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mr_potato_face

10 karma · joined July 29, 2015

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mr_potato_face··on What Do Public Library Workers Do? (2011)
Thank you for linking this. The main article being discussed made me think "okay, so administrivia, book stuff, etc. Actually doesn't sound so bad". This link, however, made me realize how emotionally draining the library can be for everyone involved.
mr_potato_face··on More microbursts are coming
According to the URL, it appears to be 1991-2012 changes in precipitation. I suspect the filename is trustworthy (based solely on it coming from NASA) but it might not be.
mr_potato_face··on Search the DNC email database
Well, none of the six results were particularly interesting. Four were variations on Trump's debate comment about having a big penis. One was a news summary which included the world's first successful penis transplant. The last was someone calling Trump "Hillary Clinton with a penis". Nothing authored by someone in the DNC.
mr_potato_face··on Cloudflare ReCAPTCHA De-Anonymizes Tor Users
One issue here is that recaptcha's traffic signature allows for a passive attacker. So instead of needing to modify the website a user visits, or trick them into going to a domain you control, you are able to just look at the traffic logs and identify them without them knowing.

I'm not too sure about what defines the "distinctive" signature of recaptcha, but I expect timing of when packets of certain sizes were sent (e.g. loading 9 images in quick succession will generate larger packets, and then you often get the incremental couple images with human-length delays between them).

mr_potato_face··on CloudFlare, We Have a Problem
To your aside, MITM seems more likely to happen to the end-user, but it is possible to happen at the Cloudflare-->Website side. We already know that the NSA logs all traffic going over certain backbone routers[1], and that some ISPs are modifying non-HTTPS connections[2]. So if your traffic bounces through certain "bad" networks between Cloudflare and your site, who knows what happens.

Relatedly, Tor recommends all users use HTTPS[3], as otherwise the connection from the exit node to the target site is vulnerable to MITM. Given that there are malicious exit nodes[4], seems like a good idea. But, as the article brings to light, that still doesn't make any guarantees of safety.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A [2] e.g. http://www.infoworld.com/article/2925839/net-neutrality/code... [3] https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq.html.en#CanExitNodesEave... [4] e.g. http://www.cs.kau.se/philwint/spoiled_onions/ but plenty of other sources

mr_potato_face··on Congress Releases '28 Pages' That Looks for Saudi Links to Sept. 11 Hijackers
Direct release link: http://intelligence.house.gov/sites/intelligence.house.gov/f...
mr_potato_face··on Pokemon Go is a huge security risk
I've never played Ingress, but I've played PGO for android. Google account settings (https://security.google.com/settings/security/permissions) shows an empty list for me.