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Dreaming of a secure browser

The web used to be simple. It used to be a place where you could go and find reference materials, news and discussions about just about anything. All this content was wrapped up in HTML, maybe with some CSS to give it a tidier look, and served over HTTP. Unfortunately this is no longer the case. You can no longer survive on the web with cookies or JavaScript disabled as websites have been designed expecting that people will have those features available in their browser. On top of that, not satisfied with HTML, CSS and JavaScript (which, by the way, is Turing-compatible – there is not really a need for anything beyond JavaScript for client side scripting in the browser) we’ve got Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight and Java applets too. Because these technologies exist, they are used, and anyone attempting to visit a site using them will have a pretty difficult time in navigating it without allowing the code, that you’ve likely never seen the source to and have no reason to trust, to run on your computer.

Full disk encryption on OpenBSD 5.3

Full disk encryption is becoming (it should always have been) more popular. When your laptop gets stolen, a login password is only a minor inconvenience to a hacker trying to steal your identity. Pop in a live CD or USB stick with Knoppix or Backtrack (or in fact basically any Linux distribution) and all your information is there for the attacker to use to steal your identity, impersonate you online and perhaps even empty your bank accounts. By booting not into the installed operating system, but into their own, the computer obeys the attacker and any protection your login password could have offered is irrelevant as the installed operating system isn’t running. If an attacker has physical access to a machine and enough time, it becomes the attacker’s machine, but the data doesn’t have to become that attacker’s data. This is where full disk encryption comes in.

Ludum Dare 24: Update 3

I have loaded my game into a git repository now and uploaded it to GitHub. You can find the repository at: https://github.com/irl/la-cucina.

I have also uploaded some instructions and a base64 encoded archive for JS/Linux and you can find them in a gist.

Only a short update this time but this is a milestone for me as whatever happens now, I have a playable game I can submit.

Tom has now come back into the room and has started working on his entry again. Let’s hope today was as interesting, exciting and educational as yesterday.

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