Tanguy Ortolo

Vous avez peut-être entendu parler de la mini-DebConf à venir. Une mini-DebConf, c'est un rassemblement de debianistes avec des conférences et des ateliers. Et donc, il va y en avoir une à Paris, le week-end des 24 et 25 novembre.

Read more apt-get install mini-debconf goodies-debian

As you may know, when Phil Zimmermann published PGP, his goal was to counter the wide spying possibilities the development of electronic communications offered to the authorities, by promoting the general use of encryption so that 1. governments would not be able to restrict it afterwards and 2. it becomes possible to encrypt messages for privacy without drawing suspicion.

Now, cryptography has made its way and is widely use, but mostly for commercial website and only sparsely for mail. Indeed, contrary to signing, encrypting a message requires that the recipient has a crypto key and is able and willing to use it to decrypt your message.

To alleviate this problem, I thought that it would be useful to have a way, when sending a message, to tell your recipients that you would like that they encrypt their answers, because you are able and willing to get encrypted mail. I think the most relevant way to do that would be by adding a dedicated header field:

Encryption-Desired: PGP

In that header, one would be able to indicate what protocols he accepts. I suggest a comma-separated list, with the following possible values: PGP (or PGP/MIME and PGP/traditional for people that only accept one of these two PGP formats), S/MIME. For instance:

Encryption-Desired: PGP/MIME, S/MIME

It may be useful to be able to indicate that you either always wish your messages to be encrypted, or that it is only for this message's replies. If this is really relevant, it would take two distinct headers: Encryption-Desired and Reply-Encryption-Desired.

Any thought about that proposal? Next thing to do, determine how to have that standardized at IANA and how to promote it.

Phishing is a fraud technique that consists in reproducing the content of a targeted website, directing users to it, and recording their credentials when they log into your website. It is like fishing fish with fake food, only you phish humans with fake websites.

Well, I have a good news for the phishers: people are using more and more smartphones, and mobile browsers are making your job really easy. In fact, many regular smartphone user simply have no way to tell your fake website apart from the real one.

Read more Why phishers must looove smartphones

When you start using Linux' logical volume manager, one of the first question you have to answer is: what name will you give to your volume group? The usual answer is: vg1, vg2, etc. Although it does not bear any specific meaning, this naming convention is simple and seems functional enough.

In fact, this is a bad idea, which can have nasty consequences on the long term. Here is why: one day, your computer will eventually give out. To save your precious data, you will remove its drives and plug them into another computer. If you are using LVM with the same naming convention on that second computer, you will then get a name conflict, which will prevent you from seeing the volume group you want to recover.

The solution is to name volume groups uniquely across all your computers, and if possible other people's. An elegant way to achieve this is to use your host names as a basis. For instance, on a machine called “Piñacolada”, you would name a single volume group “pinacolada”, or two volume groups “pinacolada1” and “pinacolada2”. Or perhaps “vg-pinacolada0” or whatever, you get the idea.

La Quadrature du Net est un groupe européen créé pour défendre les droits et les libertés des citoyens sur Internet contre les attaques permanentes de l'industrie du divertissement de masse, comme par exemple le récent ACTA. La récente victoire citoyenne contre ces monstres est une bonne occasion pour prendre l'initiative et d'appeler à une réforme du système de droit d'auteur, qui est inadapté à l'omniprésence des systèmes basés sur la copie.

Read more Des clefs USB datalove pour réformer le droit d'auteur