Tim Dierks

Security Standards and Name Changes in the Browser Wars

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 23 May 2014 13:57:00 +0000

The Netscape/Microsoft browser wars in the mid-90's were really vicious and competitive. They really had it out for each other.

Netscape had developed the SSL protocol. The initial version had cryptographic flaws and was broken pretty quickly, and never released. The first production version was SSL 2, which was in use for a few years. (I don't know the exact versions of Navigator it shipped in.)

SSL 2 had some flaws, both cryptographic and practical; not dramatic enough to make replacing it a crisis, but it clearly needed some work from early on.

As a part of the cutthroat competition, Microsoft decided to revise the SSL 2 protocol with some additions of their own, and specified a protocol called "PCT" that was derived from SSL 2. It was only supported in IE and IIS.

Netscape also wanted to address SSL 2 issues, but wasn't going to let Microsoft take leadership/ownership in the standard, so they developed SSL 3.0, which was a more significant departure.

Various people in the industry & community didn't want a fork, so we (Consensus Development, where I worked with Christopher Allen at the time, and where I had written the SSL 3.0 reference implementation under contract to Netscape) hosted a meeting between representatives from Netscape and Microsoft; I forget everyone who was there, but I recall that Bruce Schneier was there (before he was famous), and probably Paul Kocher, who had designed the SSL 3 protocol; Barbara Fox represented Microsoft. And we negotiated a deal where Microsoft and Netscape would both support the IETF taking over the protocol and standardizing it in an open process, which led to me editing the RFC.

As a part of the horsetrading, we had to make some changes to SSL 3.0 (so it wouldn't look the IETF was just rubberstamping Netscape's protocol), and we had to rename the protocol (for the same reason). And thus was born TLS 1.0 (which was really SSL 3.1). And of course, now, in retrospect, the whole thing looks silly.

The Quality of News

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 23 May 2014 13:35:00 +0000

Here's a comment I wrote in response to this post on Facebook from Mike Hudack:

As long as an ad impression on a "serious story" pays as much as an ad impression on a listicle and people are more interested in viewing listicles than real news, this will likely continue. Facebook accelerates the problem, but is not its core source. And the media outlets that produce this crap are just following the incentives: if they don't do it, someone else will (and that someone else will be all over your social media feeds).

America's tradition of quality journalism stems from two sources: bundling and the fact that some fraction of media outlets were owned by families and businesses who were interested in their reputations, not just their bank accounts. Serious news has never sold well, but as long as you had to buy a newspaper to get both the front page and the sports page, one could support the other, and it was in the interest of the families that ran those papers to be seen as serious; they funded the news desks to maintain that image. This worked, particularly when newspapers had strong, well-defended businesses which weren't vulnerable to disruption, and the bundling helped everyone hide the truth about what components of the bundle the audience actually cared about.

Now, however, people consume content one page view at a time: bundling has vanished, and brand value is low. Anyone can start a media outlet, and there's no audience loyalty. Advertisers pay pretty much the same amount for an ad view regardless of what content it's next to. And programmatic buying has eroded any value advertisers gave to serious brands: now they just want to find the audience, wherever they are. The revenue and cost of a serious news piece vs. a cheap slideshow is clearer than ever and easy to optimize. So it's a race to the bottom, and devil take the hindmost.

There's plenty of great content out there—probably more than ever—but it doesn't get a lot of attention, particularly on social media.

Personally, I think the most likely way out is charging readers for quality news and surviving the sharply reduced audience that will imply. It will entail focusing reporting on concepts that can't be easily "aggregated" by other outlets. The free media will still be a sewer, and most people will only read that. But maybe we could develop a supportive and self-sustaining ecosystem for quality reporting for the people who care about it. That said, it's hard to get there.

An open letter to a Google Now product manager

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 23 Apr 2014 18:53:00 +0000

Google Now is awesome. You can search for an address in Google Maps and automatically get that destination transported to your phone for super-easy directions, etc.

Unless, of course, it doesn't work for some reason. And there’s no indication of why the address you searched for isn’t on your phone; could be a lot of things—sync problems, maybe Google didn’t think it important enough to surface, etc.

After a number of months of feeling like Google Now didn't work for me all that well, I finally realized that it’s because I don't have Web History enabled on my Google Apps domain. Presumably, Google Now consumes the Web History logging stream, and if you don't save your searches, it can’t copy them over to your phone. Fair enough (although one might hope for the ability to ephemerally share such data across your account without logging it forevermore).

What is insane is that this is the default and how hard it is to discover and fix. Google Now, which is one of Google's big tech advances and product advantages, they should be making it easy for people to use and discover. It took me about a dozen steps to turn it on for my domain after I’d diagnosed the problem (with no prompting from Google).

It should be absolutely clear to a Google Now user that they’re missing out on functionality if they have Web History disabled. When you open Now, there should be a card at the bottom telling you that it's off. Even in the Now settings, I don't believe that the Web History setting works for Google Apps domains.

And in the Google Admin console, it should make it clear how to turn on Web History with a direct link to the setting. Right now, it's super-challenging for a Google Apps admin to turn it back on: I knew what it was, and it still took me a lot of back-and-forth between the admin panel and the documentation to find it:

Go to my Google Apps Admin console
Click on “Manage the way Google Apps Works for You”
Fail to find Web History
[back and forth between console and admin docs]
Determine that it's in “Other Google Services”
Can't find that anywhere
Discover that it's hidden by default under "More Controls". (BTW: this hidden icons thing was a bad idea.)
Go into “Other Google Services”
Can't find Web History anywhere.
Figure out that the bland, easily overlooked blue bar is filtering to only show me ”Top Featured Services” may be hiding something useful (BTW, this should be more noticeable and be a more common idiom.)
Dismiss it with the [X].
Discover that Web History is the ONLY disabled service (beside AdSense) in my domain.

Getting Custom Notifications for Important E-mail

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 28 Feb 2014 20:12:00 +0000

I get a lot of email, and sometimes I miss something, or I don't notice something urgent right away.

Here's how to configure Gmail on your Android phone to alert you distinctively when you get an urgent email.

First, identify what is important. It might be emails from someone in particular, or with a particular topic, etc. Most recently, I configured a special alert for emails from a particular notification service that always have a certain string in the subject.

Then, in the Gmail web UI, set up a filter for these messages in Gmail and assign them a new label which is specific to this class of messages.

Now, from your phone, go to that label, and from the menu icon in the upper right, choose "Label settings". Then, set this label to sync to your phone (for any duration), and you can then choose a notification sound. Choose a sound you don't use for other notifications on the phone.

Now, whenever you get an email from this category, you'll get a distinctive sound which tells you what's up without you having to even unlock the phone.

You may be able to use this ability to specifically notify on the emails you care about to reduce the alerting for emails you don't care about. You can turn off notifications for new messages in categories or labels that are not urgent. Then, when your phone goes “ding”, you'll know that it's something worth interrupting you for.

Common password checker

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 24 Nov 2013 02:33:00 +0000

There are a lot of standards out there for password quality, usually something like "at least 6 characters, with both upper and lower case and a digit or alphabetic character".

These are horrible rules. They mean that a password like "Passw0rd" is thought to be better than "Y1&j)" or "cork-bairn-meson-most-ago". However, it is not. Clever password crackers will, first thing, try a large dictionary of known passwords before they start iterating through strings brute-force, and it's only in the latter stage that using a longer password or a bunch of different character types helps.

So, if you want to get your users to choose passwords that are more likely to be secure, the most important thing is to reject the kinds of common passwords that are most likely to be guessed. Google actually tracks the passwords that crackers try to break into accounts with and notes these as "weak", regardless of how tricky they seem.

So, I built a thing: I took the 1,139,118 most-frequently-used passwords from a large password leak (from the social site RockYou in 2009) and built a password checker. This contains every password that was used 3 or more times across the 32 million leaked accounts. ("Passw0rd" was used 207 times.)

Enter a password below and discover if it's any good. The implementation uses a Bloom filter tuned for approximately 0.1% false positives, so there's one chance in a thousand that a password will show as "weak" when it's actually not on the list. The Bloom filter makes the data transfer smaller (2 MB) and allows very fast checking of candidate passwords agains the list. Nothing is sent back to a server: the checking is done in the browser.

Candidate password: not foundweak

Of course, even if your password wasn't found, it still might be quite weak: large password dictionaries have a billion passwords to try before they start churning through every possible string. To generate a better password, you might want to try my password generator. If you're interested in using either to help make your site more secure, let me know, I'm happy to help.

Endianness in Javascript

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 24 Nov 2013 01:13:00 +0000

I just needed to determine endianness from Javascript; this is needed because ArrayBuffer and associated classes operate directly upon memory buffers, which is great when you want to slurp in some binary data without the overhead of JSON-conversion, but does imply an endianness dependency.

I probably could have just ignored the question (at the expense of all my Alpha-powered users), but I'm OCD enough to write the check.

function littleEndian() {
  var buf = new ArrayBuffer(4);
  var bytes = new Uint8Array(buf);
  var words = new Uint32Array(buf);
  bytes[0] = 1;
  return words[0] == 1; // little-endian
}

But I can't test it.

Adam Tumor Wrap-up

noreply@blogger.com (Tim Dierks) — Sat, 27 Oct 2012 01:45:00 +0000

I started posting Adam's status to this blog because I needed a way to communicate with family and friends, and I abandoned it when his situation didn't really require it. But, having dropped it mid-situation, I left an uncertain status for anyone who came across the blog without knowing the family. Sorry about that!

Adam is doing great. He came home for visits starting at Christmas, and we had a great Christmas. A few weeks later, he started sleeping at home, and commuting into the hospital for therapy every day, which we continued through the spring, then took the summer off. In the fall, we moved to outpatient therapy a couple of times a week, which we did for the 2011-2012 school year, then took another summer off. This year, he's in preschool 5 days a week, and doing great.

We've had some complications, but they're pretty minor, all things considered.

Back at Rusk

noreply@blogger.com (Tim Dierks) — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 00:38:00 +0000

Just like Lindsay Lohan, we're back in rehab.

Rusk is the top facility for rehab in NYC and one of the best in the country, and it’s absolutely the right place for Adam to be right now. In fact, I made a bit of a problem on Friday night and over the weekend when the administrators at NewYork-Presbyterian and Rusk failed to get him down here on Friday. The climax of that fuss was when they told me that they’d like me to put down a deposit to cover three weeks of care because Blue Shield is closed on the weekend. But I think they were just putting me off—when I asked them where I could bring the check, or if they insisted on cash, they stopped returning my calls.

That said, compared to the newly-built magnificence that is the NYP Greenberg pavilion, the physical plant here does seem a little dated & dowdy. But the care here is right, the staff are excellent, and the food is much better than at NYP (seriously, it’s like making NYP one of the best hospitals in the country required that they have the worst food I've experienced outside of an airplane).

On the subject of insurance: besides being closed on the weekend, the Google health insurance (through Blue Shield of California) has been awesome. We haven't had any problem at all with approvals, and Google's in-house Blue Shield rep has been super-helpful, including calling me Saturday evening to try to work through our problems. While it’s hard sometimes to know how much benefit our kids get from the material rewards of our work lives, I know Adam and the rest of our family are thankful for the support that has enabled his excellent medical care.

We’re hoping to get Adam out of here and home before Christmas. Wish him good luck.

Successful Head-shrinking

noreply@blogger.com (Tim Dierks) — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 15:42:00 +0000

Here's two photos of Adam this morning, showing his now un-swollen noggin.

Back and Forth

noreply@blogger.com (Tim Dierks) — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 03:53:00 +0000

On Tuesday, Adam came back to NewYork-Presbyterian to have an MRI and to have a shunt put in to drain the bubble under his scalp. It’s done wonders for his looks (sorry, I don't have a picture right now).

The MRI looked fine; the doctors say he’s doing great and they expect him to have a really strong recovery.

He had the shunt put in Thursday afternoon. It is a bit of tubing (with an anti-siphon valve) that runs from under his scalp (but outside of his skull) down to his abdomen, running just under his skin the whole way. It drains excess fluid, but it’s my understanding that when his surgical wounds fully heal, it will then be idle, as its source is outside of the skull. Putting it in was just a 20 minute operation.

As of Friday morning, he was cleared to leave NYP to return to the Rusk Institute and get his therapy restarted, but we ran into a bureaucratic foul-up; NYP & Rusk wasted the whole day not getting their act together, so we’re still in NYP’s pediatric wing as of Friday night. Last time we went to Rusk, we wasted two days on admitting and insurance paperwork and on actually getting over there. Right now, I fear we’ll repeat that experience, and not get therapy restarted until Wednesday; however, we’re trying to do all we can (with the help of some friends) to get down there over the weekend and get him going on Monday.

Adam is doing well; he seems more comfortable and he’s smiling a lot more. He apparently spent the day asking for pizza; it’s great to have him that engaged & expressive. His doctors all seem to be very happy with his recovery, and we’re hopeful as well.

Rehab (no, no, no)

noreply@blogger.com (Tim Dierks) — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 19:48:00 +0000

It’s three weeks since Adam’s surgery, and he’s in the hospital for the 27th day.

Last Tuesday, Adam went from the hospital (NewYork Presbyterian) to the Rusk Institute, a hospital devoted to rehabilitation. We’ve gone from having a view of the East River to having a view of the Empire State Building. He’s an inpatient there, and he’s in various therapies each day: physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, etc.

Thus far, it’s hard to tell how much difference the therapy is making. Adam is improving, although that improvement has, for me, to some extent been balanced by a growing awareness of how far he has to go.

I’ve read a number of books about the brain, including books that investigate oddities, such as Oliver Sacks’ works. In those books, you frequently have people who can do one thing well, but can’t do something else: they can sing but not speak, or some other similar mix of capability and inability. But I’d never seen this in practice, and it’s surprising and unintuitive: since the surgery, Adam has always seemed quite functional: he speaks, and he has always successfully navigated the standard neurologist quiz: “Touch your nose. Now touch the doll’s nose.”, and so on. That capability, combined with his general crankiness, made it hard for me to recognize how many things he couldn’t do, or perhaps didn’t do, anymore. For many days, he didn’t smile, didn’t converse (although he could speak and communicate, he wasn’t very responsive and rarely said anything novel).

He is improving: he’s smiling now. And we have faith in the ability of the brain to adapt and heal, particularly in young kids. So we’re confident that he’ll be OK, but it may be a while.

As you can see, he has a big lump on his head where the sutures from his surgery are (also, I gave him a haircut, so it’s more visible). The bubble is cerebrospinal fluid communicating through the surgical opening in his skull. It’s been growing a little bit, and he’s due for another MRI to evaluate whether things are OK inside. He may well end up with a drain installed to let excess fluid drain off and relieve pressure on the brain; if they do that, we’ll be back at NYP for a few days.

Laura and I are swapping off spending nights at the hospital. A month in, this is all starting to stretch us a little thin. I’m back at work, at least mostly, and the kids are in school. Grandparents have come and gone, and my mom is here now. But the stress, the disruption, and the logistical complexity of the back and forth is wearing on us and on the kids. Our friends and neighbors have been great, with food, play dates, errand-running, etc.; thanks, all.

18 Days in Hospital

noreply@blogger.com (Tim Dierks) — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 15:06:00 +0000

By my calculus, it’s our 18th day here, but hopefully Adam will leave in the next day or two.

Since my last update, it’s been a stretch of recovery for Adam: general progress, but with a number of smaller challenges or setbacks. He moved to the general pediatric ward last week. For a period of time, he was quite weak on his left side, and couldn’t look to that side; later, he had some small seizures. Most recently, he went through a day or so where he said little if anything original: instead, his speech was a continuous, inconsolable, series of phrases that had little connection to the situation or his desires (e.g. “Mommy lie down with me”). He also has a big bubble of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) under the sutured area of his scalp.

However, his physical tests (MRI & EEG) look good and his surgeons don’t think that he needs a shunt implanted to keep his pressure under control. He’s doing pretty well; neurology & neurosurgery are ready to discharge him. He’s eating well. He’s using both sides of his body (for example, he will eat with a fork using his left hand). He’s a lot less uncomfortable than he was a few days ago, although he’s still apparently pretty tired of being in the hospital.

The final pathology on his tumor came back, and it confirmed the good news that it’s not malignant; they’ll have another doctor give a second opinion as a triple-check, but we’re confident that it was a “benign” tumor, which is great news.


Before	After
(yes, that cauliflower blob is the tumor)

If life wasn’t complex enough, our au pair, Tabata, woke us at 3:30 last Sunday morning with bad abdominal pains; Laura took her to the emergency room, and that evening, she had her gallbladder removed. Thankfully, it’s a pretty straightforward operation (laparoscopic), she came home the next night, and she’s up & around now, although still regaining her energy. Also, a virus has swept through the family; it had me in bed for 24 hours and slowed me down for a few days; now, Laura is recuperating from her bout with it.

The current plan is that he’ll go from here in the hospital to an inpatient rehab facility, so he can get intensive physical therapy. We don’t yet know where (we’re hoping to go to one here in Manhattan associated with NYU, the Rusk Institute, but we’re not sure if we’re going to get a bed there), nor do we have any good idea how long he might be there (an offhand guess from a doctor here was 2-6 weeks).

So, it’s pretty challenging, but Adam’s improving. We have much to be thankful for.

Recovery: Two Days In

noreply@blogger.com (Tim Dierks) — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 12:02:00 +0000

Adam is doing well. Of course, brain surgery is a Big Deal, and one doesn’t bounce out of bed the next morning. He’s feeling pretty crummy, but he’s recovering.

The surgery involved cutting a hole in the top-right of his skull, and they had to go past the right side of his brain, so his left side has been worse than his right, but it’s improving: on Tuesday, he couldn’t look left at all and his left hand was limp: now, he can look all over and he has some grip in his right hand.

Thursday was actually a little worse than Wednesday: Adam wasn’t communicating as well, just seemed a little less active, and had a couple incidents where his eyes rolled all the way back and to the right. The doctors here don’t think these were seizures, but we’re keeping a close watch on it.

He had his compression dressing taken off yesterday, and the drain in his skull removed. I think this will be a big help: the giant turban of a bandage was not only bulky and making it hard for him to lie comfortably, it was also squeezing his head, which couldn’t have been any fun. Plus, it means we now get to see his stitches.

He seems a little more aware this morning (asking for his stuffed doggy), but he slept turned to his right last night (I was sleeping next to him) and fluid puffed up the right side of his face. Again, looks ugly but apparently not very concerning to the staff here.

I don’t have a good idea of how much longer we’ll be in the ICU, or thereafter in the general pediatric ward. Here’s hoping we’ll be home by Thanksgiving.

After Adam’s Surgery

noreply@blogger.com (Tim Dierks) — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 18:08:00 +0000

Adam was in surgery for about 6 hours yesterday. Afterwards, his surgeon said that it went very well: he was able to remove all the tumor very cleanly, and there was very little bleeding: in fact, Adam didn’t need a transfusion, either during the operation or afterwards—the surgeon said that it’s the first time he’s done such an operation without the patient needing any blood at all.

The initial indication (based on the test they did during the surgery) is that the tumor was benign, but they’ll do the determinative test over the next week.

He had an MRI this morning to confirm the results and take a look at how he’s doing, and everything looks great. The tumor is gone, there’s no bleeding, and no visible brain damage. It’s all good news; his surgeon described him as “a showoff”. They plan to take his drain out soon, as there’s no sign of problematic inter-cranial pressure.

He is still pretty under the weather from the operation: they had to push the right side of his brain out of the way, and he has weakness and sensory issues on his left side as a result, but that was expected, and he’s improving.

So, the kid’s luck holds.

An Update on Adam

noreply@blogger.com (Tim Dierks) — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 19:19:00 +0000

Yesterday, Adam had a procedure where they did an angiogram and embolization of the tumor. They threaded a catheter through his arteries up to his brain and used x-rays and injected dye to map the blood supply of the tumor, then they injected a polymer which closed off the selected blood vessels and blocked about half of the blood supply to the tumor.

The procedure lasted about an hour and a half; it went well and he came through it fine. When he woke up, he was aware & fairly happy (although somewhat uncomfortable and annoyed with being trapped in the hospital and in his bed). This morning, he was a little tired and cranky, but generally in good shape.

Today, he’s having surgery to actually remove the tumor. (He’s in the operating room as I write this). The tumor is about the size of a golf ball; his surgeon describes it as large. I’m not sure of the precise procedure, but apparently they can get access via a relatively small incision; they’re going to get to the tumor by pushing past the left side of his brain, which will give him some temporary physical weakness on his right side. They’ll then cut the tumor out; the primary risk in this operation is the bleeding from cutting the tumor away. The surgery is scheduled for four hours, but it may take longer (which doesn’t imply a serious problem). There’s some possibility that they won’t be able to get all the tumor out in this operation and they’ll have to do another one; this also doesn’t imply a worse outcome; it’s just possible that they won’t be able to get it all from this direction.

After removing the tumor, they’ll test it to determine if it’s malignant or not; that test should take close to a week. (They also, as a matter of procedure, get a second opinion on that diagnosis).

He’ll continue to be in the pediatric ICU for at least a couple or three days after the surgery, and then remain in the hospital for a couple days more, so we expect to possibly be here for another week (plus or minus). The staff here have all been great with Adam and with us; informative, supportive, and helpful.

Henry and Lucy are doing well. It's all a little above Henry’s head, but Lucy’s been concerned for Adam. My father, Peter, arrived Sunday and has been helping out with the kids. Laura's mom, Barbara, came in on Friday and has also been very helpful, more here at the hospital; she's a nurse, so she knows her way around a hospital bed.

Adam's Tumor

noreply@blogger.com (Tim Dierks) — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 00:46:00 +0000

Some bad news: we found out on Thursday that Adam has a serious brain tumor. He’s in the hospital now and is going to have at least two operations in the next few days.

Some background: when we adopted Adam in Ethiopia last June, he was somewhat delayed, due to being in orphanages for about a year. At the time, he could barely crawl. After bringing him home, he advanced quite quickly, and was walking by the end of the year. He’s always been a little unsteady, and never learned to run or jump, but we chalked this up to his delayed development.

However, a few months ago, while he was going up & down stairs well, we became more concerned that he wasn’t making as much progress as we hoped; he was also noticeably shaky (wobbly, having trouble standing still), particularly right after waking in the morning or after his nap. However, other than that, he was doing well; in particular, his speech has continued to develop.

A few weeks ago, we took him to his pediatrician, who agreed that his symptoms called for him to be seen by a neurologist; when we saw the neurologist, she recommended some tests, including an EEG and an MRI. When he had the MRI on Thursday, it was clear that he has a large tumor in his brain’s ventricles; the tumor is causing overproduction of cerebrospinal fluid, which is causing hydrocephalus.

Thankfully, he thus far hasn’t had any acute symptoms (no seizures or other obvious neurological issues). However, out of fear that acute symptoms could develop, he’s been admitted to the hospital (Weill Cornell / NewYork-Presbyterian in Manhattan).

On Monday, he’ll have a procedure where they will thread a catheter up to his brain and inject a dye to take detailed images of the tumor (an angiogram); they may also close off some of the blood vessels serving it (embolization), and I believe they’ll install a drain to allow taking off some of the fluid pressure.

On Tuesday, he’ll have surgery to remove the tumor. Then they’ll biopsy the tumor to determine if it’s benign or malignant; that will tell us more about what the future will hold for him.

He’s in the hospital as a precautionary measure, not because he’s noticably ill: he’s the same happy, active kid he was a few days ago, although a little tired of being stuck in bed all day and hooked up to monitors. (Not to mention the hospital food.)

While this is tragic, let’s remember that Adam’s a very lucky kid: I think that if you’re going to have a brain tumor, New York City is as good a place as any to have it, at least presuming you have good insurance (certainly better than Addis Ababa). His surgeon is a world-class pediatric neurosurgeon, a specialist in removal of intraventricular tumors. (He’s also got a room with a beautiful view of the East River.)

Lucy & Henry are dealing with it well so far; they’re sending their love and their drawings.

Thanks for all your offers of help & support. We’ll be happy to take you up on your offers of play dates, etc.; right now, we have two grandparents in town, so we have enough pairs of hands for watching kids, etc.

Help for Ethiopian orphans

noreply@blogger.com (Tim Dierks) — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 03:25:00 +0000

We adopted a son, Adam Abera, from Ethiopia this year. He's a gift and a delight, and our good fortune in adding him to our family is far greater than his good fortune in being added to ours. However, it is true that we brought him home to material support, comfort, security, and opportunity far greater than what he left behind, and of Ethiopia's five million orphans, only a tiny fraction can or should be supported by adoption into first-world nations.

While we were there, we met the remarkable Dr. Tsegaye Berhe, the director of Wide Horizons for Children's program in Ethiopia—a man who truly loves and strives on behalf of children. He impressed upon us how deep the need there is and told us of their program to offer support to the vast number of children there for whom the proper path is not adoption—orphaned children who have family to care for them in Ethiopia, but who need support.

WHFC's program not only provides basic material support for the children you sponsor, it also makes an investment so their families can found viable, profitable businesses, and so, enable them to progress towards self-sufficiency. You can read more about the program here, including a brochure and FAQ.

This season, I would like to ask you to make a commitment and contribution to sponsor a child. $420/year can pull not only a single child, but a family out of poverty. Right now, go to WHFC's Child Sponsorship site and sign up. $420/year is $1.15 per day.

After you've contributed, please let me know. I've made a commitment that I and my companions in group 79, who brought home a double handful of kids this summer, will sponsor 79 children, and I'd like for your support to count towards that goal.

Thank you!

Tim, Laura, Adam, Lucile and Henry.

Missing the point

noreply@blogger.com (Tim Dierks) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:08:00 +0000

Benjamin Black has a service called the tls report that grades web sites based on the quality of their SSL configuration: points are taken off for SSL 2 support, support for shorter keys, etc. While I respect the effort and I value the concern for better security, this is just silly. Extending cryptographic key length is the least valuable thing any site can do to improve the security of people's data. Gene Spafford got it right when he said:

Using encryption on the Internet is the equivalent of arranging an armored car to deliver credit card information from someone living in a cardboard box to someone living on a park bench.

Worrying about whether the keys are 40-bit, 56-bit, 128-bit, or larger is the equivalent of worrying about whether the armored car guards are carrying revolvers or machine guns: it entirely misses the point. I'm not aware of a single case, ever, where an attacker stole data from a commercial site by cracking an SSL key of any length. Note also that SSL/TLS has mechanisms to prevent an attacker from forcing you to negotiate a lower grade of security than you ask for, so if you turn off 40 bit ciphers in your browser, an attacker cannot force a downgrade (other than by cracking the server's private key), so a site that supports 40-bit keys does you no harm at all. As such, in addition to measuring something not particularly relevant to security, these grades are irrelevant to the security of users paranoid and well-informed enough to know about them and care. If you're concerned about the security of your data, you should be concerned with how a site handles your account password and your data at rest. Of course, this is harder to observe than SSL settings, so Mr. Black appears to fall into a trap that catches a lot of the security community: thinking about problems that are easier to see and measure, even if they're not the truly significant security problems.

More Important than Excellence

noreply@blogger.com (Tim Dierks) — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 18:52:00 +0000

What's the most important skill in playing poker, if you're looking to make the most money?

When I ask other poker players this, I get answers like "bluffing", "reading other players" or "knowing the probabilities".

They're all wrong. The most important skill is table selection—choosing what game to play and who to play against. You could be the 20th best poker player in the world, but if you spend all your time playing against the top ten players, you're going to lose money. Similarly, you can be a mediocre player and still be rolling in dough if you find and play against players you can beat. "Better" and "worse" isn't the only measure. Some people play well against certain styles of play (for example, you might play well in a game where your opponents bet and raise a lot, but not have the skills to adjust to players who play tighter). The most important thing you can do is put yourself into a situation that optimizes your chances for success. Only after does it become important to execute well. Only then do the skills of the game of poker come into play.

This isn't just a lesson for poker; it's also true in business. One of the tenets of venture capital is that it's better to have a bad company in a good market than a good company in a bad market. I know that while I think I'm an excellent software engineer, I've made more money by being in the right place at the right time than I have solely through engineering skill. (Of course, an excellent track record of success has given me the opportunity to be in the right place at the right time.)

I think this is also a valuable reminder that it's frequently not obvious what the rules that govern success are. For example, you might invest in a company because you think their product is insanely great, but it turns out that the important skill they needed to be successful was actually business development, not creating great products. Sigh.

A Secure In-Browser JavaScript Password Generator

noreply@blogger.com (Tim Dierks) — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 03:14:00 +0000

This password generator picks random passwords for you. It runs entirely on your computer, inside your browser--the generated passwords do not travel over the Internet and are not known by my server.

The passwords are generated by picking words at random from a dictionary. I like to find a randomly generated password where the words bring to mind a memorable image--these passwords are easy for me to remember, but relatively hard to guess. For example, I just generated the password "social-fuzzy-okay"; I might remember this with the image of a party where stuffed animals are welcome. You can generate new sets of passwords several times looking for one that seems appropriate.

Please wait for the dictionary to load.

First, please move your mouse around in the window. Your unpredictable movement is used to seed the random number generator that is used to generate the passwords.


0% complete (0 bits)

Your generated passwords:

Q: How strong of a password do I need?

A: The strength you need depends on what you're going to use the password for and how hard you think someone might work to break it. If you're using the password to encrypt a file or something similar where an attacker could do an "offline attack," where she could try many different passwords very quickly, you would want to choose a very strong password. For most online accounts, you don't actually need such a strong password: it's difficult to check online passwords quickly. Also, many services, particularly security-sensitive ones like banks, will disable accounts where the password is entered incorrectly too many times. This means you can have a much shorter password and still be secure.

Q: What does the number of bits mean?

A: The number of bits (e.g., "3 words - 41 bits") is an approximation of how many bits of entropy there are in a password of that length. This is essentially how many bits it would take to enumerate the number of different passwords that have a certain number of words.
Every extra bit of entropy doubles the number of possible passwords an attacker would have to guess, so a password with 24 bits of entropy is twice as hard to guess as one with 23 bits of entropy, and 25 bits is twice as hard again. 10 more bits of entropy makes it approximately a thousand times as hard to guess a password.
For example, if there were only 5 words in the dictionary this programs uses (say "apple", "bouncy", "castle", "dancing", and "edith"), and you were generating passwords that were 3 words long, there would be 125 different passwords that it could generate (5 x 5 x 5 = 125). This would be approximately 7 bits of entropy, because 2⁷ = 128. (Actually, this program always rounds the estimate down, so it would report this as 6 bits of entropy).

Q: How long would it take to guess my password?

A: How long it would take depends on how hard to guess your password is (its "entropy", the number of bits reported in the menu), and how fast an attacker can guess passwords.
If you are interested in a detailed analysis, there is a guide to how long a key you need for unbreakable security at www.keylength.com.