StreamJockey

Bletchley, England: Powering Hendrix and saving the free world!

Marshall Amplification plc. a.k.a. Marshal Amps and Bletchley Park National Codes Centre are located about a 0.5 mile from each other as shown on Google Maps.

History

Bletchley Park was the main site of the British decryption facilities. The Bletchley Park Wikipedia post goes into the exciting history and has many links to key people involved. Many top mathematicians and cipher analysts worked there.   

One of them was Allan Turing, the mathematician who became influential in the development of computer science.

And I learned that three Polish mathematicians and cryptologists were the first to solve the plugboard-equipped Enigma machine in 1932. That was the main cipher device used by Germany, and their work gave the British a jump start on reading the Enigma of World War II.

Pictured on the right is the Colossus computer invented by Tommy Flowers at Bletchley Park. These were the world's first electronic, digital, programmable computing devices. They used vacuum tubes to perform the calculations. And it was vacuum tubes that powered Jimi's Marshall amps about 20 years later! To this day some of the most expensive amps are vacuum tube powered. Most amps today use solid state electronics (built with solid materials as opposed to the somewhat fragile glass vacuum tubes).

Movies

Relevant movies include Sekret Enigmy, a 1979 Polish movie with English subtitles that is likely more historically accurate than most. An American made movie U-571 (2000) was enjoyable, but it was not very accurate.

And on the Hendrix side we have Jimi Hendrix - Live At Woodstock released in 2005 about 389 years after the event.

   

Jimi's first Marshall - a Super 100    Bletchley Park

The 10 most common passwords revealed | News.com.au

Imperva, a data security firm, said it had analysed around 32 million passwords that had been exposed in a recent hack of the RockYou website. In December last year, a hacker breached the site's company database and gained access to the unencrypted usernames and passwords of all its 32 million users. After studying the security breach, Imperva has come up with a list of the most commonly used passwords. "Everyone needs to understand what the combination of poor passwords means in today's world of automated cyber attacks: with only minimal effort, a hacker can gain access to one new account every second," said Amichai Shulman, Imperva's chief technical officer.

via www.news.com.au

Apple Security Update 2010-001

Apple released a 22.4 MB security update that they recommend for all users. You must restart your computer after the update is installed.

Twelve common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE) are identified. Many of the updates are related to third-party software. Adobe's Flash Player plug-in is responsible for seven of them. 

The open-source security library, OpenSSL has a man-in-the-middle vulnerability that exists in the SSL and TLS protocols. This update disables renegotiation in OpenSSL as a preventative security measure. The organization IETF, that is responsible for the protocol, is working on a change to the renegotiation protocol. This is discussed in the security podcast, Security Now with Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte: http://twit.tv/sn223

Full details are listed at: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222

Safari 4.0.4 Update for Windows and Mac Addresses Security

Three of the seven vulnerabilities are in the WebKit open source web browser engine used in Safari, Google Chrome, and the browser in Google's Android.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

This update is recommended for all Safari users and includes improvements to performance, stability, and security including:

• Improved JavaScript performance
• Improved Full History Search performance for users with a large number of history items
• Stability improvements for 3rd-party plug-ins, the search field and Yahoo! Mail

For detailed information on the security content of this update, please visit this site:http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222.

Apple OS X 10.6.2 Update Available

The 10.6.2 Update is recommended for all users running Mac OS X Snow Leopard and includes general operating system fixes that enhance the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac, including fixes for:

• an issue that might cause your system to logout unexpectedly
• a graphics distortion in Safari Top Sites
• Spotlight search results not showing Exchange contacts
• a problem that prevented authenticating as an administrative user
• issues when using NTFS and WebDAV file servers
• the reliability of menu extras
• an issue with the 4-finger swipe gesture
• an issue that causes Mail to quit unexpectedly when setting up an Exchange server
• Address Book becoming unresponsive when editing
• a problem adding images to contacts in Address Book
• an issue that prevented opening files downloaded from the Internet
• Safari plug-in reliability
• general reliability improvements for iWork, iLife, Aperture, Final Cut Studio, MobileMe, and iDisk
• an issue that caused data to be deleted when using a guest account

For detailed information on this update, please visit this website:http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3874.

For information on the security content of this update, please visit:http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222.

Configuring and Using GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG) - Part 1

This post will discuss configuring and using the open-source software, GNU Privacy Guard or GnuPG as it is frequently listed. All other applications and plug-ins referenced require GNU Privacy Guard. I have listed some applications and plug-ins that are available including those that I use. There are GUI as well as command-line based applications available.

GNU Privacy Guard

GnuPG comes in two flavors: 1.4.9 is the well known and portable standalone version, whereas 2.0.12 is the enhanced and somewhat harder to build version. 

On the Mac I am running 2.0.12 since there was a binary available.  I am running 1.4.9 on Windows since I did not see a 2.0.12 binary available, but 1.4.9 meets my needs.

Email Clients

Apple Mail

Use Sen:te GPGMail which is GPGMail is a plug-in for Apple's Mail, providing a front-end to GnuPG for some operations. It allows you to read/write encrypted messages, as well as electronically signed messages. A quote from the site "GPGMail is a complete hack, relying on Mail's private internal API." So with major updates to OS X/Mail you may need a new version of GPGMail.

GPGMail is released under the BSD License. The author, Stephane Corthesy has asked that if you enjoy the product you send him a postcard!

Thunderbird

Thunderbird open source Email client

Enigmail is a security extension to Mozilla Thunderbird and Seamonkey. It integrates the renowned OpenPGP standard provided by GnuPG.

Set owner trust after import otherwise it may not work.

Outlook and Outlook Express

Since Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express do not allow third party software access to the raw MIME headers, they do not work well with PGP/MIME mail. They do work fine with GnuPG when receiving message that use inline encoding i.e. no attachments. But for the love of God ditch Outlook!

WinPT is a graphical user front-end for the free OpenPGP implementation GnuPG.

Some Settings I Used

2048 bit key

wwwkeys.pgp.net key server. I had used ldap://keyserver.pgp.com at first but my test client on Windows could not locate me! So after some trials I switched to using wwwkeys.pgp.net and it came right up.

Folks that want to encrypt something they are sending to you need your public key. So your public key is used to encrypt their email to you. If you get confused as to what key to share remember this phrase from object-oriented software engineering: Friends don't show their friends their private parts :-)