Rodney Adler: “This week on Sunday Profile, jailed businessman Rodney Adler talks about the impact of the HIH collapse on him, his family and his business ventures and what he expects from prison life.”

This is a really amazing interview. If you are even remotely interested in the inner workings of the HIH debacle, this is fascinating. While I’m not quite sure how I feel about this, it’s very interesting to hear the other side of the story. The comments about the fact that the other N-EDs not being held responsible is particularly interesting… Well, I thought so anyway.

(Via Sunday Profile : ABC Online.)

[A legacy blog post]

So I was having a few paranoid thoughts about communicating with people securely, in a way that evades traffic analysis, and provides me ways of using side channels (like web browsing and email) to securely communicate with other people. A secure, addressed version of the CSE lunchboard, if you will.

If you’re a security geek, there’s a good chance you’ve heard systems engineers say “oh, we’ll just use soft certs and mark them non-exportable. That’s secure!” Frankly, this scares me, but I can’t provide hard proof beyond “that requires us to trust the operating system more than I’m willing to.”

So, I’m opening a challenge. I challenge you, the internet, to demonstrate an attack against non-exportable user and computer certificates and private keys. I’ll accept either programmatic attacks, or a detailed description of how to carry out a manual attack. In order to win, I have to be able to successfully carry out the attack on my own hardware, and recover both the certificate and private key that has been marked non-exportable from either the user or computer certificate store on a Windows 2000 SP4 or Windows XP SP2 machine. You may assume that local administrator privileges have been obtained, but not LocalSystem. You should indicate what privilege is required.

A Hydrogen ion walks into a bar, and tells the barman “I’ve lost an electron”. The barman replies “are you sure?”. “I’m positive!”

A neutron walks into a bar and orders a stiff drink. After a short conversation, he looks up and asks the barman what he owes for the drink. “For you, no charge”.

Courtesy of my (newly minted Co-Op Scholar) brother.

[A legacy blog post]

So, I’m in a car, heading to Queensland for the traditional Chrismas family get-together-play-nice-fun-and-games. Hooray for long battery life, iTunes and sitting in the back seat. After two weeks, I’ll be jetsetting away to the states, courtesy of some accumulated and expiring parental frequent flyer points…

Coming off the ISG’s offsite, things seem a little surreal. I can’t believe my time at Westpac has come to a (temporary?) end. I can’t really place what happened to the scared 19 year old 2nd year student who walked into the BT Financial Group in January 13. It seems like I’ve come so far, and yet what have I really achieved? I’ve got some experience, done some things, learnt some skills, made some friends, but it still seems so transient and ethereal.

So yes, I finally broke down and bought a Mac. About a year ago, I swore that if I ever bought a new computer that it would be a Mac. I wasn’t expecting to be able to go through with it.

So, first impressions - the hardware’s too ostentatious. I couldn’t afford anything but a near-base-build iBook, so that’s what I got (which was cheaper than the PC laptops I was looking at). It’s white, very very noticeably white. This bothers me, because I don’t really want to be noticed…

That said, the operating system is really nice. After having played with a few consumer operating systems, I think I’ve found a desktop distro that I like. ‘course I haven’t had time to discover the things that will shit me off yet, so this could just be the honeymoon period. It’s nice to have an operating system that has most of the bits I need and just works. Expose is possibly the most useful thing I’ve used in a while, and I don’t understand Jordan’s frustration with the application model.

Incidentally, this is the most useful thing I’ve found yet - the OS X keyboard shortcuts. :)

Someone just asked for a copy of this, so I’ll put it up.

I am NOT a lawyer. These are my impressions, and should not be construed as legal advice

[If you’re considering doing UNSW’s LEGT2771, I strongly recommend it. Feel free to reference this stuff, but don’t steal it - they’ll kick you out. :) ]

Watching the Watchers: Legal Considerations of Network Surveillance in New South Wales

This page is possibly the most amusing collection of 404 messages I’ve seen. The english variants (Cockney, Lancastrian, Canadian, Deep South, etc) are particularly amusing. I can verify the German one is legitimate, but I can’t vouch for the others.

We are amused.

[A legacy blog post]

http://labs.google.com/papers.html

Google has some amazing papers written by their staff. No wonder they’re good at what they do.