ijk64✅ @ijk64@m.futex.au

FAKER

#Python tool for generating fake data in different languages.

Generate addresses, city names, postal codes (you can choose the country), names, meaningless texts, etc.

https://github.com/joke2k/faker

Creator twitter.com/joke2k

#sockpuppets

Eating too much cake is the sin of gluttony. However, eating too much pie is okay because the sin of pi is always zero.

'Bridge the gap' is an astro panorama shot at 14mm in one horizon to horizon spanning arc, I shot this in 2014 with a samyang 14mm and canon 6D

Was tricky to work out the mechanics of this back in the day with the gear I had available, and stitching was not easy, since worked out a lot better techniques for doing all that!

#photography #nature #naturephotography #landscapephotography #longexposure #NewZealand #astro #astrophotography

Greetings. Once upon a time long ago, I was sitting alone in the UCLA ARPANET site #1 computer room late one night when the high Santa Ana winds outside started disrupting power. Hit after hit, very dangerous for the minicomputers, disk drives, and other equipment in that room, since we didn't have uninterruptible power supplies back then.

I made some calls and it was decided I should shut everything in the room down. Everything. I phoned the ARPANET NOC (Network Operations Center) at BBN and explained the situation, since I was about to shut down IMP #1 (essentially, a refrigerator-sized router) on ARPANET which sat in a corner of the room, and doing this could cause disruptions if done in an unplanned manner. The IMP was *always* running -- I had never seen it powered down.

I worked my way around the room, powering down terminals and disks, and printers, and the power supplies on the 11/45 (ARPANET Host #1 - UCLA-ATS) and the 11/70 (Host #129 [1+128 on IMP #1] - UCLA-SECURITY. Back then my email addresses were LAUREN@UCLA-ATS and LAUREN@UCLA-SECURITY -- no domains yet.

The usual roar of the many machines' fans and motors gradually got quieter and quieter, until only the IMP was left. I pulled down the power switch. Now there was dead silence except the hum of the lights, a situation I'd never experienced in that room before. Very odd feeling.

Suddenly I heard a click -- the IMP was powering back up by itself. Damn. I pulled down the switch again. Quiet for a time, then click and it came back up yet again. Before I started thinking about screwing around with its power cables or turning off breakers that could have unexpected effects, I called the NOC again to ask them if they had any ideas.

"Oh yeah. We should have told you! There's a little switch that controls auto-restart. Surprise!"

So I found and flipped that little toggle switch, powered down the IMP again, and this time it stayed down. I had turned off the ARPANET -- at least at UCLA. -L

I recently wrote a post detailing the recent #LastPass breach from a #password cracker's perspective, and for the most part it was well-received and widely boosted. However, a good number of people questioned why I recommend ditching LastPass and expressed concern with me recommending people jump ship simply because they suffered a breach. Even more are questioning why I recommend #Bitwarden and #1Password, what advantages they hold over LastPass, and why would I dare recommend yet another cloud-based password manager (because obviously the problem is the entire #cloud, not a particular company.)

So, here are my responses to all of these concerns!

Let me start by saying I used to support LastPass. I recommended it for years and defended it publicly in the media. If you search Google for "jeremi gosney" + "lastpass" you'll find hundreds of articles where I've defended and/or pimped LastPass (including in Consumer Reports magazine). I defended it even in the face of vulnerabilities and breaches, because it had superior UX and still seemed like the best option for the masses despite its glaring flaws. And it still has a somewhat special place in my heart, being the password manager that actually turned me on to password managers. It set the bar for what I required from a password manager, and for a while it was unrivaled.

But things change, and in recent years I found myself unable to defend LastPass. I can't recall if there was a particular straw that broke the camel's back, but I do know that I stopped recommending it in 2017 and fully migrated away from it in 2019. Below is an unordered list of the reasons why I lost all faith in LastPass:

- LastPass's claim of "zero knowledge" is a bald-faced lie. They have about as much knowledge as a password manager can possibly get away with. Every time you login to a site, an event is generated and sent to LastPass for the sole purpose of tracking what sites you are logging into. You can disable telemetry, except disabling it doesn't do anything - it still phones home to LastPass every time you authenticate somewhere. Moreover, nearly everything in your LastPass vault is unencrypted. I think most people envision their vault as a sort of encrypted database where the entire file is protected, but no -- with LastPass, your vault is a plaintext file and only a few select fields are encrypted. The only thing that would be worse is if...

- LastPass uses shit #encryption (or "encraption", as @sc00bz calls it). Padding oracle vulnerabilities, use of ECB mode (leaks information about password length and which passwords in the vault are similar/the same. recently switched to unauthenticated CBC, which isn't much better, plus old entries will still be encrypted with ECB mode), vault key uses AES256 but key is derived from only 128 bits of entropy, encryption key leaked through webui, silent KDF downgrade, KDF hash leaked in log files, they even roll their own version of AES - they essentially commit every "crypto 101" sin. All of these are trivial to identify (and fix!) by anyone with even basic familiarity with cryptography, and it's frankly appalling that an alleged security company whose product hinges on cryptography would have such glaring errors. The only thing that would be worse is if...

- LastPass has terrible secrets management. Your vault encryption key always resident in memory and never wiped, and not only that, but the entire vault is decrypted once and stored entirely in memory. If that wasn't enough, the vault recovery key and dOTP are stored on each device in plain text and can be read without root/admin access, rendering the master password rather useless. The only thing that would be worse is if...

- LastPass's browser extensions are garbage. Just pure, unadulterated garbage. Tavis Ormandy went on a hunting spree a few years back and found just about every possible bug -- including credential theft and RCE -- present in LastPass's browser extensions. They also render your browser's sandbox mostly ineffective. Again, for an alleged security company, the sheer amount of high and critical severity bugs was beyond unconscionable. All easy to identify, all easy to fix. Their presence can only be explained by apathy and negligence. The only thing that would be worse is if...

- LastPass's API is also garbage. Server-can-attack-client vulns (server can request encryption key from the client, server can instruct client to inject any javascript it wants on every web page, including code to steal plaintext credentials), JWT issues, HTTP verb confusion, account recovery links can be easily forged, the list goes on. Most of these are possibly low-risk, except in the event that LastPass loses control of its servers. The only thing that would be worse is if...

- LastPass has suffered 7 major #security breaches (malicious actors active on the internal network) in the last 10 years. I don't know what the threshold of "number of major breaches users should tolerate before they lose all faith in the service" is, but surely it's less than 7. So all those "this is only an issue if LastPass loses control of its servers" vulns are actually pretty damn plausible. The only thing that would be worse is if...

- LastPass has a history of ignoring security researchers and vuln reports, and does not participate in the infosec community nor the password cracking community. Vuln reports go unacknowledged and unresolved for months, if not years, if not ever. For a while, they even had an incorrect contact listed for their security team. Bugcrowd fields vulns for them now, and most if not all vuln reports are handled directly by Bugcrowd and not by LastPass. If you try to report a vulnerability to LastPass support, they will pretend they do not understand and will not escalate your ticket to the security team. Now, Tavis Ormandy has praised LastPass for their rapid response to vuln reports, but I have a feeling this is simply because it's Tavis / Project Zero reporting them as this is not the experience that most researchers have had.

You see, I'm not simply recommending that users bail on LastPass because of this latest breach. I'm recommending you run as far way as possible from LastPass due to its long history of incompetence, apathy, and negligence. It's abundantly clear that they do not care about their own security, and much less about your security.

So, why do I recommend Bitwarden and 1Password? It's quite simple:

- I personally know the people who architect 1Password and I can attest that not only are they extremely competent and very talented, but they also actively engage with the password cracking community and have a deep, *deep* desire to do everything in the most correct manner possible. Do they still get some things wrong? Sure. But they strive for continuous improvement and sincerely care about security. Also, their secret key feature ensures that if anyone does obtain a copy of your vault, they simply cannot access it with the master password alone, making it uncrackable.

- Bitwarden is 100% open source. I have not done a thorough code review, but I have taken a fairly long glance at the code and I am mostly pleased with what I've seen. I'm less thrilled about it being written in a garbage collected language and there are some tradeoffs that are made there, but overall Bitwarden is a solid product. I also prefer Bitwarden's UX. I've also considered crowdfunding a formal audit of Bitwarden, much in the way the Open Crypto Audit Project raised the funds to properly audit TrueCrypt. The community would greatly benefit from this.

Is the cloud the problem? No. The vast majority of issues LastPass has had have nothing to do with the fact that it is a cloud-based solution. Further, consider the fact that the threat model for a cloud-based password management solution should *start* with the vault being compromised. In fact, if password management is done correctly, I should be able to host my vault anywhere, even openly downloadable (open S3 bucket, unauthenticated HTTPS, etc.) without concern. I wouldn't do that, of course, but the point is the vault should be just that -- a vault, not a lockbox.

I hope this clarifies things! As always, if you found this useful, please boost for reach and give me a follow for more password insights!

Who'd have thought the winning tweet of the year would be such a late entry?!

Fission is in the news, but few recognize that a woman physicist was behind the discovery.

Lise Meitner’s brilliance led to the discovery of nuclear fission. But her long time collaborator Otto Hahn, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry w/o her in 1944, even though she had given the first theoretical explanation.

Albert Einstein called Meitner “our Marie Curie." She also adamantly refused to work on the atomic bomb during WWII. https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201502/physicshistory.cfm #women #history #science #HistoryRemix

Mastodon is a kick. Twitter was really watching a performance with audience participation. Occasionally, you might get called up on stage with a RT or QT. Mastodon is like a retro cocktail party. You get to mingle. Or maybe just people-watch.

I think I like this.

By popular demand, here's the VIDEO version of Hanselminutes Podcast 872 with @nova on how her team runs the Hachyderm Mastodon Server! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJSxRqJ2kgQ

Cheating on this book with another book but being blatant about it by using the other book as a bookmark

Why do Australians love the mullet? https://bbc.in/3WrwYuk https://nitter.net/BBCWorld/status/1607951998879424513/video/1

Stolen info on 400m+ Twitter accounts seemingly up for sale https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2022/12/27/twitter_hack_morgan/

You can choose to be exactly one:
(pls boost for reach?)

This is a carbonized loaf of bread from Pompeii, 79 C.E. - preserved for thousands of years in the volcanic ashes of Mount Vesuvius. The baker left his stamp, which reads: “Celer, slave of Quintus Granius Verus." Celer is known to have survived the eruption, as his name later appears on a list of "freed men." Most bread at the time was baked in community ovens, so customized stamps were used to mark individual families’ and bakeries’ loaves.

#histodons #TIL #WeirdHistory #AncientHistory #DYK

My file formats dissection repository:
https://github.com/corkami/pics/blob/master/binary/README.md

@eniko @MaddieQuestions
I knew the "Hamburger", but didn't know the Meatballs... I think I'll start calling it by that name now. actually, there's more food names:

I declare. These Russians are some cold mofos.

“Superintendent Vivekananda Sharma of Odisha police said Mr. Budanov was found to have suffered a stroke while his friend "was depressed after his death and he too died". The Russian consul in Kolkata, Alexei Idamkin, told the Tass news agency that police did not see a "criminal element in these tragic events".

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64101437

#Russia #Ukraine #News #Putin

I take pride in the fact that we've been married for just shy of 25 years, and I still know how to get my engineer husband's heart racing