Russell Coker: Links June 2020
Bruce Schneier wrote an informative post about Zoom security problems [1]. He recommends Jitsi which has a Debian package of their software and it s free software.
Axel Beckert wrote an interesting post about keyboards with small numbers of keys, as few as 28 [2]. It s not something I d ever want to use, but interesting to read from a computer science and design perspective.
The Guardian has a disturbing article explaining why we might never get a good Covid19 vaccine [3]. If that happens it will change our society for years if not decades to come.
Matt Palmer wrote an informative blog post about private key redaction [4]. I learned a lot from that. Probably the simplest summary is that you should never publish sensitive data unless you are certain that all that you are publishing is suitable, if you don t understand it then you don t know if it s suitable to be published!
This article by Umair Haque on eand.co has some interesting points about how Freedom is interpreted in the US [5].
This article by Umair Haque on eand.co has some good points about how messed up the US is economically [6]. I think that his analysis is seriously let down by omitting the savings that could be made by amending the US healthcare system without serious changes (EG by controlling drug prices) and by reducing the scale of the US military (there will never be another war like WW2 because any large scale war will be nuclear). If the US government could significantly cut spending in a couple of major areas they could then put the money towards fixing some of the structural problems and bootstrapping a first-world economic system.
The American Conservatrive has an insightful article Seven Reasons Police Brutality is Systemic Not Anecdotal [7].
Scientific American has an informative article about how genetic engineering could be used to make a Covid-19 vaccine [8].
Rike wrote an insightful post about How Language Changes Our Concepts [9]. They cover the differences between the French, German, and English languages based on gender and on how the language limits thoughts. Then conclude with the need to remove terms like master/slave and blacklist/whitelist from our software, with a focus on Debian but it s applicable to all software.
Gunnar Wolf also wrote an insightful post On Masters and Slaves, Whitelists and Blacklists [10], they started with why some people might not understand the importance of the issue and then explained some ways of addressing it. The list of suggested terms includes Primary-secondary, Leader-follower, and some other terms which have slightly different meanings and allow more precision in describing the computer science concepts used. We can be more precise when describing computer science while also not using terms that marginalise some groups of people, it s a win-win!
Both Rike and Gunnar were responding to a LWN article about the plans to move away from Master/Slave and Blacklist/Whitelist in the Linux kernel [11]. One of the noteworthy points in the LWN article is that there are about 70,000 instances of words that need to be changed in the Linux kernel so this isn t going to happen immediately. But it will happen eventually which is a good thing.
- [1] http://tinyurl.com/uqm8zk2
- [2] http://tinyurl.com/wrffaz9
- [3] http://tinyurl.com/y7y65m7g
- [4] http://tinyurl.com/y7ms56df
- [5] http://tinyurl.com/yan2mxlz
- [6] http://tinyurl.com/y7kvd39d
- [7] http://tinyurl.com/y7pfq3vl
- [8] http://tinyurl.com/y8ol5y9s
- [9] https://curlybracket.net/2020/06/17/how-language-changes-our-concepts.html
- [10] http://tinyurl.com/y7mgsd55
- [11] https://lwn.net/Articles/823224/
LWN published today yet another great piece of writing, 
Only... _Some_ blocking did hurt Telmex's users: The ability to play
an active role in Tor. The ability to host Tor relays at home. Why?
Because the *consensus protocol* requires relays to be reachable in
order to be measured from the network's *DirAuths*.
### Technical work to prove the blocking
We dug into the issue as part of the work we carried out in the
project I was happy to lead between 2018 and 2019, *UNAM/DGAPA/PAPIME
PE102718*. In March 2019, I presented a paper titled [Distributed
Detection of Tor Directory Authorities Censorship in
Mexico](https://www.thinkmind.org/index.php?view=article&articleid=icn_2019_6_20_38010)
([alternative download](http://ru.iiec.unam.mx/4538/) in the [Topic on
Internet Censorship and Surveillance (TICS) track](https://tics.site/)
of the XVIII International Conference on Networks.
Then... We had many talks inside our group, but nothing seemed to move
for several months. We did successfully push for increasing the number
of Tor relays in Mexico (we managed to go from two to eleven stable
relays not much in absolute terms, but quite good relatively, even
more considering most users were not technically able to run one!)
So, we are already halfway through DebCamp (which means, you can come
and hang out with us in the 
So, the self-signed certificate the printer issued at itself expired
116 years before even being issued. (is this maybe a Y2k38 bug?
Sounds like it!) Interesting thing, my CUPS log mentions the printer
credentials to expire at the beginning of the Unix Epoch
(
However, clicking on Configure leads me to the not very
reassuring
I don t remember what I did for the next couple of minutes. Kept
fuming Until I parsed again the output of 
Click on New self-signed certificate , click on Next, a couple of
reloads And a very nice color print came out of the printer, yay!
Now, it still baffles me (of course I checked!): The self-signed
certificate is now said to come from
