Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wait, socialization of the parents via some epigenetic effect? Fascinating.
Are you trying to point out the missing Oxford comma?
Haha no, did I misunderstand because of the absence of a comma?
Room 641A
61–70 of 73 posts
Re: Room 641A
#62One day I was getting out of my car to carry groceries into my house. Our nice neighbor was passing on the sidewalk at that moment, saw the EFF hat I was wearing, and asked me about it. "Do you work for the EFF?" "No, but I throw some money at them when I can because I like them." "Oh. I like them, too. They helped me out a lot once." "Oh yeah? For what?" He laughed. "I'm Mark Klein. Go Google me when you're finished…
Cool story. Off topic question... Do golden retrievers have a mean side to them? I’ve always liked them and I dont like scary dogs in general
They'll get that hair on you, and you'll never get it off of yourself. Better to leave them well alone.
Re: Room 641A
#63Putting ethics and legality aside (if you can, and you shouldn't), it's a marvellous technical achievement to be able to take a beam splitter and analyse all the traffic. I assume they must do a lot of early filtering in hardware to select traffic of interest based on IP headers and then some deeper inspection, and then gradually move up to software on the filtered traffic. Do we think they start with dedicated ASICs…
Oddly enough, the "fiber optic tap" shown in the article is an extremely mundane component that you can buy out of a catalog. There are two of them in the box, called fiber directional couplers. I used one when I just wanted to combine two colors of lasers for an R&D project.
Needless to say, the stuff that those fibers would go into and out of in that particular application, is way beyond my comprehension.
Re: Room 641A
#64What kind of data do they have access to, now that most internet traffic is encrypted?
Various leaks and whistleblowers have revealed that encryption alone doesn't provide as much protection as people think. There's all sorts of ways around the problem.
State-sponsored attacks against crypto are targeted, they don't care about your online shopping cart contents secured by TLS. They go for VPN connections, IPSec tunnels, and Tor.
A classic example is the Dual_EC_DRGB (Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generator), which uses a public/private key pair to generate the random numbers. The NSA pinky swears that they destroyed the private key, and don't know what it is. Nobody in their right mind believed them. Yet, the NSA basically forced a bunch of VPN vendors such as Juniper to include it.
Now, fine, okay, in theory Dual_EC_DRGB is safe even if the private key is know to an adversary, unless ~40 bits of the internal state is leaked during the connection handshake, which seems terribly unlikely. That was NSA's argument for why everyone should trust them and their algorithm. Unfortunately, guess what... the Juniper ScreenOS had a "bug" in it that just so happened to leak a bit over 40 bits of the RNG state into the handshake packets. Accidentally, I'm sure. Ooops.
It's also a safe RNG if the private key is destroyed, and is not known to anybody. But unfortunately for Juniper, the Chinese government hackers broke into their source control and replaced the public key with their own, matching a private key they know. So for a while, all Juniper VPN connections were being spied on by the Chinese government instead of the US government. I'm not sure which is better.
I've read similar stories about Cisco, Citrix NetScaler, etc... They all have purposefully weak crypto, government mandated back doors, and so forth.
The various western governments' fears of Huawei being used by the Chinese government to hack them is absolutely warranted: this is exactly what they would do given the same opportunities!
Re: Room 641A
#65That door has no handle, no sign of a swipe card reader. Any ideas how the people who can would get that door open? My guess...some kind of reader hidden in the door that triggers a mechanical device that lifts the panic bar (another comment's comment) or otherwise disengages some such other locking mechanism.
My assumption is that this door is an exit — perhaps an emergency exit with a push bar. The room is big, 1152 square feet according to the article, so it probably has a real entrance somewhere else which couldn’t be photographed.
Re: Room 641A
#66Off-topic, but what kind of door lock is shown in this picture? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/89/Room_641...
The lock on that door is largely circumvented by the fact that the hinges are mounted backwards. The door opens outward, so it could be trivial to lift the hinge pins and pull the door towards oneself. Hopefully the hinges have security pins.
> lift the hinge pins and pull the door
That’s a bit of a myth. It won’t work on normal door hinges going back many decades. When the door is closed, the knuckles of the left and right sides of the hinge overlap, so the door won’t slide out even if the hinge pin is removed. You need to swing the door open at least 10-20 degrees to disengage the knuckles. (I wish I found a decent close-up picture of hinges on a closed door to include here.) The easiest way to see this is to walk over to the nearest door and look at the hinges.
Re: Room 641A
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
>it's a marvellous technical achievement Not trying to argue for the sake of it here, but _is_ that a huge achievement? I assumed this was a simple device that splits the fiber beam, sending one part on it's way to AT&T and the other to some NSA database for further processing.
Well at the speed the data comes in, you don't have time/space to store it all on disk (and just filling up also doesn't seem to beneficial for them) and also can't just double all traffic for sending it to the NSA So they have to filter a lot of data for interesting bits really fast before storing / sending it anywhere else
Interesting, thanks.
Re: Room 641A
#68The NSA has gone way beyond that now. Expand "room" to fortress , and then multiply by 8. https://theintercept.com/2018/06/25/att-internet-nsa-spy-hub...
It’s a little hyperbolic, those are generally just datacenters. They’ve got lots of fiber running through them, sure, but most of the “blacked out windows” is being dramatized.
Structural reinforcements as mentioned for datacenters are also fairly normal, they’re often designed to survive the worst imaginable environmental conditions for the area they’re being built into.
Re: Room 641A
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also I'd be suprise if they don't have a copy or at least acess to all of the maj root certs and websites. Iean sure maybe Facebook or Apple or AWS takes a stand against the govt. Saying "No you can't have our data" but I doubt Verisign or other root level CAs are so scrupulous.
But that would only allow them to sign new certs, CA’s don’t get the private keys only the public part to sign... Or did I misunderstand you?
That's correct. To sniff traffic without replacing the certificate with one of their own they would need the the private key which was used in a session. (That key might have been derrived from the server private key, but again nothing the CA has access to.)
Re: Room 641A
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or more likely because very young dogs would grow some basic traits of character while influenced by the behavior that their parents exhibit in front of them.
For some reason, I assumed that the animals were not brought up with their parents.
Puppies are supposed to be separated from their parents no earlier than about 6-8 weeks old. Critical socialization time is the first 3 months of their life. (Or so. These numbers vary by region and amount of caring; I'd rather have the puppies spend more time with the mom than less.)