taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

• Emergent Chaos: Certifiably Silly : Adam Shostack tells the truth re Firefox 3’s stupid self-signed cert bug. ‘imposing yet another security tax, based on a static analysis of attackers and some certificate authority pixie dust, isn’t going to help things for very long.’
  (tags: firefox firefox-3 security certificates ssl tls ca pki adam-shostack ui usability)

• Image Cerberus: a SpamAssassin plug-in against image spam : a new plugin, subject of a paper at this year’s CEAS conference it looks like
  (tags: plugins spamassassin anti-spam image-spam images ceas conferences)

• Twitter drops SMS-notification support for EU users : interesting, I haven’t received the mail, and it claims to still be sending updates to my Irish mobile (update: I’m not actually *getting* any updates, though)
  (tags: twitter phones mobile sms ireland eu uk)

Tags: adam-shostack, anti-spam, ca, ceas, certificates, conferences, eu, firefox, firefox-3, image-spam, images, ireland, mobile, phones, pki, plugins, security, sms, spamassassin, ssl, tls, twitter, ui, uk, usability

Why San Francisco’s network admin went rogue an “eyewitness account” with allegations about the SF network admin in question — no documentation, passwords kept to himself instead of shared with his team, the entire network maintained by 1 person, never took holidays, bad tempered and stubborn — sounds like a recipe for classic BOFH disaster

Yehrin Tong Illustration cool, hyper-detailed hand-drawn tiling patterns

working around installation bug in File::Scan::ClamAV running the test suite results in “ERROR: Can’t open/parse the config file clamav.conf”; looks like File::Scan::ClamAV is now unmaintained :(

ALIFE Conference to reveal bio-inspired spam detection ‘this bio-inspired spam detection algorithm, based on the cross-regulation modeal of T-cell dynamics, is equally as competitive [sic] as state-of-the-art spam binary classifiers and provides a deeper understanding of the behaviour of T-cell cross-regulation systems.’

Tags: admin, alife, antispam, art, bofh, bugs, clamav, conferences, cpan, graphics, illustration, immune-system, install, modules, networking, oh-dear, patterns, perl, presentations, san-francisco, southampton, sysadmin, t-cells, tiles, war-stories, workarounds, yehrin-tong

Well, that was great fun — well worth the trip down. Got to put a load of faces to names, meeting up with a fair few people I’ve been conversing with online — and a few I hadn’t met before, online or off. Plenty of thought-provoking and interesting chats, too!

My talk went down well, I think. Unfortunately, we didn’t quite know how to operate the projector, so the attendees, while they got to hear me talk, didn’t get to read the leftmost quarter or so of each slide ;)

To make up for it, here they are:

OpenOffice 2 source (234k), PDF (320k), HTML

(PS: Regarding GUI interfaces to managing EC2 — a question that came up in the Q&A — here’s one that looks pretty interesting…)

Tags: aws, barcamp, blogging, conferences, ireland, unconferences, waterford

Back from ApacheCon!

I’ve got to say, I found it really useful this year. Last year, I was pretty new to the ASF, and found that my expectations of ApacheCon didn’t quite match reality; it wasn’t a rip-roaring success exactly, for me, as a result.

However, many details of how the ASF works — and how the conference itself works and is organised — are much clearer after you’ve spent some time lurking and absorbing practices in the meantime. (The visibility one gets into the process as a member of the ASF makes this a lot easier.)

Result: it was much more of a success for me this time around. Plenty of networking, putting faces to the names, hanging out, and discussing many aspects of our work.

The hackathon really worked out, too; while we didn’t produce a hell of a lot of code per se, it made for a good ‘developer summit’ and I think we established solid agreement on SpamAssassin’s short-term directions and goals. (summary: rules, and faster).

On top of that, I got to meet up with Colm MacCarthaigh and Cory Doctorow for discussion of Digital Rights Ireland. Looks like I’ll be spending a bit of time on that next year ;)

Finally: Solaris. On Monday night, I got to sit down with Daniel Price, one of the kernel engineers behind Solaris Zones, work through a quick demo of a bug I was running into with chroot(2) and zones on our rule-QA buildbot server, and watch as he visually traced it through the OpenSolaris kernel source on the web. From this — and from talking to Daniel — it’s pretty clear that things have changed at Sun. Pretty much the entire Solaris operating system is now a full-on open-source project; it’s not just a marketing gimmick. The source is up there on the web, that’s the source for the code they’re running now, and there’s no half-assed ‘freeze it, cut out the good bits, and throw it over the wall’ fake-open-source tricks.

The concept of getting this level of access to Solaris source code and engineers, would have blown my mind when I was Iona’s sysadmin back in the 1990s ;) I’m very impressed.

Tags: apache, apachecon, apacheconus2005, asf, conferences, open-source, opensolaris, solaris, spamassassin, sun, virtualization, zones

In a couple of weeks, I’ll be going to San Diego for ApacheCon US 2005 (including the hackathon beforehand). There’ll be quite a few other SpamAssassin committers there, too, so if you’re working with SA, or interested in getting some face time with the developers, there’s no better way of doing so.

Tags: apache, apachecon, conferences, san-diego, spamassassin

ToorCon this year looks good. I’m not going, but I wish I’d gotten it together. There’s a couple of spam/phishing-related talks, and a data-visualisation talk by Christopher Abad; hopefully he might diverge into some of this phishing data he talks about in this First Monday paper. Dan Kaminsky’s talk looks interesting, too –

Application-layer attacks against MD5

We will show how web pages and other executable environments can be manipulated to emit arbitrarily different content with identical MD5 hashes.

Sounds like fun!

Tags: conferences, hashing, md5, security, toorcon

Conferences: Hey — I’m talking at ToorCon 2004 down in San Diego this weekend! Come along and check it out, if you can.

I’d better hurry up and file my presentation slides pronto ;) The topic is:

Spam Forensics: Reverse-Engineering Spammer Tactics

In this talk, I’ll discuss how the SpamAssassin project has identified reliable signatures indicating that a message is spam, by reverse-engineering spammer tactics from the spam mails themselves. I’ll also discuss several specific features that we have identified, how we found them, and why the spammers add them.

Tags: conferences, forensics, hey, presentation, pronto, reverse, spam, spammer, toorcon, topic, weekend

Conferences: LayerOne was seriously great! Got to meet up with some really interesting people; discuss some nifty stuff; and get some new angles on the whole hacking scene.

Seriously, that was well worthwhile, especially in terms of potential new ways to deal with spam, and issues to watch out for in terms of spammer techniques in future. A great techie conf, and the boozing^Wsocialising was pretty good too ;)

I’m actually giving some thought to going to Defcon after that…

Tags: conf, conferences, future, got, layerone, scene, seriously, spam, spammer, stuff, techie

Conferences: I’m going to LayerOne; it looks interesting, and I’ve been hoping to bump into Danny O’Brien (who’s there doing his Life Hacks talk) for a couple of drinks and a blather for quite a while. Other speakers look similarly interesting, in an ‘offbeat hacker conference’ way, so I think it’ll be fun.

Conflicts with The Streets playing the Wiltern though, but c’est la vie ;)

Tags: blather, conference, conferences, couple, hacker, hacks, layerone, life, talk, way, while