Posts by Keith Ng
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OnPoint: Ich bin ein Cyberpunk, in reply to HenryB,
-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----
HenryB: Got it! And thanks!
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OnPoint: Ich bin ein Cyberpunk, in reply to Idiot Savant,
Second Little Brother. I'm wondering if I need to have a key-signing party sometime.
YES. I'll work something out for my next post.
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OnPoint: Ich bin ein Cyberpunk, in reply to Andrew C,
Not that I do this, but I just thought it was kinda cool. These guys have thought stuff through.
Oh yeah. That's precisely why I'm going to go through Truecrypt. This is from the Police Search Manual:
A specified person may not be required to give any information tending to incriminate themselves. However, this does not prevent you from requiring them to provide information or assistance that is reasonable and necessary to allow you to access data held in, or accessible from, a computer system or other data storage device that contains or may contain information tending to incriminate the person.
In NZ, it's give up your password, or face 3 months in jail.
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General comment: Baby steps, folks. Tor, Truecrypt, everything else will come.
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OnPoint: Ich bin ein Cyberpunk, in reply to Thomas Beagle,
I guess the first part of the article nicely disposes of ex-GCSB head Bruce Ferguson's claim that the GCSB only provided assistance to Police by seconding staff to them.
Hang on though - this was not quite the same, in that they believed (genuinely or not) that Kim Dotcom was a foreign national, and therefore there was no need for a firewall between them and the investigation, which is what the secondment process is designed for.
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OnPoint: Ich bin ein Cyberpunk, in reply to B Jones,
Maybe this is a silly question, but given that I understand encryption that can't be cracked by governments isn't supposed to be publicly available (limit to number of keys) - isn't there a risk with encryption that using it attracts attention in and of itself, and that with small volumes of encrypted traffic, agencies can comfortably handle the processing power to crack it?
a) I don't think this is true yet, and b) this is why we need to increase the volume of encrypted traffic.
I've assumed for years that everything I put on the internet, including email, can be harvested, it's just that nobody cares enough to do it provided I don't stick obvious keywords in there, or correspond with known agitators, or have offline activities that might draw attention. Security by obscurity.
That's not security by obscurity, that's just obscurity.
Of course, if enough people use encryption, the appearance of secrecy doesn't stand out as noteworthy. Another thought - a really good code doesn't look like a code.
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OnPoint: Ich bin ein Cyberpunk, in reply to Moz,
Moz & Rich: Yes, will get to that in the next part...
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OnPoint: Ich bin ein Cyberpunk, in reply to HamishFraser,
Huzzah! It worked. I'd reply in an encrypted message, but I don't have your public key.
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OnPoint: Government Portfolios for Dummies, in reply to B Jones,
People making the important decisions in policy ministries don't realise its importance because they're steeped in humanities rather than information science culture, and are mostly older and less likely to have picked up information science through having fun with computers.
That's why I reckon the best way forward might be to just make stuff like this, to demonstrate that it takes one guy, zero dollars and most of an afternoon to build a searchable all-of-govt (well, most-of-) archive.
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OnPoint: Government Portfolios for Dummies, in reply to LeslieGoodliffe,
Is this service likely to be any more reliable than the individual Government departments?
It looks more haphazard that my own efforts...