you ever used (not owned) ?

The thread on owning computers got me thinking of this. Mine was probably an IBM mainframe in 1978 that used punch cards. Didn't they all use punch cards back then ? Or did some mainframes just take data by typing it in ?

April 11, 2014

President Obama: "When women succeed, America succeeds."

During World War II, Kay Morrison worked as a journeyman welder on the assembly line at Kaiser Shipyard #2. She earned the same wage as the man working the graveyard shift alongside her. Today, on average, full-time working women earn 77 cents for every dollar earned by men. Share this if you agree it's time for equal pay for women.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/share/time-for-equal-pay

April 11, 2014

Heartbleed's engineer: It was an 'accident'

http://www.zdnet.com/heartbleeds-engineer-it-was-an-accident-7000028335/

The Heartbleed bug has rocked the security industry and web services in the past few days. However, the programmer responsible for the oversight says that it was an accident that the flaw was introduced in the first place.

Heartbleed is an encryption flaw which affects OpenSSL's 1.0.1 and the 1.0.2-beta release, 1.01 which is used widely across the web and in a number of popular web services. The flaw can theoretically be used to view apparently-secure communication across HTTPS, usually denoted by a small closed padlock in a browser's address bar.

The data potentially at risk includes everything from passwords and encryption keys to financial details and personal identifiable information -- allowing a hacker to dip in, swipe data, and leave no trace of their existence.

Commenting on the discovery, Bruce Schneier wrote on his security blog Schneier on Security:

more at link above