Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • February 24, 2014 8:46 AM

Matthew Green’s opening paragraph certainly made me smile 🙂

Clive Robinson • February 24, 2014 2:32 PM

@ Figureitout,

Yup it looks like that, only my BF app barfed on it, maybe “cut-n-past” is not hacking it.

For any budding coding wanabees out there try writing your own BF interpreter that runs inside a Word doc or spread sheet, it can be done… and you will definatly learn something [1].

[1] of the many things that could be learned patience and determination are but two, however a wise man should quite quickly pause for thought long enough to realise that important time is passing that could be more productivly used quaffing ale.

Clive Robinson • February 24, 2014 11:42 PM

@ Anura,

I fully understand the problem having grown up sufficiently to realise there is nothing heroic or sexy about pulling “all nighters” etc over a hot keyboard, especialy when there is little or nothing in it for me just my employer or some ungratful other.

I actually told one employers senior managment some years ago –when their idiot “contracting” project manager was giving me grief and sugesting my continuing employment was dependant on working an extra 30 hours per week gratis– “You pay I’ll play, after all that idiots on billable”. It caused quite a flap, anyway the “idiot” was out the door quicker than I, even though it took me two weeks to find a new employer and then work my months notice… As for the “mega important project” I was offered incentives to stay but turned them down (I don’t play that game and told them so). Any way I bumped into one of the people that worked there for a while after I left, some time later at a trade show and over a drink they told me the company failed to get the project to work in time and lost the subsiquent contracts and they like me jumped ship as they could see the company had to down size which it duely did significantly…

The thing is that nearly all research shows that working more than seven hours on a mentaly taxing task is actually self defeating very very quickly (it’s why commercial vehical drivers and airline pilots are legaly not alowed to work more than a certain number of hours). So not only is burning the midnight oil antisocial and not heroic or sexy it’s actually counter productive as mistakes rise rapidly with a tired mind. And recent research also shows that drinking strongly caffinated drinks and taking in lots of simple carbs (sugars etc) is equally counter productive.

Apparently for the best “mental output” the thing to do is start the day with protien and mild excercise, drink plenty of water throughout the day [1] and avoid carbs especialy sugars, have a lunch of vegtable soup or broth, then after work do some High Intensity Training (HIT) consume some complex carbs do a half hour of walking/swiming/cycling rest/winddown for a couple of hours in low light and quiet with a class of milk or two [2] then get a good nights sleep of atleast a couple of three hour cycles, and importantly if you feel mentaly tired at work take a short “cat nap” or as it’s called by managment gurus a “power nap”. All of which appears to be the opposit of what managment want the actual productive workers to do…

Sadly though most alcoholic drinks are not good for you, though the more natural it is the better, so some wines and naturaly produced beers can cross over to slightly good for you in proper moderation [3][4]…

There is one drink that gets quite a bit of argument about not just in the scientific but social and cullerany worlds and that’s tea. Historians have noted that historicaly the size of cities is decided by disease. However societies that drink weak beer or tea have significantly larger cities with greater population densities. The original argument was it’s because the water gets boiled. However it appears that when looking at those who drink beer/coffee and those who drink beer/tea or just tea those societies that drink tea have less disease and manage higher population densities [5].

And before you ask it I follow this life style, lets just say I wish I’d done a lot more of it when I was younger 😉

[1] Apparently there is some contraversy about how much fluid you should drink, but the general medical concensis is we don’t drink enough. For many years the armed forces have told people to “watch your urine colour” it should be clear or pale straw, not yellow or darker under normall conditions (though watch out for some medications that do darken it irrespective of hydration level).

[2] It appears that most “energy drinks” and “sports drinks” are of little or no benifit to a normal health person –and can infact be quite harmfull to some– and research has shown faster recovery and more sustained performance in athalets if they drink milk instead after training (though some people do have issues).

[3] Apparently a health liver can deal with the alcohol in about half a pint of (weak) beer per hour but no more. The downside is what the liver does with it which means you need to burn energy. So a farm labourer of a hundred years or so ago could safely drink eight pints of beer across the working day, but not so for us sedentry desk dwelling types 🙁

[4] One thing that is clear is smoking is bad for you and most people now accept that after 50years. However there is a bit of the message most people have not taken onboard. That is the risks of drinking and smoking are not addative they appear to have a significantly greater risk when the activities are combined as has happened in most social gtherings for quite some time. However in the UK where premature death from smoking and drinking are some of the highest in the world smoking in pubs clubs and other indoor venues is now baned. It will –if I live long enough– be interesting to see what happens to the UK mortality figures, especialy in “socialy deprived” areas.

[5] Tea bush leaves have traditionaly been added to food that is stored as it apparently helps it keep longer. Science has subsiquently found that some species of tea do have antibacterial properties (and some are researching anti viral as well). However there is considerable disagrement as to if this has any benifit when humans drink tea… I suspect from “history” that it does. So maybe “milky tea” might be the new “super drink” 😉

Clive Robinson • February 25, 2014 6:05 PM

@ Anura,

Eating healthy is one of those things where I know how to do it, I will give advise on it, but the knowledge doesn’t stop me from living on what can best be described as the bachelor diet

Having a life long adiction to tasty food, I know of the problem as my waist line will attest to 🙁

However “bloke chow” reminds me of the old joke of,

The wages of sin are death… but the hours are good

Take the pizza you know the base is loaded with sugar and salt, likewise the tomato paste which is likewise thickened with the likes of chemicaly processed animal hair. The chease is well re-cycled rotten milk again with all sorts of unplesant chemicals. Then there is the partialy rotted belly fat and gut muscle stuffed into animal intestines and loaded with salt and sugar and even more strange chemicals some of which are known carcanogens which we call peperoni. We then apply heat to make more carconegens… Knowing all this you would think we would treat it as being worse than a bowl of live maggots, but know we gleefully stuff ourselves with slices of pizza because for some strange inexplicable reason the unpalatable devils brew of salt, sugar, fat and leathal chemicals by the application of “Hell’s Fire” some how becomes a tasty meal…

As for excercise it’s not the pacing up and down that does you good it’s the arobic excercise of screaming at the anoying talking head that gives you the cardio vascular work out 😉

Some time ago there was a conferance of cardiac medical proffesionals up in Liverpool, an eminent cardiologist during their talk said “The best way to murder some one was to feed them lots of indian food, because all the ghee that sticks to the blood vessal walls and kills them is put down to natural causes at autopsy”…

Clive Robinson • February 26, 2014 12:38 AM

@ Buck,

Honeypots could be a highly complementary defence when also considering obfuscation!

Only if they are implemented correctly which does not happen currently.

Honeypots and tarpits have a problem which few wish to talk about, which are they are fairly easy to enumerate and thus avoid.

I pointed out quite some time ago on this blog how they are very suseptable to side channels that reveal what they are to somebody who knows what to look for.

In essence a honeypot or tarpit is code that sits in a spin awaiting input ontop of an OS. This has a number of charecteristic signitures, but worse many are run as multiple virtual systems on single hardware instances which adds further identifing signitures.

As was once pointed out ‘you can put a wolf in sheeps cloathing but it still behaves like a wolf not a sheep’. And it’s these differences or deltas that strip of the cloth to reveal the real animal underneath.