Johannes Ernst on August 30th, 2011

Yet another case this week where unsuspecting users were compromised because a certificate authority that they had never heard of screwed up. In case you hadn’t heard, they issued a certificate for google.com (Google!) to somebody other than Google, and apparently that certificate was in fact used to compromise users in Iran. This is not [...]

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Johannes Ernst on August 3rd, 2011

Great to see somebody on top of things, here Michael Hayden, previously director of the NSA and the CIA in the context of the Shady Rat attacks: “You see Google acting in some ways as nation-states used to act, exercising to the best of their ability some attributes traditionally associated with sovereign states. ‘We’re going [...]

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Johannes Ernst on April 20th, 2011

EFF activist Eva Galperin in quoted in a ReadWriteWeb article introducing their new campaign: “HTTPS provides the minimum level of security for websites. Without it, no site can make any meaningful security or privacy guarantees to its users.” Well, wouldn’t that be nice! Particularly if HTTPS actually were providing that security. For a counter-point, read [...]

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Johannes Ernst on March 16th, 2011

I lived through the Chernobyl disaster back in 1986, as a teenager, in Germany. I recall watching the radioactive cloud coming closer and closer on TV, wondering whether it was ever going to be safe to go outside again. That was before I became an engineer, but I remember pondering even then whether it was [...]

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Johannes Ernst on August 2nd, 2010

This time around, it’s serious. The recent publication of the massive Kabul war diary by WikiLeaks signals the end of business as usual for the establishment. This publication happens to target the military establishment, but its reverberations will be felt in all parts of society, and eventually, in all countries and regions. Back in the [...]

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