Nuffing.com

Yesterday was Veteran’s Day, the U.S. holiday where we Yanks honor the members of our military, past and present (and get our annual Band of Brothers fix on TV). The timing of the holiday is based on Armistice Day’s 11-11-11—that’s the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of the year, which in 1918 marked the official cessation of World War I hostilities.

Commissioned to design a Veteran’s Day memorial for Anthem, Arizona, Phoenix-based artist Renee Palmer Jones took heed of both the "11" timing and the Arizona sun. As she writes:

At precisely 11:11 a.m., each year on 11-11, the sun aligns through the elliptical holes in each of the five marble pillars (each representing a branch of the the U.S. military) in order to perfectly illuminate a round mosaic inlaid into the bricks; that of the Great Seal of the United States. The symbolism of the five pillars standing in formation in order to protect the United States and to complete the solar illumination is representative of U.S. military personnel working together in all regards, in the security and defense of American citizens.

The project was designed by Palmer Jones, engineered by Jim Martin Oscar Oliden and Steve Rusch and constructed by the Haydon Building Corporation.

(more…)
via Core77
Brilliant Monument Design Casts Perfect Solar Spotlight Once a Year

via kottke.org
The Great War

Someone made a Star Wars-themed parody of the catcall video that went viral last month and it’s even better than the original: This one didn’t edit out the white guys and left only blacks and latinos. Males from the galaxy far far away can all be creepy and gross regardless of race or affiliation—just like in this galaxy.

---

This is SPLOID, a blog of delicious brain candy. Join us on Facebook

via Gizmodo
Princess Leia walking in NYC being harassed by dicks from all the galaxy

InRange TV performs an interesting test on WWII exploding ammunition. Both German and Russian snipers were authorized to use explosive spotter-type rifle ammunition on human targets. Watch their video below to see how effective they really were compared to standard ball ammunition. http://ift.tt/10WoEpH
via AllOutdoor.com
VIDEO: Testing WWII Exploding Ammunition

A SaaS product needs to use security measures you might not ordinarily use in an on-premises solution. In particular, it’s important that all sensitive data be secured. Encryption plays an important role in information security. At VividCortex, we encrypt data in-flight and at-rest, so your sensitive data is never exposed.
We use Go and MySQL extensively at VividCortex and thought other Go programmers might be interested to see how we’ve integrated encryption into our services layer (APIs).
Encryption Techniques
At a high level, you can think of two kinds of data encryption inside of MySQL or any similar data store. I’ll oversimplify for purposes of illustration. You can:
Store the data in MySQL as normal, but encrypt the container that holds MySQL. Usually this means storing MySQL’s data on an encrypted disk volume. The protection? Broadly speaking, if someone gains access to a backup disk, they can’t see your data.
Encrypt the data before sending it to MySQL. In this case the security boundary is pushed out further: even if someone gets access to the server, and can run SQL commands, they can’t see your data.
Each of these has advantages and disadvantages. These include ease of use, programmer overhead, ability to inspect (e.g. recovering from backups), searchability and indexability, and so on. There are a lot of things to consider here. Just a few:
Will data be exposed if backups are unencrypted? (Our backups are encrypted, by the way.)
Are sensitive values possibly in cleartext in query logs?
Will sensitive values be visible in status commands like SHOW FULL PROCESSLIST?
At VividCortex we err on the side of safety and security, rather than favoring convenience. There’s a fairly simple question that does a pretty good job of illustrating our goal: if someone succeeds in a SQL injection attack against our databases, will they see any sensitive data in cleartext? The answer needs to be “no.” This is a higher standard than on-disk encryption. It means that someone has to get access to the keys for the particular data they’re trying to decrypt, in order to see anything other than garbage. And those keys are not present or accessible on the database servers in any form, not even in-memory.
Making It Convenient
Convenience is important. If it’s too hard to do encryption, there’s an increased risk that it won’t be done. Fortunately, Go’s elegant interfaces for the database/sql package make the burden transparent to the programmer!
We learned how to do this from Jason Moiron’s excellent blog post on the Valuer and Scanner interfaces. Please read that if you haven’t yet.
To implement transparent encryption and decryption, we created a custom data type that implements the Valuer and Scanner interfaces. The implementation is straightforward and quite similar to Jason’s example of compressing and decompressing, except that we used encryption libraries instead.
Now our code is incredibly simple to use with encrypted values. All we do is define a variable of our custom type. For example, instead of
var password string
err = rows.Scan(&password)
We simply use
var password EncryptedValue
err = rows.Scan(&password)
It’s similarly simple to insert values encrypted into the database. Magic! This is why I often say that Go’s design, although it seems minimalistic at first, is actually very advanced and powerful.
"Go feels under-engineered because it only solves real problems." Exactly. http://t.co/18LhLT0ALB #golang— VividCortex (@VividCortex) September 18, 2014
Nuts And Bolts
The code is small. The exact details of all the code are not all that important for this blog post; much of it is about things that are out of scope here. The gist of it, though, is that we store values as byte arrays:
the first byte is an indicator of the version of our encryption algorithm used, so there’s a clear migration path for changes
the next four bytes indicate which key we used to encrypt this value, so we have 4 billion possible keys
the rest is the encrypted payload
We can even change this in the future. For example, we can switch on the first byte’s value, if we want, to determine whether the key ID is in the next 4 bytes, or if it’s something more, such as the next 8 bytes. So we can easily expand the number of keys we can indicate. We can also, if we ever hit version 255, use that to indicate that the version number continues in the next byte. This is a standard trick used, among other places, by the MySQL wire protocol.
The result is that we have a simple and future-proof way to encrypt values.
Alternative Approaches
In addition to the approaches we’ve mentioned, there are several others. There are commercial projects designed to help ease the encryption and decryption techniques you might otherwise wrap around MySQL and perhaps fumble in some ways. There are encryption functions inside of MySQL, but educate yourself about those before using them. There’s more, too, but you should be able to find all you need with a search.
Conclusions
By using Go’s built-in interfaces, we created a solution for transparently encrypting values in our database so that it’s never in the database in cleartext, either on-disk or in-memory. The code is super-easy for programmers to use, which improves our security posture automatically. All sensitive data gets encrypted in-flight and at-rest, and an attacker would have to have extensive access to our systems (e.g. SQL injection won’t suffice) to be able to decrypt the data.
We highly recommend that you use the standard Go interfaces for the power they give you. And please, ask your SaaS providers, including us, hard questions about security and how it’s implemented. Every service needs to be secure to make the Internet a safer place.
Click here to register for a webinar with more insights on incorporating Go and MySQL. Pic Cred
via Planet MySQL
Encrypting Data In MySQL With Go

When the weather gets cooler, it’s time to turn off the air conditioners. AC units need protection from leaves and other debris, though. Instead of an expensive cover, a piece of plywood does the trick.

Over at Quicken Loans’ Zing blog, they say the secret to protect your AC unit is to just cover the top:

Get a large square of plywood and set it on top of the system. Put a brick or a large rock on top of that to keep it in place, and voila! You’re done. This will help keep any falling leaves, snow or ice out of your system while preventing damage from snow and sleet.

That’s it. No step three. No covering the unit. You see, by covering the unit so tightly, you wind up trapping in a lot of the things you’re trying to keep out, like moisture, condensation and any residual debris. Think about it this way: the unit was made to stay outside, so don’t worry about protecting it from the outside.

It may not look pretty, but it’s inexpensive and easy to install.

How to Winterize Your Air-Conditioning Unit the Right Way | ZING Blog

Photo by ActiveSteve.

via Lifehacker
Cover Your Air Conditioner With Plywood to Protect It For the Winter

Clever photo series by talented photographer Dina Goldstein brings Barbie and Ken into the real world and shows their day-to-day life.
“In the Dollhouse”: Full size replica of Barbie and Ken’s house with stylish pink interior was constructed in the studio and then photographed.
Also check out: Realistic Barbie and Creative Barbie Jewelry
via Toxel.com
Real Life of Barbie and Ken

Thinking about heading to Tosche Station.
— Luke Skywalker (@skywokka) March 18, 2009

Gah. Snuck off to the Imperial recruiting station in Mos Espa. Apparently I’m a little short to be a stormtrooper. Back to square one.
— Luke Skywalker (@skywokka) March 23, 2009

Being smuggled.
— Luke Skywalker (@skywokka) July 4, 2009

My aunt and uncle died, I was abducted by an old dude, he died, I met some people, and also I’m a murderer now. Weird day so far.
— Luke Skywalker (@skywokka) September 29, 2010

On the other hand, I met a hot space princess, got a rad laser sword, and we’re going to a place with "trees," whatever those are.
— Luke Skywalker (@skywokka) September 29, 2010

…holy shit I just killed like a million people.
— Luke Skywalker (@skywokka) March 11, 2013

And there’s Ben’s voice again. Everyone is dead and I’m haunted.
— Luke Skywalker (@skywokka) March 11, 2013

WATER?! These maniacs clean themselves with WATER?!
— Luke Skywalker (@skywokka) October 22, 2014

They’re making me wear a really stupid yellow jacket
— Luke Skywalker (@skywokka) November 6, 2014

via Super Punch

Our houses are quickly filling with an internet of things—smart TVs, DVRs, thermostats, and more all online, all the time. But to a hacker, each of these devices is a digital door or window into your home (network). Here’s what you need to do to keep your devices locked against outside intrusions.

It sounds paranoid, I know, but there are, seriously, websites out there dedicated to streaming unsecured security camera footage—veritable YouTubes of compromised DropCams and smart TVs. Leaving these and other networked devices unsecured—or even worse, using the factory default username and password—is like leaving a note on your front door that reads: "I’ve gone to the store, be back in 3 hours, the key is under the mat." Or, almost as creepily, an open invitation to voyeurs.

The basics

Basic network security is fundamental, every bit as important as locking your front door whenever you go out. That door is your wireless router and there are a number of ways it can, and should, be secured, according to the FCC:

• Set the network encryption to WPA2. The older WEP algorithm is totally outdated and laughably insecure by comparison.
• Install a firewall. Your router should have a hardware-based firewall so be sure it’s activated. Also, it doesn’t hurt to have a secondary, software-based firewall running as well. Windows 8 has the feature baked into its OS, as does OS X and Chrome OS. Or you can install a third party system like Zone Alarm’s Personal Firewall.
• Stop broadcasting your network. There’s simply no need to publicize the existence of your home network, so turn of the Broadcast SSID option in your router configuration. That way you’re protected from wardrivers—which probe for easy access points—and nosy neighbors alike.

The secret to network security: password, password, password

Just using a WPA2 encryption algorithm isn’t enough; you need to make sure your password has all the bells and whistles and special characters you can cram in there. The longer and more complicated the password, the harder it is for hackers to crack—not necessarily unbreakable, but enough of a hassle to make it not worth the attacker’s time.

And, while you’re at it, change the user ID if you can. Avoid easily identified or guessable phrases like "Jeff’s Place" or "210 Elizabeth St" in favor of more esoteric tags like "Welcome to the Terrordome" or "Flying Saucer". And by all means, don’t name it something stupid like "Al-Quada Free Terror Network"

Partition your network

For most of us, just taking care of the basics should be sufficient but if you have a slew of network-connected devices laying around your house—i.e. an IRIS security system, a smart TV, a smart DVD player, a connected DVR, Hue lights, and a Nest thermostat—more advanced users will want to minimize any damage caused by intruders by segmenting their networks. It’s the same as not just locking your front door but also the back door and the door to your garage as well.

The trick is to assign groups of devices individual SSIDs. Most routers on the market today possess the ability to manage multiple SSIDs and, by doing so, prevent an intrusion into one device allow attackers to gain access to the rest of the network—say, attacking your smart TV to gain access to get into the network and then go after the personal files on your NAS. You can group the devices most any way you please—by room, by function, whatever—just be sure to keep your most sensitive devices (your DVR and networked hard drives) on separate networks as other, more easily-hacked appliances. In fact, you would do well to set your the various components of your entertainment system—your TV, gaming system, DVR— all on individual networks.

MAC down on it

Now, if you want to get really paranoid about your home network security and have a few hours to kill, you can set a MAC list filter for your router. The MAC (media access control) address is the unique network identifier for an individual piece of connected hardware—essentially the device’s digital fingerprint—and a MAC list filter is akin to a fingerprint scanner for your front door. Only devices that are registered on the MAC list can even see the network, everything else—literally every other digital device on the face of the planet—will be blocked outright.

The only problem is that you’ve got to gather up the MAC address from every single connected device in your house if you want it to keep functioning once the filter has been implemented. Anything you miss not only stops working, it also leaves a nice big security hole for attackers to exploit. For most people that won’t be worth the trouble, but if you’re the better safe than sorry type, this is decidedly safer.

Lead image: Scott Bedford

via Gizmodo
How to Lock Down Your Internet-Enabled Houseful of Gadgets