S1E12: "Fight for Your Right (to Parity)"

Posted 2016-08-01 05:17
Modified 2017-02-14 18:09
Comments 0

Newsworthy happenings and also mention some tips on getting that A+ on Qualys SSL Labs you’ve always dreamed of.

And Jthan shows that he doesn’t understand what “privacy” means.

• News
• Notes
• Sysbadministration Award
• Errata
• Music

News

Starts at 21m42s.

• Paden has a new kid! His name is Oakley. No, not the sunglasses.
• There’s an infected Pokémon GO APK running around.
• MIT has a new anonymity tool that’s supposedly more secure than Tor.
  • And I hope it kills the current iteration of Tor.
  • Dear Tor: shape up or ship out.
• PKMNGO nudes are a thing now (but also, lol Kotaku)
  • This is mostly just here to make you laugh. It’s definitely not what I’d consider “news”, per se, or even a piece of worthy journalism.
  • Seriously. Kotaku is the tabloids of the tech world.
  • But the concept itself? Hilarious.
• There is being work done to get snap packages working in Arch Linux.
• The Windows 10 free upgrade period has ended as of July 29, 2016.
• Make sure you register for FOSSCON 2016!
• There is (another) D-Link vulnerability.
• US voter registrations are being sold.
• Private computers are ruled to not be private property in certain cases.
  • Namely, with “certain cases” being “convenient to law enforcement/investigation officials”.

Notes

Starts at 37m40s.

I was drinking water. Jthan wasn’t drinking anything. Paden was drinking another Stella Artois.

• Securing your webserver!
  • Want to get an A+ on the Qualys SSL Labs? Conveniently, I wrote an article on it before we did the episode!
  • Also, beware of httpoxy! (RH vuln info here)
  • We talk about “not asking bad questions” in S1E5.

Sysbadministration Award

In this segment, we highlight system administration mistakes. Think of them as the IT equivalent of the Darwin Awards. (57m00s)

A continuation of the tale from last episode that comes from our IRC channel:

<[REDACTED]> paden, my never ending saga with [REDACTED] continues
<[REDACTED]> when a tech wants to do a remote session with me
<[REDACTED]> but his hours are, in est, 6am till 10am, then noon till 1pm
<[REDACTED]> i asked for a new tech with more traditional hours because that shit wasn't going to work for me
<[REDACTED]> i tried going around him with another tech who i discovered is really fucking good
<[REDACTED]> but they figured me out and she had to tell me she couldn't work on his ticket
<[REDACTED]> so i begrudgingly asked what his hours of availablity were, and he came back with that
<[REDACTED]> would you believe i'm beginning to hate this fucking product?
<[REDACTED]> i can find faults with most products, so i don't tend to hate them right away
<[REDACTED]> but the more bugs i find and the more idiot support i deal with
<[REDACTED]> the more i look at the [REDACTED- LARGE NUMBER] a year we spend on this shit and think
<[REDACTED]> "maybe we should find something better

Errata

• Jthan was super quiet this episode, even after I amplified him. He had a new recording setup, so we need to play around with it.
• If you don’t listen to Dual Core, you should.
  • More shoutouts: Nibalizer, Jim/JediJF
• I say voting machines are “tumbler locks”- oops, I meant “tubular lock”! (Or they may be wafer locks… It’s something really not the best either way.)
• I mention halthcare.org. I MEANT HEALTHCARE.GOV OOPS.
• The following (very important!) note of importance came in from Skip Oliva, a legal writer who definitely knows his legal stuff more than we do:

Hey guys,

I’m a legal writer who covers the courts for a number of clients. Regarding your discussion
of the Virginia Playpen decision, it’s important to understand what is and is not a “precedent.”
A single federal district judge, as in the case here, cannot create precedent. In other words,
another judge on the same court would not be bound to follow this judge’s ruling.

Only the higher appellate courts can establish precedent. So in the Playpen case, the Virginia
judge’s decision can (and I assume will) be appealed to the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals.
If the Court of Appeals upholds the judge’s decision—which I imagine is unlikely—then it
becomes binding precedent for all of the trial courts within the 4th Circuit (Maryland,
Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia). And obviously, if this case ever made
its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, that court’s decision would then become binding precedent
for the entire country.

Frankly, it’s not unusual for lone trial judges to issue batshit crazy decisions like this one.
It happens all the time, especially with respect to technology issues where there is a high
degree of, shall we say, judicial ignorance.

Thanks again, Skip, for the correction and for giving us some insight into how these things play out!

Music

Author r00t^2
Categories Season One