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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • If you use HTTPS, the attacker can still see what websites you connect to, they just can’t see what you are sending or receiving. So basically they can steal your browsing history, which defeats the purpose of a commercial VPN for many users.

    This is blatantly false. They can see IP addresses and ports of you connect to from IP packets, and hostnames from TLS negotiation phase (and DNS requests if you don’t use custom DNS settings). HTTP data is fully encrypted when using HTTPS.

    If exposing hostnames and IP addresses is dangerous, chances are that establishing a VPN connection is as dangerous.


  • Control of the DHCP server in the victim’s network is required for the attack to work.

    This is not a VPN vulnerability, but a lower level networking setup manipulation that negates naive VPN setups by instructing your OS to send traffic outside of VPN tunnel.

    In conclusion, if your VPN setup doesn’t include routing guards or an indirection layer, ISP controlled routers and public WiFis will make you drop out of the tunnel now that there’s a simple video instruction out there.





  • Please correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t this allow one to represent virtually any resource as a mail inbox/outbox with access through a generic mail app?

    I’m working with a specialized healthcare company right now, and this looks like a way to represent patient treatments data as an intuitive timeline of messages. With a local offline cache in case of outages. Security of local workstations is a weak point of course, but when is it not…


  • Sorry, but you don’t get to claim groupthink while ignoring state of Apache when Nginx got released.

    Apache was a mess of modules with confusing documentation, an arsenal of foot guns, and generally a PITA to deal with. Nginx was simpler, more performant, and didn’t have the extra complexity that Apache was failing to manage.

    My personal first encounter was about hosting PHP applications in a multiuser environment, and god damn was nginx a better tool.

    Apache caught up in a few years, but by then people were already solving different problems. Would nginx arrive merely a year later, it would get lost to history, but it arrived exactly when everyone was fed up with Apache just the right amount.

    Nowadays, when people choose a web server, they choose one they are comfortable with. With both httpds being mature, that’s the strongest objective factor to influence the choice. It’s not groupthink, it’s a consequence of concrete events.





  • Moreover, “deep work” is a bullshit claim. Working solo long sessions without communicating is not an indication of… anything, really. The moment “deep work” becomes a trend, some idiot will start measuring it, making it yet another counterproductive way to torture people.

    Measure business outcomes and implement changes that don’t fall victims to Goodhart’s law. If a director can think of a way to game a measure, workers will think of ten.





  • I described a route to spoof DNS root authority that Russia and China can use already. Single root is not an advantage, it’s merely a different kind of implementation with different attack vectors.

    When it comes to security, it is better to have multiple different implementations coalesce at a point of service delivery, than have a single source of truth. If everything is delivered via DNS, there’s your tasty target for a capable adversary. If there are multiple verification mechanisms, it’s easier to tailor an attack for a specific target.

    I want cryptographic infrastructure I rely on to be the last resort for anyone capable of dealing with it.