Well, following a suggestion from my wife, I decided to bring up a mascotte for this website.
I admit that it was a lot of fun playing with Gimp and Inkscape, which are really great tools.
So please welcome our new little spiky friend :
I hope that you have nothing against hedgehogs, which should be inspiring the security industry !
After I tried to set this blog as my own OpenID provider using the OpenID WordPress plugin, I got a weired error message:
“This is an OpenID Server, Nothing to See Here… Move Along”
I could not find what as wrong, as all prerequisites were fulfilled, until I find this nice post. The patch there works very well, thanks to the author (it is a shame that it wasn’t yet included in the trunk).
This and the lack of active open-source development around OpenID seems to show that it is not really popular. It is a shame because it is a pretty good solution against the multiplication of passwords. I wouldn’t want to use OpenID for my bank account access, but it is just right for many sites, forums, etc. Unfortunately, no many sites are yet OpenID enabled and the choice when you want to become your own provider is very limited (most of projects listed in the official wiki are dead, with no update for the last 2 years).
You may have noticed that the site had a lot of downtimes recently.
I was having a daily kernel panic and weired file system corruptions, which I first tought were coming from the successive crashes and reboots.
However, while it happened again and again and I could not find any good reason for that, I became more doubtful about my hardware and finally found the culprit.
I booted on Memtest, installed with zypper from the repo, which immediately displayed a lot of errors. The tedious task of isolating the faulty memory module revealed that it was one from a Ballistix bundle that I bought just 3 months ago.
I usually use Kingston or Corsair and never had such a problem, but maybe I was just lucky. I will test now the customer service of Ballistix.
No, it is not a computer this time. And yes, it is off topic, but I wanted to thank a Japanese friend for his gift and, at the same time, promote his work :
He owns a small company in Hokkaido producing a number of wood toys. He is an artist and designs them, which are all hand made and from the local wood.
In our industrial society, where all toys are made of plastic in chinese factories, it is refreshing to see such authentic and nice wood toys.
So think about it for your kids. His website is only in Japanese for now but if you are interested, drop an e-mail and my friend will certainly answer to you shortly (last link in the menu page).
And Google is making so much noise about that ?
If what is said is true, it nothing else but a trojan. A good one, but nothing new otherwise.
I would also say that the most targeted company was Microsoft. After all, it was an Internet Explorer 0-days breach that was exploited. Once the computer was infected, I bet that the trojan was doing much more than just targeting Gmail. To maximise the chance of an attack to succeed, a good trojan comes with a bunch of functionalities and harvest as many things as possible on the computer. Thus I doubt the target was only Google.
As Steve Ballmer said (hey, I didn’t think I would ever quote him here ! :D ), it happens every day. And it must not be something new in a country like China. And suddenly, Google cares ? Whereas they quietly applied censorship in China until then ? I always become suspicious when a multinational company claims it cares about human rights to the detriment of its business.
Maybe Google is just really wanting to get out of China for some reason (not so popular there with the competition of Baidu?) and is looking for an excuse. More details will certainly be coming so time will tell…
I found this initiative, apparently started in Sweden, quite funny but also educative.
So I just set up the Shockingly Big IE6 Warning plugin in this blog.
Then I became curious and checked the stats of this site :
So there is still about 9% of our visitors that are running IE 6 and 3% using some rather outdated versions of Firefox.
And, my god, I would have never imagined that Netscape would appear in the list !
Yes, there is still a lot of work to do about security awareness among users.