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Dice Keys
by Christopher Browne 30 Aug '20

30 Aug '20

Here's a cool thing I saw recently... https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/08/dicekeys.html The intention of this parallels the various Bitcoin "Solid Steel Passphrase Wallet" items that were popular a year or so ago (See https://www.toughgadget.com/bitcoin-crypto-metal-recovery-seed-wallets/, https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/wallets/steel/ ) It's a case for a set of 25 dice that looks like a Boggle game set; it will generate and "record" what ought to be a Sooper Seekrut key as would be used for things like: - master key for password manager - U2F key for 2 Factor Authentication - Secret key for cryptocurrency wallet By being a set of dice with a nice plastic box to hold them securely, this is not vulnerable to various threats common to electronic devices: - EMP (for those highly worried about nuclear devices) - Water damage Of course, if all your disk drives get toasted, there might not be any data left to decrypt or systems to connect to. And plastic will melt away or burn when exposed to fire... But it's pretty cool, I'm tempted to grab a set. There's a web app: https://dicekeys.app/ It appears that this application, embedded in a single JavaScript file, runs locally, inside your browser, so that usual criticisms about it being a giant security vulnerability of sharing your key with their web site seems like it mightn't apply. How to confirm in an authoritative way that nothing is *actually* shared seems like the fun security question. -- When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"

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[GTALUG-Announce] GTALUG Membership In These COVID-19 Times
by Christopher Browne 28 Aug '20

28 Aug '20

In most years, membership has been handled via comparatively informal in-person processes, and those that wish to support GTALUG via membership would (broadly) follow the following steps: - Grab a membership form (that Chris passed out) - Try to pass Chris a $20 bill, whereupon Chris would say "take it back, and give it to me once you fill in the form" - Fill in the form, and hand it to Chris along with payment - Chris returns a few minutes later with a membership card As GTALUG is meeting virtually, these days, this process cannot occur as described. For those wishing to support GTALUG via membership, two routes are suggested: - The Cheque is In The Mail :: Send a payment via Canada Post. - Interac eTransfer :: Send funds from your bank to ours To ensure that membership has been addressed for voting at the 2020 AGM on October 13th, it is imperative to handle this earlier than that, as mail can take several days for delivery. Alas, either way, this imposes more bureaucracy and some more cost than we have been accustomed to. - Payment via check using Canada Post :: In this case, please send a cheque, made out to "GTALUG", in the amount of $20, along with the identification information indicated below, and please send to the following address: GTALUG 914-10 Carabob Court Toronto, ON M1T 3N5 - Interac eTransfer :: In this case, three pieces of information are critical, and must be shared both with your bank as well as with GTALUG. - Recipient :: The recipient email address is membership(a)gtalug.org - Security Question :: The content of this is not too important; "Random Value" or "Sooper Sekrut Data" are fine values. - Security Answer :: It is suggested that a random value be used. For instance, 215db45eb7f54e1e5907de3b50ac50ee is a value I got from passing 1K of data from /dev/random through md5sum, and that is a decent mechanism to get a relatively unguessable password. (Of course, since many people have seen that specific value, 215db45eb7f54e1e5907de3b50ac50ee, it would not be a good choice.) This security answer also needs to be emailed to the membership(a)gtalug.org address in order for us to receive the payment. - Common information :: Whichever of the above mechanisms is used for payment, please email the following membership information to membership(a)gtalug.org. Note that by longstanding policy, we do not pass your information on to outside organizations. - Name :: Your preferred name - Email :: Your preferred email address (if using Interac eTransfer, it's best to use the same address, so we know which email address to associate each security answer with) - Address :: If you are comfortable providing such - Security Answer :: If eTransfer is used, we need the Security Answer in order to actually receive funds *** Generating a random value, the Linux way Here is a script that repeatedly takes 1K of random data from /dev/random, and turns it into an md5 checksum to ensure that the value is human readable and not too long. #+BEGIN_EXAMPLE for i in 1 2 3 4 5; do dd if=/dev/random bs=1k count=2 status=none | md5sum; done 215db45eb7f54e1e5907de3b50ac50ee - 4f8f0e3a2944c857ebc3a7a776659134 - 1a52010a29ef3b2446d532ba389f65cb - 84e6b072e2661fc88b3a7b1ed1ce5873 - ef3f10a8b634760691e2ae53a0952707 - #+END_EXAMPLE --- GTALUG Announce mailing list announce(a)gtalug.org https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/announce

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[GTALUG-Announce] AGM and Call for Candidates
by Christopher Browne 28 Aug '20

28 Aug '20

Hear ye! Hear ye! This is a Call for Candidates for the GTALUG Board. October 13th is GTALUG's Annual General Meeting, our tiny piece of "political pageantry." There are two seats opening, for 2 year terms (2020-2022). Please consider running for the board, and keep in mind the following. There are two formal qualifications that candidates need to satisfy: - Must be a GTALUG member in good standing - Must not have any undischarged bankruptcy It is also important to be able to be available most months for Board/Operations meetings where we plan GTALUG meetings and activities. These meetings normally take place on the Monday evening following the regular Tuesday meeting. These days, this takes place on-line, using Jitsi. This is not an extraordinarily huge burden, but it does mean that there are 48 meetings (counting both "second Tuesday" and "the following Monday") where we hope to see you, and we hope to see you most of the time. Board members are involved in and support the following activities. - Finding speakers for our monthly presentations - Operating our internet infrastructure (website and mailing lists) - Organizing and running our annual Linux in the Park picnic (in less pandemic-stricken times) - Our involvement as a member organization of ICANN If you are interested, we'd appreciate it very much if you can submit your intention to run to the email address: board at gtalug.org The incumbents whose previous terms are expiring are: - Chris Browne - Alex Volkov Potential Candidates are welcome to announce their intention all the way up to the day of the AGM itself. --- GTALUG Announce mailing list announce(a)gtalug.org https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/announce

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top posting [was: Re: Blockchain, the solution to nothing]
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 27 Aug '20

27 Aug '20

| From: ac via talk <talk(a)gtalug.org> | I practiced with my first top post in 2006, before it became | fashionable :) It has been gauche for a lot longer than that :-) It can make sense in business correspondence where a precise record of what you are responding to is important. This was not such a case. It can make sense when you are dealing with folks who only know how to do mail on smartphones. This was not such a case. It can make sense when your time is more valuable than the readers' time. This was not such a case. It is almost never the case on a mailing list. | From: ac via talk <talk(a)gtalug.org> | It was one fine spring day, at least over 180? (it may be 280 or even | more) something full moons ago that i realized that Mutt simply sucks at | threading, so I disabled it. Since then, I also thought that some/ALL | Linux console users probably also battle and struggle with threads (and | the worth/value which the unwashed places in threads) I congratulate | you on the fine prowess of your "mail reader" but it is probably not | console based? (or maybe it could be? is it Pine? not looked at Pine | in decades...hmm, maybe?) | | As you said "almost all others" it certainly is not any? console users, | unless Pine or something else has turned me into an ignorant dino... I don't understand this. But I'll respond to a couple of things that I think I've gleaned from it. I use ALPINE (PINE is dead). It can do threading. It works on a terminal. What am I missing? I actually use procmail to sort GTALUG mail into a "folder". It turns out that all the messages in this thread are lined up appropriately by being sorted in arrival order. I don't often use thread-order. I use it often enough that I don't have to look it up. I guess I might use it more if I didn't demultiplex my incoming mail. How do you handle/avoid the deluge of email? I ask in all humility since it is a burden as well as a blessing. If Mutt is broken, fix it. It's open source. Or, more likely, you'll come to understand why it does what it does. Anecdote: The second assembly language I learned was PDP-8 PAL. I was offended by the opcode mnemonics chosen by DEC. For example, the only add instruction was "TAD" (for Two's complement ADd). Would ADD not be better? But by the time I learned enough to attempt the task, I had started to think of the operation as TAD. This is an example of starting out intending to change a tool and ending up changing me. Sub-anecdote: The PDP-8 was a single-accumulator machine. And there was no instruction to load a word from memory into the accumulator! Instead you arranged for the accumulator to be 0 and than "TAD memory" to add the content of the memory word that 0, leaving the sum in the accumulator. So TAD was a heavily used instruction. There were only eight opcodes, but two of them had modifier bits. The PDP-8 machine language was incredibly easy to learn even if it wasn't very powerful. Much simpler than any micro people use now.

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Re: [GTALUG] Blockchain, the solution to nothing
by Scott Allen 27 Aug '20

27 Aug '20

On Thu, 27 Aug 2020 at 09:38, ac via talk <talk(a)gtalug.org> wrote: > As you said "almost all others" it certainly is not any? console users, So you're doing this for the benefit of a small percentage of readers that use a console based mail reader without threading or subject grouping capability? Also, there are the archives available for viewing by thread, or if you've deleted a message you wish to review. https://gtalug.org/pipermail/talk/ It works fine from a console using lynx. Anyway, you can reply if you wish, but this will be my last. -- Scott

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Blockchain, the solution to nothing
by Christopher Browne 27 Aug '20

27 Aug '20

https://thecorrespondent.com/655/blockchain-the-amazing-solution-for-almost… I found it particularly hilarious when the writer of the article asked the maker of the childrens' aid app if he had noticed that the app didn't actually need blockchain at all. "That's right." But the punch line was even better... Isn't it strange that you won all these awards despite not really using blockchain? "We keep trying to tell people, but it doesn’t seem to stick. You’re calling me about it again now … ” -- When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"

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Re: [GTALUG] Blockchain, the solution to nothing
by Scott Allen 27 Aug '20

27 Aug '20

On Thu, 27 Aug 2020 at 07:25, ac via talk <talk(a)gtalug.org> wrote: > Not trimming the original post simply states that imnsho the > quality is high enough that you can read it again. Your post's header included a reference to the message you were replying to. My mail reader (and almost all others) groups threads using these references, as well as by the title. If I felt your "+1" gave me a reason to re-read the original, I could easily go back and do so. -- Scott

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Re: [GTALUG] Blockchain, the solution to nothing
by Scott Allen 27 Aug '20

27 Aug '20

On Thu, 27 Aug 2020 at 05:56, ac via talk <talk(a)gtalug.org> wrote: > +1 That's got to be one of the lowest signal to noise ratio posts I've seen. Two characters of top posting above about 5800 characters quoting the entire previous message! -- Scott

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Mozilla XUL is dead
by Christopher Browne 25 Aug '20

25 Aug '20

https://yoric.github.io/post/why-did-mozilla-remove-xul-addons/ Pretty interesting article on how Firefox has been evolving over the last 15-ish years. I remember when Wrox Press asked me if I knew of anyone that knew about XUL, because their "hype wagon" thought that XUL was the next big thing, and they wanted a book on that. And it was, though after a fashion much smaller than I expect Wrox was imagining. XUL and XPCOM (which is kinda like COM, which was Microsoft's fork of DCE's DCOM, which was an extendible API system kinda like CORBA...) are now being actively deprecated. A pain in the neck to anyone that had devoted a lot of resources to XUL, but probably not something others care about terribly much. -- When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"

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Remote Desktop [ RDP files and Remmina ]
by Aruna Hewapathirane 24 Aug '20

24 Aug '20

Hello everyone, I have to login remotely from home to work and this involves booting up a Windows system then logging in. Which works fine. I wanted to see if I can login remotely using Remmina and the RDP protocol using Linux. So far zilch and tried most things I know ( which is very little ). So I was wondering if anyone has any experience logging into a Windows System remotely using Linux and Remmina ? When I try to activate the tool for work under Linux it just lets me save the RDP file. I have tried to import the file into Remmina but does not connect. What should I do to trouble-shoot and resolve ? Any suggestions? And Evan I received your email to the Raspberry Pi thread I was busy-busy sorry for not acknowledging sooner :-) So once again to break it down: 1 - Office System is in London, Ontario and runs Windows. 2 - I have a dual boot running Windows and Debian How do I log-in to the office server using my linux system ? Thanks - Aruna

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