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Comment Re: Who is eMudhra (Score 3, Interesting) 19

They primarily manage company-internal CAs for big businesses, which they seem to do well. AFAICT, they noticed that their security infrastructure was compliant for managing a global CA, and thought they might as well also have that as a product. However, there are some operational differences between an enterprise CA and a public one, including that companies want to issue client certs to employees but nobody really does global client certs. That means that they had an intermediate CA for global client certs that they never used, but it was in the standard trust store, and nobody tested that it was handled right until Wayne just went through the standard trust store making sure a new certificate weakness detector didn't give false positives.

So eMudhra correctly handled all the certs they issued, and all the certs they used to sign them, but they got some extra CA certs trusted that they didn't really need, because it would make their side business more similar to their main business, and this caused a major problem.

Chances are that they actually got a real random number out of a HSM for the bad CA certs, but accidentally made the certs with the index of the random number instead of the actual number. (That is, they got the 4th random number and made a cert for 4 instead of the number.) I wouldn't be surprised if they stored the correct private key, which would have made leaf certs that didn't validate because the intermediate was wrong, but they never used it to find this problem.

Comment Re: Phishing Tests (Score 2) 84

The email wasn't even too good to be true. The nasty phishing emails are the ones where the recipient is supposed to get a real email on the topic, but it's because of a publicly known event and outsiders could easily make up the content, so they just need to find a bunch of likely recipients.

I think the "you've been assigned the mandatory phishing training" emails should come from an external sender and contain a link to get into the extended training, and you should only get the short refresher by finding it through verified sources. Not only would this be a good placement test, it would test that official communications are actually hard to fake and possible to verify using the process in the training.

"In response to the embarrassing data breach that hit the news recently, we've assigned every employee at the company an online training session about phishing at this link. By sure to take it immediately, because it's a legal requirement for our settlement and delays could affect your employment." --Russian Hackers

Comment Re: Yes (Score 1) 202

Honestly, the employers were the first to start racing for the bottom there. For years they have relied on employees having an outdated sense of loyalty to the company that hasn't reciprocated in decades.

Much of the criticism of GenZ in the workplace is really just them giving to the employer what the employer offers them. Perhaps it's time for government to re-take its essential role in leveling the playing field so new players can enter the market and push the dinosaurs into their richly deserved tar pits.

Comment Re: Yes (Score 1) 202

Id doesn't NECESSARILY debase the social fabric. But if it does things like buying crooked inspectors to overlook sub-standard materials, buying off a zoning board to basically take over a residential area (*cough* datacenters *cough*), pays sub-standard wages under the table to people who 'need' to keep a low profile, and then when something goes wrong, scampers off leaving an impoverished shell behind to go bankrupt so the public has to pay for the clean-up, yes it debases the social fabric.

Comment Re:Yes (Score 1) 202

By separating the decision making from the execution, the corporation is the perfect psychopath. The structure not only allows all parties to rationalize their own guilt away, it also protects those who make unconscionable decisions from the legal consequences of their actions. That combination can only ever produce a monster. The LAST thing we need running them is someone educated to break the rules (law) when 'necessary'.

Even from the very beginnings of Capitalism, Smith admonished that corporate charters must be handed out exceedingly sparingly and they must be held strictly to their charters. Also note that all corporate charters are in legal theory supposed to be for the public good. Not just as a nice idea but as one of the mandates. A company acting against the public interest is supposed to be dissolved for violating it's charter. Clearly we have failed in that. Let's not double down on the failure by educating people in the image of the incorporated monster and putting them in charge.

There may be some use to something like the LLC, but there seems to be little economic use for corporate personhood. The only public value of a corporation (if/when it has any) is economic.

Comment Re:Nobody mention TAI (Score 1) 91

I never said to adjust it only once. For scientific use time should be specified as TTTT:TT:TT:TTTTT - PPPPPPPPPP where PPPPPPPP is the periods of cesium per second used for that measurement. For everyday use no need to distinguish the varying time 'constant.'

That was tried before 1972. The frequent adjustments of the length of the second became cumbersome to track, so the in 1972 the switch was made to the current system of constant length seconds with leap seconds to keep UTC tracking the rotation of the Earth..

Comment Re:good thing I guess (Score 1) 91

When I worked for a broadcasting software company that had customers worldwide, everything was using TC (timecode), PTP, and of course we needed to support leap year, different timezone etc when a broadcast was scheduled between different zone around the world (it can be complicated) ; and we needed to support leap second by contract! Easiest thing was to add a 1s black frame after the schedule after reaching midnight. Supporting negative leap second would have been complicated... Good thing we drop it I think.

That's very interesting.

To support negative leap seconds you can insert one second of black on normal days, two seconds of black on days with a positive leap second, and no seconds of black on days with a negative leap second.

Comment Re:Nobody mention TAI (Score 1) 91

Atomic time is based on 9,192,631,770 periods of cesium? why not adjust the period count to not require any leaping? Fix the damn problem at the source and be done with it. This new strategy is just in accordance with the lazy do-nothings. Most networked time is synchronized for local clock drift constantly, most chips are simply not that accurate, so change the source clock and they won't even need to be fixed as the constant syncing corrects for such a small change automagically.

That won't work because the rotation rate of the Earth is not uniform. No matter what you pick for the length of the second, the Earth will not always turn in 86,400 seconds.

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