Why security is hard, and why it’s not going to get easier

Bruce Schneier summed it up well: the good guys have to secure all the doors and windows; the bad guys only have to find one. In a nutshell, that’s why security is hard. Real-world security has to deal with that problem all the time.
If you think of writing software as filling a feature space, sometimes you accidentally provide functionality that you didn’t intend to, while providing what you meant to. You meant to provide an exhaust port but you also created a vulnerability.
Continue reading “Why security is hard, and why it’s not going to get easier”

Take back your control-space keybinding in Ubuntu w/ Cinnamon

I use Emacs and just switched to Cinnamon when upgrading to Trusty Tahr. It somehow stole the control-space keybinding, which I use in Emacs a lot; it is used for setting the current mark, so I can cut or delete a region of a buffer. This is also used for the autocomplete feature in Eclipse, which is one of the main reasons I use Eclipse.

Solution found: some built-in thing called IBus binds that for setting the input method. I like the input method I already have set up & I don’t need to change it, so here’s how to disable that: answer on askubuntu.com.

 

 

Using a Lite-On eTDU-108 DVD drive with a Mac

I bought a Lite-On eTDU-108 DVD writer, as a companion for my MacBook Air which lacks a built-in optical drive.

Using this drive with a Mac is strange because it has a lid, so the Mac cannot physically eject the media. This leads to odd circumstances such as when you tell the Finder (or iTunes) to eject the disc, and it makes the icon disappear and suddenly it’s back, as if you had inserted it into the drive again at superhuman speed.

Most of the sequences of ejecting discs that I came up with resulted in error messages, failure to eject the disc, spinning beachballs, or unplugging the USB cable from the drive in frustration. I finally figured out the right sequence to eject a disc from this drive when it’s connected to a Mac.

Continue reading “Using a Lite-On eTDU-108 DVD drive with a Mac”

Patch to make Ubuntu’s GNU Screen bash completion work better

If you make a screen with a name using screen -S foo and then try and reattach later using screen -R f[tab] it doesn’t work. It only completes the full name as seen in screen -ls which starts with the PID of the detached screen, like 9972.foo. Not very convenient. Why can’t it just complete using the name you gave it?

Someone else solved this problem three years ago but nobody accepted their patch, and now /etc/bash_completion.d/screen has been overhauled and the patch no longer applies.

I updated the patch so it works and resubmitted it to Ubuntu.

If you don’t wanna wait, grab the code from this gist and do this:

This will probably work on Debian too since that’s where the completion script came from.