Links

Sono.us: link shortener for the author
AltSci Network: sites by same author
AltSci Blog: Unified blog for Javantea. Search this blog and others by the same author

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Let's Encrypt

I have setup TLS for sono.us and www.cell-game.com using Let's Encrypt. Both certificates will expire January 25, 2016.

Instead of running letsencrypt with sudo privileges on my server, I ran letsencrypt-nosudo. According to Issue #5, this can be done using the official client as well. Because letsencrypt-nosudo was very short, I was able to modify it and vet it easily. There are weaknesses in any system, but the options are quite limited in this system. If you'd like my patch, let me know.

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Control

I thought I'd just write a few thoughts down and see where it goes. I'm having trouble writing down my thoughts. Apologies if I go too fast. I'm not in the mood to be patient.

First things first. I write a lot. My mother is a bibliophile. I am a scriptophile, I love to write. But I don't publish most of what I write. My graphic novel Javantea's Fate ground to a halt not long after it started, so I started a blog called "Making of JF" hoping to gain readership by writing keywords and drawing interesting things a few days per week. Years later very few pages of Javantea's Fate were finished, but 378 pages of Making of JF were done. That's a huge amount of writing. It was a very tough part of my life, so I'm glad that I have that corpus of writing to show what my mind was thinking. But I didn't post everything I wrote. The House MD episode "Private Lives" discussed a person who wrote down everything she was going through. I didn't do that back in 2001, but I was spending a few hours three days a week on it. I can't do that now because I signed a confidentiality contract with my previous employer and one of our clients. They went to bat for me and I owe them my current happy status but I also think that the past four years of not quite radio silence (comparatively) has warped my mind. Of course my mind was warped before I went to work in infosec, but the secrets I've kept have gnawed at me. It's the whole issue of doublethink straight from 1984. I am holding two contradicting truths to be true at the same time. Operational security is incredibly important, information should be made free. But information is power and with great power comes great responsibility. I am an irresponsible person. I don't believe in control.

Let's talk about control. There are more than a few theories on the human mind that talk about control and I'm not going to do them any justice explaining them right now. Let's say that my friend, let's call him Descartes for now says that human beings are incapable of moving. He's wrong, but let's say I'm so furious that I want to prove to him that human beings are capable of moving. So I tell him, if I am able to walk from my current position to one foot in front of you, then I can move and your statement is false. He replies, but how do you know you're moving and not changing my mind about what's going on? Occam's razor? Nope. Descartes isn't having it. So I think again. I am unable to reach out and touch you right now. If I am able to reach out and touch you, I must be able to move therefore your theory is wrong. Descartes is too smart for that. You can change my mind, so how do I know if you're actually touching me?

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New PGP Key

This is a quick message to those who communicate with me over PGP or who verify my signatures, I am now using a new key and I am retiring (but not yet revoking) the old 1954fed2 key. Many things I have written are still signed with the old key and many software packages I wrote are signed by that key so it will remain secret hopefully for a year or two. The reason I'm changing keys is because the 1954fed2 key is 1024-bit El-Gamal and is 9 years old. How many keys are 9 years old? The longevity of my key probably has to do with my trust in El-Gamal and my distrust of RSA. Over the past few months I have factored a handful of weak RSA keys and I have done a little bit of cryptanalysis. There are many weaknesses in cryptographic keys and many weaknesses in the computer systems that protect them. We hope that we will avoid these and that our random number generators are strong enough to keep the NSA from reading our personal and business conversations that we choose to encrypt with PGP. We also hope that the NSA isn't able to sign malicious software with our keys or the keys of people we rely upon to provide us with software. But in all, we can only do so much and if RSA is broken or SHA-2 is broken, then we just have to deal with the consequences. Until we know better, we have to use the best judgement we have.

So now for the key. It's been signed by 1954fed2. The key id is CBA783EF. As always, only trust fingerprints or keys signed by keys you have checked the fingerprints for.

- -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: GnuPG v2
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ZOKlvtpreM3hFCCdJantGi1m8MLUkCzfTjD4llWAVHZaJXqvxG+7S//5De3GmfDV
5SOWtv2r2CyZOEUvyEMq3u/dptGol+z9UNAw66ZtIxahluoKfNz2+nA5+QARAQAB
tBxKYXZhbnRlYSA8amF2YW50ZWFAbmVnOS5vcmc+iQI/BBMBAgApBQJUeV5nAhsD
BQkDwmcABwsJCAcDAgEGFQgCCQoLBBYCAwECHgECF4AACgkQPGjI28ung+8cYxAA
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kbW6TSVqeFPA0bX3oexEuOvftx2ervn9Yk0C9wLMA117eYo3El+gyyAS7LgdwljM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VHlcTAIbAwUJA8JnAAcLCQgHAwIBBhUIAgkKCwQWAgMBAh4BAheAAAoJEDxoyNvL
p4PvrmUP/Rjbaxt5zu9dU23g8SQLBUXxsdgZXbu3pZvzu+lwd4fvky4mjPHdjxnl
+FPHPDztP1lj0ctU6wRrYlSs5RgDVdiD29jDrVoR7pofu/LkJmdh8NtrWCXLDk0n
nP04YuEmzNt17szjfV3UPdohDuTCP6OrPSpK9YAV2n9xgBdMwBhEKVX7YKvIPuru
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EPn7C7IL0R8Ou6g7qUJd3itfk1JhWoo1zlD7Woc1O3QsIG4SwEsHH4K+XcFdl8sS
lA79Qm5ACM7A2rJg24M4ckPB8gjscMXw5fEiHu6jeCHeu5ldjSSsNwzvPmDnC/XB
LZoWBP5h3hw1YL5v34KTiE4iVieFd78b9BxHgN1nWuhE8iQIF1lHUVRL3+Sqai3q
toIKnAs6x4rSYLEMgxhJ48vd/Xi+Zmu52sdKM/5ql9zxQG7Cd+uubBhJafKxetW4
5jr+L6OplB5inH0MZgw76QDDODMrE0JJsDlT6Tq4/NXT7q5LwJeqZ25AQ7HY4HHB
BL6VfbLGNSBrrtkQeJEKSXd1FeILmcA6vH9cGzfm2lUAdnepxT3B6uEAwohUPq2x
S+M153PDmqKsyylySWpgvn+4tK5HeQw6XbYXY3KX9SNYogWCLMIFiEYEEBECAAYF
AlR84e4ACgkQpmRrABlU/tKAjACfX95rbycC39Kj97n1JCzPDONl050AoJ8HYnjl
2dZEeciqxDvW6o7ZkWc5uQINBFR5XEwBEADK5RhG0GGchvuW5CJVpLMgT9FpOcb8
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CY1ZPmFHVBRwhjKB6JzzFN3NgXPZu1f/EiC7/VACyhiRl9Rebsvc2LMUlCtV2PBg
O9qXlI5i0tVLnT+a99urJyggsg2JK9T02G3ex+HlrF/91FCHYOhsGqeXWrMrRChM
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K6k+bvnaVQUnuv903KHvXmJ4ikOtnIzPE2htn4Z1wmzVaMk94CWKtImwpah9l92v
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1lLgF1crAjNk0VIT19NN9s7NKfCMjeVIpKmFzQC4pk0ozQdYYumnCE9lse9e0s8A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=ua9y
- -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

For those who are interested in the OpenPGP format. Here is a parsing of the above public key:

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