Debian Bug Screws us All

This morning, I spotted this nasty tidbit on Slashdot: Debian Bug Leaves Private SSL/SSH Keys GuessableIt turns out a maintainer of the OpenSSL package on Debian removed the "seeding" of the random number generator that is used to generate, among other things, SSH keys. For those unfamiliar with random number generators, they work by generating a sequence of pseudo-random numbers based on some initial seed. The default value most programmers use when seeding their random number generators is simply the time, because it changes quickly and ensures a great deal of variability in what the generated random sequence of numbers will look like. If you seed your random number generator with the same number every time, you'll end up with the same sequence of numbers being generated over and over again...

Blogger Captcha Cracked?

I just 50+ emails from Blogger saying new comments were posted on my blog:Up until now, the spam situation with Blogger was decent. I'd only ever had the odd spam comment come through and I had been able delete them all. With this massive barrage though, I don't have the patience to go through and delete them all, especially knowing that it can happen again.For now, I'll just hope that blogger deletes the spammer's account and all of the comments he post...

Toy Story, Cave Story, .... Ubuntu Story ?

About once a month, I receive an email solicitation asking me to promote something on my blog. 9/10 times I just ignore it, because they're usually asking me to promote a spam blog. Not cool.It looks like we did better with this month's email. Rather than a pointless spam blog, it was instead regarding UbuntuStory.com, which seems like a friendly advertisement for Ubuntu by a community member. I'm probably preaching to the choir here, but if you haven't tried Ubuntu yet, I'd check out the site. Sorry, your first impression from that site will be wrong - Ubuntu won't take you on a wild African adventure, but it can make your computer much less...

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