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Re: [GTALUG] CIRA officially launches free DNS firewall for consumers | IT World Canada News
by Alvin Starr 28 Apr '20

28 Apr '20

On 4/28/20 1:10 AM, ac via talk wrote: > On Mon, 27 Apr 2020 12:31:50 -0400 > Gordon Chillcott via talk <talk(a)gtalug.org> wrote: >> On Mon., Apr. 27, 2020, 09:08 James Knott via talk, <talk(a)gtalug.org> >> wrote: >>> I came across this today: >>> https://www.itworldcanada.com/article/cira-officially-launches-free-dns-fir… >>> https://www.cira.ca/cybersecurity-services/canadian-shield/configure > so... no opinions... no comments... no discussion... just posting > links, multiple times, or doing marketing now, we are? Ouch. > > my not so humble opinion is that dns over https is very evil, even if > done under the guise of "privacy" or "protection/nanny" or "to protect > us" or under any other logic or reasoning. DNS over https is not in and of itself evil. If it is used as a way to implement surveillance capitalism then it becomes evil. I rather liked the quote from the CIRA CTO “As a non-profit with no interest in monetizing user data we were able to bring together a group of great partners who are committed to protecting Canadians online–including the first-ever national deployment of DNS over HTTPS globally,” The only thing missing was the " yet " after the words "no interest". Somewhere down the line CIRA will likely face a fiscal problem and suddenly there will be value in that user data that cannot be passed up. How about DNS over TOR? > > my further opinions are that any "nanny" type "free" service where > someone else decides what and where i may or may not go or what i may > or may not see, needs to be either well regulated/controlled/open/published/etc > or simply not be accepted... Sometimes nannies are good things. People without the wherewithal or interest in managing their own security likely are in need of a nanny. > > anyway, i am probably a minority as i also do not like/use/support very > popular and world dominating services such as 'whatsapp' and i do not > tweet or post photos of my food on insta and i have zero tiktok vids I have a feeling your take is not a minority on this list. > > so i guess ymmv, > > Andre > > > --- > Post to this mailing list talk(a)gtalug.org > Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk -- Alvin Starr || land: (647)478-6285 Netvel Inc. || Cell: (416)806-0133 alvin(a)netvel.net ||

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Re: [GTALUG] CIRA officially launches free DNS firewall for consumers | IT World Canada News
by James Knott 28 Apr '20

28 Apr '20

On 2020-04-28 01:10 AM, ac via talk wrote: >>> I came across this today: >>> https://www.itworldcanada.com/article/cira-officially-launches-free-dns-fir… >>> https://www.cira.ca/cybersecurity-services/canadian-shield/configure > so... no opinions... no comments... no discussion... just posting > links, multiple times, or doing marketing now, we are? I don't use it and I just posted to see what comments came up. I have pfSense running a DNS resolver, so it goes to the top level servers. > > my not so humble opinion is that dns over https is very evil, even if > done under the guise of "privacy" or "protection/nanny" or "to protect > us" or under any other logic or reasoning. > > my further opinions are that any "nanny" type "free" service where > someone else decides what and where i may or may not go or what i may > or may not see, needs to be either well regulated/controlled/open/published/etc > or simply not be accepted... > > anyway, i am probably a minority as i also do not like/use/support very > popular and world dominating services such as 'whatsapp' and i do not > tweet or post photos of my food on insta and i have zero tiktok vids I also tend to shy away from many of those services. I have better ways to waste my time.

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CIRA officially launches free DNS firewall for consumers | IT World Canada News
by James Knott 27 Apr '20

27 Apr '20

I came across this today: https://www.itworldcanada.com/article/cira-officially-launches-free-dns-fir… https://www.cira.ca/cybersecurity-services/canadian-shield/configure

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Data backup recommendations?
by Gron Arthur 27 Apr '20

27 Apr '20

I'm looking for an easy way to backup data? What's good software to use, preferably open-source, better if it had a GUI? Where is the best place to buy some space, for storing data? Trying to modernize how I backup files personal files.

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GnuPG key signing party over Zoom?
by Rouben 27 Apr '20

27 Apr '20

Hi GTA LUG folks, Do you think it’s doable? Based on instructions here I think these can be adapted for Zoom or similar... https://www.phildev.net/pgp/gpgsigning.html Also I’m curious to see if/what key signing policies folks here adhere to. Here’s a fairly comprehensive example: http://www.arasca.com/olaf/pgp/policy.html I brought this up before, but unfortunately found the interest was not quite there, coupled with lack of time to do this face to face in the past, the proposed event never took place. I’m therefore wondering if the current predicament of staying at home and holding meetings over Zoom (or similar platforms) can help rekindle this and make it actually happen. What do you think? Rouben -- Rouben

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European ACM Lisp Conference today
by Christopher Browne 27 Apr '20

27 Apr '20

This isn't necessarily everyone's cup of tea (I'm too busy today to follow it!) but there's a broader thing... Today and tomorrow is the European Lisp Symposium, which was to be held in Zurich. Obviously, in person conferences aren't especially happening just now ;-) https://www.european-lisp-symposium.org/2020/index.html They're publishing video streams on Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/elsconf There are probably some talks that would be of some interest to some of us (note that Debian includes packages for innumerable Lisp dialects, doubtless dozens and dozens, including major Common Lisps like SBCL, CMUCL, CLISP, ECL, GCL, and dozens of Scheme variants), but I'll bet it's pretty much an edge case for us. The bigger point is that there are a lot of conferences out there that have decided to "self-isolate" and operate via video and/or videoconferencing. There are doubtless plenty that have some material of interest. It looks like a lot of it is leading to public publishing of material, which curiously means that we may have *BETTER* access than we would ever have under normal circumstances. At the sorta wild end, and properly outside GTALUG's ambit, WORLDCON, the World Science Fiction Convention, was to be in Middle Earth, I mean, New Zealand. Vanishingly few people would be likely to fly all the way there. It will be "virtual," with the result that I imagine there will be participants that would never have considered going to NZ in person. Closer to home, and of way more relevance, I'm on the program committee for PGCon, the PostgreSQL conference, normally in Ottawa, May 26-29. Dan is presumably very busy right now trying to collect videos and determine video publishing and videoconferencing strategy. https://www.pgcon.org/2020/ Also potentially of interest is BSDCan, operated by similar folk (I'm not on any committees) which is June 5 and 6; see https://www.bsdcan.org/2020/ It will presumably use very much the same methodologies as PGCon. -- 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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Video of our September 2019 meeting
by Alex Volkov 26 Apr '20

26 Apr '20

Hello everyone, Here's the video of our September 2019 meeting. Fear and Loathing and Mailing Lists with Evan Leibovitch -- https://youtu.be/xa-U9n9LH6g Alex.

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New York Times on Zoom security
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 22 Apr '20

22 Apr '20

This talks about the (bad) history of security at Zoom. <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/20/technology/zoom-security-dropbox-hackers…>

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Printing Problem(s)
by Peter King 18 Apr '20

18 Apr '20

About a year ago I bought a Lexmark MS415dn laser printer, a well-known and reasonably popular model; I checked linux compatibility before buying and it was rated highly. Recently it now prints PDF files at best half the time. Otherwise it seems to dump two or three lines of random gibberish (possibly postscript code) to pages and pages and pages, with no way to stop it short of unplugging it. Sometimes it will print a file just fine, and then fail to print the very same file immediately afterwards. Sometimes it just won't print a file no matter what or when. Pulling the plug, clearing the paper jams, restarting the printer, restarting CUPS, telling CUPS it's ready to work again -- well, it's all a bit much, and even then it screws up the next job through about half the time. I'm using Arch Linux with the current (5.6.4) kernel and CUPS 2.3.1. Suggestions? Suggestions for a more reliable printer? -- Peter King peter.king(a)utoronto.ca Department of Philosophy 170 St. George Street #521 The University of Toronto (416)-946-3170 ofc Toronto, ON M5R 2M8 CANADA http://individual.utoronto.ca/pking/ ========================================================================= GPG keyID 0x7587EC42 (2B14 A355 46BC 2A16 D0BC 36F5 1FE6 D32A 7587 EC42) gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 7587EC42

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warning: some WD NAS drives are shingled!
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 17 Apr '20

17 Apr '20

Shingled drives are NOT suitable for RAID. NAS drives are marketed as designed for NAS, and thus for RAID. WD has started to ship some shingled drives with NAS labels. They didn't admit it for almost a year. <https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/14/wd-red-nas-drives-shingled-magnetic-r…> <https://nascompares.com/2020/04/16/your-wd-red-nas-hard-drives-might-be-usi…> Shingling is a useful technique for increasing disk density. But it has performance implications. They are horrible for RAID. In fact they can cause RAIDs to fail. I'm currently not affected but if I were I'd search for a class-action suit to join.

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