Arthur Besse
cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions
- 122 Posts
- 200 Comments
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto Asklemmy@lemmy.ml•What's a random line from a movie that fans of it will instantly know?English3·13 days agoYou better find a way to make it easy, soldier, or I’m gonna start pushing buttons!
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto Privacy@lemmy.ml•US embassy wants 'every social media username of past five years' for new visasEnglish301·13 days agoin other news, the market price of hacked credentials for MAGA-friendly social media accounts:
📈
note
in case it is unclear to anyone: the above is a joke.
in all seriousness, renaming someone else’s account and presenting it to CBP as one’s own would be dangerous and inadvisable. a more prudent course of action at this time is to avoid traveling to the united states.
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlOPMto Linux@lemmy.ml•postmarketOS v25.06: the one with systemdEnglish11·13 days agoyou can still use OpenRC instead if you want, and sxmo will continue to do so by default.
you can read here about why they added systemd.
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto Asklemmy@lemmy.ml•What's a random line from a movie that fans of it will instantly know?English10·14 days agoThe acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of Humanity.
The w700ds/w701ds (“Dual Screen”)
… was not Lenovo’s last try at putting two screens on a laptop; see also the X1 Fold and Yoga 9i
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMto Linux@lemmy.ml•Just wanted to show off the lowest end hardware I ever ran Linux onEnglish5·20 days agoI’m planning on revitalizing and bringing this old Itautec to the 21st century
I think it was born in the 21st century? From this it looks like the first Celeron M was in 2004, and the first at that clockspeed was 2005.
Also, 2GB of RAM is plenty for many purposes - that’s more than any Raspberry Pi before the Pi 4 had!
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto Greentext@sh.itjust.works•game has multiple factions fighting each otherEnglish4·24 days ago
were you careful to be sure to get the parts that have the key’s name and email address?
It should be if there is chunks missing its unusable. At least thats my thinking, since gpg is usually a binary and ascii armor makes it human readable. As long as a person cannot guess the blacked out parts, there shouldnt be any data.
you are mistaken. A PGP key is a binary structure which includes the metadata. PGP’s “ascii-armor” means base64-encoding that binary structure (and putting the BEGIN and END header lines around it). One can decode fragments of a base64-encoded string without having the whole thing. To confirm this, you can use a tool like
xxd
(orhexdump
) - try pasting half of your ascii-armored key in tobase64 -d | xxd
(and hit enter and ctrl-D to terminate the input) and you will see the binary structure as hex and ascii - including the key metadata. i think either half will do, as PGP keys typically have their metadata in there at least twice.
how did you choose which areas to redact? were you careful to be sure to get the parts that have the key’s name and email address?
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlOPto United States | News & Politics@lemmy.ml•The legal issues raised by Trump sending the National Guard to L.A.English115·28 days agoThe Russian trolls are working overtime to justify military action against American people at the objection of the governor and mayor.
For sure, the American people could never be ignorant xenophobic bigots like that on their own, it must be foreigners influencing them and/or posting those comments!
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto Asklemmy@lemmy.ml•What is a movie that "looks like" it would suck, but actually is well written and acted and a good time?English10·29 days agoTeknolust (2002)
CW: y2k aesthetic, Tilda Swinton in multiple roles.
Do not read wikipedia’s synopsis of it first unless you want to spoil it. you can find it here on archive.org.
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto Lemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world•Happy anniversary of the day absolutely nothing happened at nowhere square!English1111·29 days agoit’s not a particularly long post; if you’re really confident in the veracity of the narrative you’re familiar with then you shouldn’t need to be afraid to read something that contradicts it.
(and btw, neither of the two posts i linked claims nothing happened there.)
Due to the Norwegian language conflict there have been various competing forms of written Norwegian over time, two of which have been officially recognized as equally valid by the Norwegian parliament since 1885. Both apparently changed their spelling of “slut” to “sludd” in the 21st century, Bokmål in 2005 and Nynorsk in 2012, presumably in an effort to encourage English speakers to make jokes about Swedes and Danes instead of them.
TLDR: this is way more broken than I initially realized
To clarify a few things:
-No JavaScript is sent after the file metadata is submitted
So, when i wrote “downloaders send the filename to the server prior to the server sending them the javascript” in my first comment, I hadn’t looked closely enough - I had just uploaded a file and saw that the download link included the filename in the query part of the URL (the part between the ? and the #). This is the first thing that a user sends when downloading, before the server serves the javascript, so, the server clearly can decide to serve malicious javascript or not based on the filename (as well as the user’s IP).
However, looking again now, I see it is actually much worse - you are sending the password in the URL query too! So, there is no need to ever serve malicious javascript because currently the password is always being sent to the server.
As I said before, the way other similar sites do this is by including the key in the URL fragment which is not sent to the server (unless the javascript decides to send it). I stopped reading when I saw the filename was sent to the server and didn’t realize you were actually including the password as a query parameter too!
😱
The rest of this reply was written when I was under the mistaken assumption that the user needed to type in the password.
That’s a fundamental limitation of browser-delivered JavaScript, and I fully acknowledge it.
Do you acknowledge it anywhere other than in your reply to me here?
This post encouraging people to rely on your service says “That means even I, the creator, can’t decrypt or access the files.” To acknowledge the limitations of browser-based e2ee I think you would actually need to say something like “That means even I, the creator, can’t decrypt or access the files (unless I serve a modified version of the code to some users sometimes, which I technically could very easily do and it is extremely unlikely that it would ever be detected because there is no mechanism in browsers to ensure that the javascript people are running is always the same code that auditors could/would ever audit).”
The text on your website also does not acknowledge the flawed paradigm in any way.
This page says "Even if someone compromised the server, they’d find only encrypted files with no keys attached — which makes the data unreadable and meaningless to attackers. To acknowledge the problem here this sentence would need to say approximately the same as what I posted above, except replacing “unless I serve” with “unless the person who compromised it serves”. That page goes on to say that “Journalists and whistleblowers sharing sensitive information securely” are among the people who this service is intended for.
The server still being able to serve malicious JS is a valid and well-known concern.
Do you think it is actually well understood by most people who would consider relying on the confidentiality provided by your service?
Again, I’m sorry to be discouraging here, but: I think you should
drastically re-frame what you’re offering to inform people that it is best-effort and the confidentiality provided is not actually something to be relied upon alone.The front page currently says it offers “End-to-end encryption for complete security”. If someone wants/needs to encrypt files so that a website operator cannot see the contents, then doing so using software ephemerally delivered from that same website is not sufficient: they should encrypt the file first using a non-web-based tool.update: actually you should take the site down, at least until you make it stop sending the key to the server.
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMto Linux@lemmy.ml•Cross-platform video player GrayJay now available as FlatpakEnglish93·1 month agoalso “you may not remove or obscure any functionality in the software related to payment to the Licensor in any copy you distribute to others.” 🤡
FUTO’s license meets neither the free software definition nor the open source definition.
Btw, DeadDrop was the original name of Aaron Swartz’ software which later became SecureDrop.
it’s zero-knowledge encryption. That means even I, the creator, can’t decrypt or access the files.
I’m sorry to say… this is not quite true. You (or your web host, or a MITM adversary in possession of certificate authority key) can replace the source code at any time - and can do so on a per-user basis, targeting specific IP addresses - to make it exfiltrate the secret key from the uploader or downloader.
Anyone can audit the code you’ve published, but it is very difficult to be sure that the code one has audited is the same as the code that is being run each time one is using someone else’s website.
This website has a rather harsh description of the problem: https://www.devever.net/~hl/webcrypto … which concludes that all web-based cryptography like this is fundamentally snake oil.
Aside from the entire paradigm of doing end-to-end encryption using javascript that is re-delivered by a webserver at each use being fundamentally flawed, there are a few other problems with your design:
- allowing users to choose a password and using it as the key means that most users’ keys can be easily brute-forced. (Since users need to copy+paste a URL anyway, it would make more sense to require them to transmit a high-entropy key along with it.)
- the filenames are visible to the server
- downloaders send the filename to the server prior to the server sending them the javascript which prompts for the password and decrypts the file. this means you have the ability to target maliciously modified versions of the javascript not only by IP but also by filename.
There are many similar browser-based things which still have the problem of being browser-based but which do not have these three problems: they store the file under a random identifier (or a hash of the ciphertext), and include a high-entropy key in the “fragment” part of the URL (the part after the
#
symbol) which is by default not sent to the server but is readable by the javascript. (Note that the javascript still can send the fragment to the server, however… it’s just that by default the browser does not.)I hope this assessment is not too discouraging, and I wish you well on your programming journey!
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com•Bought a Bluray Disc. Sony still tracks you.English30·1 month agoThe industry will take whatever steps it needs to protect itself and protect its revenue streams ... It will not lose that revenue stream, no matter what ... Sony is going to take aggressive steps to stop this. We will develop technology that transcends the individual user. We will firewall Napster at source – we will block it at your cable company. We will block it at your phone company. We will block it at your ISP. We will firewall it at your PC ... These strategies are being aggressively pursued because there is simply too much at stake. - Steve Heckler, senior vice president of Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc, August 2000
quote from https://web.archive.org/web/20010201204600/http://www.nyfairuse.org/sony.xhtml
via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal
Wikipedia says:
But know your meme attributes its meme status to this tumblr post from 2013:
Contrary to comments in many places like this reddit thread from 2018, I suspect the phrase wasn’t actually used in many textbooks or very commonly known prior to that tumblr post.
(If you search on Google Books you can find numerous textbooks using the phrase. Range-based search on Google Books appears to be broken so I’m not sure, but all the ones I checked were published well after 2013.)