security

Freedom to Tinker Freedom to Tinker
With elections on our minds (vote Tuesday!) here's Ed Felton describing a new voting system called E2E-V. I'm not sure I get the nuances of the coin-flip challenge voters but it sounds like a much better system than our current black-box, insecure, privately owned machines. And of course my favorite system is Oregon's statewide mail-in system. I'm sure it's not as secure as end-to-end verifiable cryptography but I think the convenience and ease of understanding how it works means more people participate.
Strange Loop IP Spoofing Talk

An engineer at Cloudflare shares some data from the front lines of fighting DDoS attacks. He also makes the connection between DDoS and service centralization and offers some potential solutions. (Unfortunately I don't see any incentive for big companies to fix this problem.)
  • This is a fantastic idea! You install a bit of software on your server to automate the security certificate garbage. It'd be great for low-stakes sites where the hassle of setup is the barrier.
  • Leonard has a great summary of the Apple security problem: "Either Apple’s security was so incompetent or negligent that they have not been aware of what was going on, or they knew, but actively ignored the issue and decided that it was not worth fixing."
  • This looks like a nice stab at making public key cryptography more user-friendly.
  • Mat Honan is experiencing a nightmare cascade failure of interconnected services. This is a good reminder to back things up and make sure your passwords are unique for each service.
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