How much data are the most popular apps on Android and iOS leaking to third parties (i.e. people who have nothing to do with the app you’re using). A LOT!
Category: English
Hello, Is That You?
It looks like Google has been recording your voice searches (German). There have been rumors all along and it was assumed this was going on. They have the actual voice recordings and their transcripts and also generate a “finger print” of your voice to be able to verify it.
If you extrapolate from that they can by now
- transcribe speech almost instantaneously,
- have (over time) enough data to recognize your voice among others and
- are also able to speak in your voice stitching together chopped-up samples of your speech.
*shudder*
CFSSL FTW
After reading how CloudFlare handles their PKI and that LetsEncrypt will use it I wanted to give CFSSL a shot.
Reading the project’s documentation doesn’t really help in building your own CA, but searching the Internet I found Fernando Barillas’ blog explaining how to create your own root certificate and how to create intermediate certificates from this.
I took it a step further I wrote a script generating new certificates for several services with different intermediates and possibly different configurations (e.g. depending on your distro and services certain cyphers (e.g. using ECC) may not be supported).
I also streamlined generating service specific key, cert and chain files. 😀
Have a look at the full Gist or just the most interesting part:
You’ll still have to deploy them yourself.
Update 2016-10-04:
Fixed some issues with this Gist.
- Fixed a bug where intermediate CA certificates weren’t marked as CAs any more
- Updated the example CSRs and the script so it can now be run without errors
Update 2017-10-08:
- Cleaned up `renew-certs.sh` by extracting functions for generating root CA, intermediate CA and service keys.
youpronounce.it
YouPronounce.it allows you to enter an (English) word and finds YouTube videos where this word is used, jumps to the exact point so you can hear how that word is pronounced. 😀
A Service Monitor built with Polymer
I tried to build a service monitor having the following features:
- showing the reachability of HTTP servers
- plotting the amount of messages in a specific RabbitMQ queue
- plotting the amount of queues with specific prefixes
- showing the status of RabbitMQ queues i.e. how many messages are in there? are there any consumers? are they hung?
- showing the availability of certain Redis clients
Well, you can find the result on GitHub.
It uses two things I published before: polymer-flot and flot-sparklines. 😀
An example dashboard:
Flot Sparklines with Polymer
After wrapping Flot for Polymer I needed an element that would present a sparklines style graph.
I made one and put it into a Gist along with a demo on how to use it.
too long for Unix domain socket
If you’re an Ansible user and encounter the following error:
unix_listener: "..." too long for Unix domain socket
you need to set the control_path option in your ansible.cfg file to tell SSH to use shorter path names for the control socket. You should have a look at the ssh_config(5) man page (under
ControlPath
) for a list of possible substitutions.
I chose:
control_path = %(directory)s/ssh-%%C
Flot in Polymer
I was playing with Polymer at work, building a service monitor with it. At some point I needed charts and Flot seemed to be the simplest solution.
So after a little work I managed to wrap Flot for Polymer (on GitHub). ?
Inner City “Dueling” Over “Micro Aggressions”
From the comments section of a summary of a paper called “Microaggression and Moral Cultures“:
Re: In the inner city men are dueling over the smallest of, er, micro aggressions.
TMMD ?
NSA’s MITM attack on Cryptome
The moment you find out the NSA is performing MITM attacks on your website’s visitors from a leaked slide deck:
But here is the thing — and this is crucial — the address for Cryptome is listed to be the location of a fiber optic cable junction in Sterling, VA (next to an Amusement Machine company)… which is quite some distance away from your location in NYC, and a considerable distance from your ISP who hosts your file, and it is located away from any signal switching systems use in the area, but it is virtually next door to fiber that goes to a large NSA listening post nearby.
The reason it is notable, is that someone at or near the location in Sterling, VA is performing a MITM attack on Cryptome visitors, and this image out of the slidedeck with the two GPS coordinates is the U.S. Government performing a MITM attack against Cryptome and sharing the collected intelligence with the Brits, or the U.S. Government giving the British government backdoor access into the U.S. (illegal) collection systems.