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Comment Re:Not as Private? No shit. (Score 2) 83

Sorry to reply to my own comment, but I have to correct some assumptions I made:

TLS 1.3 appears to (optionally?) encrypt certificates so that they're no longer sent in the clear, and eSNI (encrypted SNI) is an available extension.

So if you're using TLS 1.3 and the appropriate options, then yes the only thing your ISP will have to go on is the IP address. That may be good enough for accessing a lot of sites, but not every website lives on one of the big cloud hosting providers.

Comment Re:Point (Score 1) 83

Fire up wireshark on port 443 and see if you can figure out where your browser is taking you.

From just opening a new tab on FF, I can see that it's making an HTTPS request to 'snippets.cdn.mozilla.net' (as specified in the 'Client Hello' TLS message under the server name extension). And I didn't need to break the encryption or anything - this is part of the handshake before encryption begins.

Maybe TLS 1.3 starts encryption earlier. If not, maybe later versions will. But at the moment, it's trivial to see who's connecting to what even without sniffing or controlling the DNS servers.

Comment Not as Private? No shit. (Score 0) 83

It's baffling to me how people (who aren't Goog or Moz) think that DoH is in any way beneficial. (aside from protection from eavesdropping)

The entire point is to redirect and encrypt DNS requests so they can't be mined by your ISP. Thus, your privacy is protected from them. Except, it just moves the privacy problem from one name-services provider to another.

If I can't trust my ISP to not exploit my DNS request data (which, for the record, I can't) why the f*$# should I trust my browser maker instead?

And even if DoH (or some other form of encrypted DNS) works and I can trust my chosen provider, my ISP would still be able to track where I go - Either by sniffing SNI and certificates during the HTTPS handshake (which, as of current TLS versions, are sent in the clear before encryption begins) or ultimately doing a reverse lookup on IP addresses.

As has been mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the only way to get actual privacy here is to use Tor - which comes with its own gotchas.

Comment Re:I would like to try ... but ... (Score 1) 42

There is nothing AI about running a bunch of IF ... THEN statements in code.

I believe that's what's known in AI as an "Expert System".
You ask an "Expert" what they'd do in a bunch of situations, and encode their responses in a laundry list of IF ... THEN statements.

Comment RNG (Score 1) 637

dd if=/dev/random status=none bs=24 count=1 | base64

This should produce passwords accepted by the majority of sites, and should be about as secure as your random number generator and password management system. Tack on characters as the site requires. You may substitute your RNG of choice, and adjust length to your liking (protip: use a length that's a multiple of 6 to avoid getting extra =s' at the end of the encoding). Dropping the status=none saves you typing, but you have to pick out the password from the resulting jumble of output.

Comment Re:Of course Anonymous isn't anonymous. (Score 1) 407

"Anonymous" as a proper noun defies anonymity, so it's no real wonder that these people failed to cover their tracks.

Mod Parent up please. There is too much conflation between "anonymous" ("without name") and "Anonymous" (the group). It seems some group has taken the name "Anonymous" and used it to further their own ends - losing their own anonymity in the process, and destroying the term for everyone else.

Incidentally, this whole thing bears a striking resemblance to The Laughing Man (Ghost in the Shell:SAC). In the show, there only ever was one Laughing Man, and he only ever did one thing in the public eye. Afterward, there were many copycats claiming to be "The Laughing Man," even though the original never referred to himself as such.

They've taken what was the default username on 4chan, and turned it into an activist group - losing whatever meaning it had in the first place. It is no longer "everyone and no one." It's just a bunch of street punks on the Internet.

Mozilla

Firefox 4 Will Push Edges of Browser Definition 501

Chris Blanc writes "Mozilla Lab's push is to blur the edges of the browser, to make it both more tightly integrated with the computer it's running on, and also more hooked into Web services. So extended, the browser becomes an even more powerful and pervasive platform for all kinds of applications. 'Beard wants the new online/offline, browser/service to be more intelligent on behalf of its users. Early examples of this intelligence include the "awesome bar," which is what Mozilla calls the new smart address bar in Firefox 3. It offers users smart URL suggestions as they type based on Web searches and their prior Web browsing history. He's looking to extend on this with a "linguistic user interface" that lets users type plain English commands into the browser bar. Beard pointed me towards Quicksilver and Enso as products he's cribbing from.'"
Input Devices

'Mind Gaming' Could Enter Market This Year 154

An anonymous reader writes "In an adapted version of the Harry Potter video game, players lift boulders and throw lightning bolts using only their minds. Just as physical movement changed the interface of gaming with Nintendo's Wii, the power of the mind may be the next big thing in video games. And it may come soon. Emotiv, a company based in San Francisco, says its mind-control headsets will be on shelves later this year, along with a host of novel "biofeedback" games developed by its partners. Several other companies — including EmSense in Monterey, California; NeuroSky in San Jose, California; and Hitachi in Tokyo — are also developing technology to detect players brainwaves and use them in next-gen video games."

From GNOME to KDE and Back Again 369

Slashdot's own Roblimo has an interesting introspective on what makes us so prone to liking one window manager over another. More than likely it's just the inherent laziness of most users that precludes change. "I used KDE as my primary desktop from 1996 through 2006, when I installed the GNOME version of Ubuntu and found that I liked it better than the KDE desktop I'd faced every morning for so many years. Last January, I got a new Dell Latitude D630 laptop and decided to install Kubuntu on it, but within a few weeks, I went back to GNOME. Does this mean GNOME is now a better desktop than KDE, or just that I have become so accustomed to GNOME that it's hard for me to give it up?"
Graphics

NVIDIA To Buy AGEIA 160

The two companies announced today that NVIDIA will acquire PhysX maker AGEIA; terms were not disclosed. The Daily Tech is one of the few covering the news to go much beyond the press release, mentioning that AMD considered buying AGEIA last November but passed, and that the combination positions NVIDIA to compete with Intel on a second front, beyond the GPU — as Intel purchased AGEIA competitor Havok last September. While NVIDIA talked about supporting the PhysX engine on their GPUs, it's not clear whether AGEIA's hardware-based physics accelerator will play any part in that. AMD declared GPU physics dead last year, but NVIDIA at least presumably begs to differ. The coverage over at PC Perspectives goes into more depth on what the acquisition portends for the future of physics, on the GPU or elsewhere.
Censorship

Best Buy Hands Out Cease & Desist Letters for Christmas 332

arrenlex writes "Improv Everywhere, a NY-based comedy group, was served a Cease & Desist notice by Best Buy for selling 'improv everywhere' shirts modeled after the blue Best Buy uniform. But that's not the interesting part. From the blog post: 'Here's where the story gets interesting. Today, Best Buy sent a C&D to our friend Scott Beale over at laughingsquid.com threatening legal action unless he removes the blog post referencing our shirts! They're threatening to sue someone for just covering the news story of the shirts!'"

Brawndo, It's Got Electrolytes. It's What Plants Crave 397

"This week's film blogs have been left aghast as Mike Judge's grotesque fictional energy drink Brawndo from the movie Idiocracy became a reality. To recap: Fox wouldn't support a film about Brawndo, the energy drink that destroys plants, debases the human race, and makes those who drink it 'win at yelling' but they are now putting wholehearted support behind the actual drink?" And if you haven't seen Idiocracy, you are missing out. It is the smartest stupid movie I've seen. Whoever did production design on that thing deserves an Oscar.
Microsoft

Promise of OOXML Oversight By ISO Falls Through 216

640 Comments Are Enough for Anyone writes "Microsoft is going back on one of their promises concerning OOXML. While they originally made assurances that the ISO would take control of the standard if it were approved, Microsoft is now reversing that position and keeping near-full control over OOXML with the ECMA. This is significant because the ECMA is the group that originally rubber-stamped OOXML. It seems unlikely that they will force changes to correct problems with the standard. In Microsoft's new plan, the ISO would only be allowed to publish lists of errata and would be unable to make OOXML compatible with existing ISO standards, while the ECMA would be the one to control any new versions of the standard."
NASA

Astronauts Hook Up Harmony in Lengthy Spacewalk 65

Tech.Luver writes "Astronauts spent seven hours in space to finish preparing the International Space Station for its next addition — Europe's first permanent space laboratory, the Columbus laboratory — which is sitting in the cargo bay of space shuttle Atlantis at Cape Canaveral, Florida launch pad — set to lift off on December 6."

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