RaSchi’s Valhalla

In case you wonder what these acronyms mean:
Global Information Assurance Certification - GIAC Certified Intrusion Analyst
If you’re interested, find out more here and here. And what is this all about? I’ve just passed the certification exams and so from now on (for the next four years at least),  I may call myself a GCIA. I’ve […]

The American Civil Liberties Union has installed a countdown labeled the Surveillance Society Clock. It is six minutes to noon.
The timer is supposed to alert the public to the increasing trend towards a surveillance society. The initiative imitates a similar countdown which was set up by nuclear scientists after the WWII and which was supposed […]

Today I dared a little. I upgraded the firmware of my Fritz!Box. It shipped with the firmware 29.04.22 and recently 29.04.29 was published. I was especially interested in running WPA and WPA2 in parallel, also I like the alarm function to be dependent on the weekday. I wasn’t brave/stupid enough to go and update just […]

What happens if you apply techniques or technology (or probably any other domain knowledge) which you only master half way through (at best)? Well, you might end up in quite some trouble and depending on the type of failure, you might end up caught with your pants down in public. The latter is what happened […]

If you read the last post about FONs new router and were interested, you should also note that apparently the login procedure is not as safe as it should be.

The open WLAN community FON has released their first own WLAN access point and router under the name La Fonera. The router is sold for $5 or €5 plus shipping and it is required that the router is activated as a FON router within 30 days, otherwise $/€ 50 are charged. Previously, FON merely offered […]

The CATO institute has published a whitepaper (PDF) on the Bush administration’s linguistical mvoes to obscure the actions and measures they take against terrorism. Examples include:

Circumvention of court approval for search warrants by labeling them “National Security Letters” (p. 3).
Prisoners’ suicides are labeled as “asymmetrical warfare” (p. 4).
By definingt the entire world as the battlefield, […]

Bruce Schneier reminds people of what he posted in his crptogram newsletter a few days after September 11th and on September 30th five years ago. It’s amazing how right he was (and is).

If you’re using OpenSLL libraries and digital signatures in your application, you should update the OpenSSL version you are using. A security advisory by the OpenSSL team points out that under certain common circumstances signatures can be forged. This is fixed in OpenSSL 0.9.7k and 0.9.8c. Patches are available for versions 0.9.6, 0.9.7, 0.9.8, and […]

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghous (TRAC) at Syracuse University has analyzed justice departments’ statistics to assess the effectiveness of the “war on terror”. The results are now published in a TRAC Report.
In his blog, Bruce Schneier highlights some of the ironic results. You want examples? The median sentence in terror-related trials range from 28 to […]