Category: Internet matters

Posts about the internet

SSL glitches

I recently updated the SSL certificate used to provide encrypted access to this site via HTTPS. Chances are, nothing sensitive is passing between my server and your computer. Running the site this way by default does, however, increase the overall volume of encrypted traffic on the web, which may hamper some ubiquitous surveillance efforts.

In any case, if you see warnings from your browser about this site’s encryption, let me know. I am hoping they will clear on their own as various caches update.

Concept for improving email: StampMail.com

Often, email feels like an impossible torrent of mostly-unwanted information.

For a while, I have felt like one way to improve it would be to require refundable stamps for messages. In order to send you an email, a person might pay $0.50 or $1.00 for a virtual ‘stamp’. When you receive the message, you get to choose whether to refund the sender (perhaps minus a set fee for the email provider), or keep the value of the stamp yourself (again, minus a $0.05 or $0.10 cut).

If emails cost $1 each to send, there would be a lot fewer trivial ones. I doubt many people would totally replace their normal email with StampMail, but a lot might set up a parallel account for higher-priority messages.

Some spam will be profitable enough to make sending emails with stamps worthwhile. There are two responses to this. First, StampMail could be a lot more aggressive than existing email providers about banning accounts that are sending spam. Second, any spam you receive is more tolerable when it comes with a $0.90 to $0.95 payment.

What if?

My copy of Randall Monroe’s What if? book arrived from Amazon today, and I spent a pleasant couple of hours in the Upper Library going through it. Right from the disclaimer it is quite entertaining:

The author of this book is an Internet cartoonist, not a health or safety expert. He likes it when things catch fire or explode, which means he does not have your best interests in mind.

Toronto friends are welcome to borrow the book and learn about bullet-sized pieces of material with neutron star density; the effects of draining Earth’s oceans; the plausibility of eradicating the common cold through global quarantine; and similarly practical matters.

These facts will not be on the exam

I was wrong a while ago when I said the QI podcast isn’t available through the iTunes Store. It simply doesn’t have a name that makes it obvious that it is the QI podcast: No Such Thing As A Fish.

One nice fact is that Lawrence Burst Sperry, the man who invented the aircraft autopilot, went flying in November 1916 with Mrs. Waldo Polk, whose husband was off driving an ambulance in France. They counted on the autopilot to keep them aloft, but ended up crashing naked into a bay and being found by duck hunters.

Also, if you get a zebrafish drunk and put it among sober companions, the sober ones will follow the drunk one:

Maybe something about the drunk fish’s one-on-one interactions with the other fish made the group as a whole move in the same direction. Or maybe the sober fish looked at their non-sober tankmate and saw a leader. “It is likely,” Porfiri says, that the drunk fish’s uninhibited behavior “is perceived as a boldness trait, thus imparting a high social status.” As they followed the drunk fish, the sober ones also sped up to keep pace, swimming roughly a third faster than they would have otherwise.

The very drunkest zebrafish, though, lost their leader status. Fish that had been exposed to the highest alcohol concentration began to lag behind the rest of the group, following instead of steering. Since higher alcohol doses have “sedative effects,” Porfiri says, the drunkest fish slow down and start to display “sluggishness in response to the rest of the group.”

I listed some fun facts from QI in a previous post.

Ghost in the Wires

A friend of mine recently lent me Kevin Mitnick‘s book Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker. It’s an entertaining story that highlights how the willingness of people to trust and help others who they assume to be co-workers is often the greatest weakness in security systems.

It also highlights some of the characteristics of obsessive behaviour. I had no idea how many separate times Mitnick was caught. It reminded me of Marc Lewis’ Memoirs of an Addicted Brain, in terms of how repeated contact with agents of authority was insufficient to interrupt a longstanding pattern of behaviour.

The book is also a reminder of what seems like a more innocent era of global interconnectivity – when phone phreaks with blue boxes were a cutting-edge threat, and when the FBI would have real trouble tracking you down if you assumed the identity of someone who died in childhood. Now, attacks against computer systems seem associated more with governments themselves than with curious amateurs, and it’s difficult to imagine someone like Mitnick evading the surveillance state for long.

Graveyard of blogs

Either because people are moving away from blogging in general or because I haven’t been seeking out new blogs, many of the sites in my blogroll haven’t been updated for long spans of time.

I feel the time to pull them from the list has come – at least in the case of blogs not updated in the past six months.

For reference, here they are:

I hope all the authors have moved on to stimulating new projects.

The heartbleed bug is bad news for internet security

Many websites rely on SSL / TLS to encrypt communication: everything from passwords to credit card numbers to emails. OpenSSL is a very widely used implementation of these encryption protocols.

Right now, the internet is abuzz with the news of the ‘hearbleed’ bug. Because of a flaw in OpenSSL, attackers can extract 64 kilobytes of information from a webserver for each ‘heartbeat’. This information can include secret encryption keys, usernames and passwords, and other kinds of sensitive data.

In response, the Canada Revenue Agency has stopped accepting online filing of tax returns. There is a lot of other discussion online: Schneier, XKCD. A tool for testing webservers for the vulnerability is also online.

One take-away from this is that once various web servers are fixed, we will all need to change our passwords.

From Kitty Fisher to Rasputin

This website is highly entertaining. Here are a few Quite Interesting nuggets:

  • “A famous 18th century courtesan named Kitty Fisher used to distribute pictures of herself small enough to be concealed in the lid of a snuffbox… Fisher led a sensationally dissolute life; Casanova relates that she once ate a thousand-guinea bank note on bread-and-butter.”
  • “Another famous kidnap victim who did not display Stockholm Syndrome was Julius Caesar. Kidnapped by pirates and then ransomed, he raised a fleet, pursued and captured the pirates, and then crucified them, as he had told them he would while in captivity – a promise the pirates had taken as a joke.”
  • “Normal healthy sleepers wake up between 15 and 35 times every night.”
  • “The only other animal with a clear-cut menopause followed by many more years of life is the killer whale.”
  • “Each individual part of a Saturn V rocket had a 99.9 per cent reliability rate, which means that on a good flight, roughly 6,000 of the 6,000,000 parts were expected to fail.”
  • “Buzz Aldrin was the second man to walk on the moon, but was the first human being to celebrate Holy Communion away from the Earth, and the first to urinate on another world. He still keeps his Apollo 11 travel expenses receipt framed on his living-room wall: ‘Cape Kennedy, Fla. – Moon – Pacific Ocean. Amount claimed 33 dollars and 31 cents.’ Buzz had jokingly tried to claim for 880,000 miles at 8 cents a mile. NASA replied with an invoice for one Saturn V rocket, ready for travel, at $185,000,000.”
  • “The best-selling work of fiction of the 15th century was The Tale of the Two Lovers, an erotic novel by the man who later became Pope Pius II.”
  • “The US ban [on subliminal messaging] is a Federal Communications Commission rule rather than a law, and in 1978 they waived it so that police in Wichita could send a subliminal message to a serial murderer called ‘the BTK Killer’ to turn himself in, hidden in a news broadcast. It didn’t work; he was eventually caught in 2005 by other means (irritated that the police had failed to link one of his murders to him, the Killer called them to ask whether it was possible to trace someone from a floppy disc. The police said ‘Er – no’, so he sent the disc, and they tracked him down by Googling the metadata it carried).”
  • “Vitamin A is really toxic; we use it in anti-wrinkle creams because it actually kills the top layer of skin, making it look fresher. Too much, however, can be fatal.”
  • “In general, the only members of the UK armed forces who can wear a full beard are the Royal Navy. A sailor who wants to do so must submit a form requesting ‘permission to stop shaving’. He is then allowed up to two weeks to ‘grow a full set’. At this point he must present himself to the Master at Arms (the senior Service policeman in any ship or unit) who will decide if his beard looks stupid or is respectably full enough to be permitted.”
  • “Professor Con Slobodchikoff of Northern Arizona University has spent 30 years studying prairie dog behaviour… The result was the first dictionary of Prairiedogese, in which the different calls could be decoded – first by computer but eventually by ear. Not only could the prairie dogs differentiate between hawks, coyotes, badgers and humans, they could also differentiate between short and tall humans and even what colour shirt they were wearing. (Interestingly, they couldn’t tell male from female). Not only is Professor Slobodichikoff’s work the first successful attempt to decode a rodent language, it is probably unique among mammals.”
  • “In some countries, being a criminal doesn’t exclude you from having to pay tax… Of course, if you have to pay tax on an illegal action, you can theoretically claim expenses against it. In 2005, a bank robber in the southern Dutch town of Chaam was able to subtract the cost of his gun from his fine. The judge accordingly reduced the fine from $8,750, the amount stolen from the bank, to $6,500.”
  • “In fact, the autopsy didn’t show any poison in Rasputin’s stomach at all and what seems likeliest is that Rasputin was beaten and stabbed and then shot twice. Then, upon finding that he still had a pulse, a third man shot him in the head. What killed Rasputin was being shot through the forehead, which would kill anyone… Another interesting facet to the affair is the suggestion that it may have been an MI6 officer that killed him; the only man present with the sort of revolver which would have fired the fatal bullet was a British Intelligence officer called Oswald Rayner. MI6 had been involved in planning Rasputin’s death, worried that he was going to persuade the Tsar to pull Russia out of World War I and probably lose it for Britain. It is possible that British Intelligence actively ordered Rasputin’s death. Unfortunately, there’s no way of knowing for sure because Rayner burnt all of his papers before his death in 1961.”

See also: baby cages