{"id":131,"date":"2004-11-03T11:04:24","date_gmt":"2004-11-03T11:04:24","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2004-11-03T11:04:24","modified_gmt":"2004-11-03T11:04:24","slug":"","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/?p=131","title":{"rendered":"Misc notes and bits ‘n’ pieces"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sparkes<\/a> has now officially left LUG-Radio<\/a>. His final episode, Season 2 Episode 2, is available for download. I have a mirror copy of the high-quality Ogg Vorbis file available here<\/a>. Be warned that this an audio recording of Four Blokes Who Talk About Linux And Free Software But Occasionally Say Rude Words – don’t download it if you’re easily offended by bad language. Sparkes also said a few nice things about me<\/a> in his own blog posting about it, which was good of him. Him thanking me, me thanking him, just like a posh awards ceremony, isn’t it? “And The Award for Funniest Geek From Wolverhampton goes to …”<\/i> \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n

Comment spam, and indeed comment spam attempts, has subsided a little over the last 24 hours. In particular, the individual mentioned in my previous post has given up at last.<\/p>\n

And a bit of schadenfreude, which is always welcome. A number of months ago, I raised a purchase order for a USB flash drive which Head Office blocked, because I hadn’t chosen a “secure” version. I replied that if encryption is required for the data to be stored on it, then we would use GPG<\/a> or something similar. No, no, no, they said, you must use this<\/i> USB drive because it has onboard proprietary encryption. I asked them why I should trust the “proprietary” solution, when there is a peer-reviewed, well-trusted and widespread solution (in encryption circles, “proprietary” is an evil word, yet some people Just Don’t Get It). I said that one day, an implementation issue with the security on the USB drive they were suggesting would probably surface, and, guess what it has<\/a>! The data is indeed ‘properly’ encrypted on the drive, but the passphrase is stored unprotected on the drive too<\/i>. This is rather like having a bank vault door, which is truly very strong, but leaving the combination codes or keys taped to the door. As the esteemed Bruce Scnneier points out, “screwing it up this badly is impressive”.<\/p>\n

Oh, and finally, the second part in my Debian: From Installation To Infinity<\/a> series will probably be out soon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sparkes has now officially left LUG-Radio. His final episode, Season 2 Episode 2, is available for download. I have a mirror copy of the high-quality Ogg Vorbis file available here. Be warned that this an audio recording of Four Blokes Who Talk About Linux And Free Software But Occasionally Say Rude Words – don’t download… (read more<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}