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00:00 - 17:0018:00 - 00:00

00:04
@copy Yeah, it is.
@copy Doesn't mean I have to like it though... it's not a particularly applicable skill.
Well, neither is chess, nor many hobbies for that matter
@KnightOfNi Cramming a whole program onto one line in python is a real accomplishment.
In perl, on the other hand, the goal is to fit it in under 80 characters.
@tylerl heh. I can't really argue with that one. On the flip side, there are almost 0 strange characters you have to insert into python scripts.
There's an XKCD about that somewhere... But I forgot what it was called.
All I can remember the link to is the one on sudo
@KnightOfNi That was actually a design consideration. An explicit goal in the initial language design was to avoid requiring the programmer to memorize things and make it possible for someone who knows nothing of the langauage to read any program
1
Q: Setting up NAT with firewall for RDP connection

donLI have a vendor who needs to connect remotely to one of our servers. What I thought I would do is setup a NAT rule in our firewall. I have a public IP address that I will have translated to the local server address so that then the vendor just needs to RDP to the public IP address. Is this a secu...

want?
(looks like a no to me)
00:11
in very real contrast to Ruby
@tylerl Whose goal was to make programming as difficult a skill to acquire as possible...
@KnightOfNi Well, when matz designed ruby he started with Perl as his base, and built from there.
@tylerl So, there was an introductory python session at my institute a year ago. Before that, I only knew basic python. There was a small competition with easy-medium questions in it afterwards. That day I had been awed by the syntactic sugar and resolved to make each submission as a one-line program. Actually accomplished it, and one of the seniors later told me that the submission was "epic"
@tylerl The whole project was doomed to failure before it began :)
One line programs in python are fun
00:14
@ManishEarth Not when you're reading them. Then they are decidedly confusing...
@KnightOfNi 'course :)
@KnightOfNi The problem with Ruby is that it's actually got some really useful design features. He took a crappy base and built something powerful on it. Like building a world-class library in a swamp.
Heh. Taceback tells me there's an error on line 1.
@KnightOfNi sometimes the confusing ones are where you learn the most
@MikePennington Not arguing with that. But I don't really want to learn how to cram as much as possible onto one line...
00:16
@Adnan What's funny is that I'm connected to that guy by way of someone who I've never actually met. He followed me once on the twitters and about a day after I followed him back he LinkedIned me.
@Adnan He looks to be a circle whore.
@tylerl Like the analogy. Still, gonna stick with Python... No matter what problems Perl can solve, chances are I can throw a (python) library at them. And it's not in a swamp.
@Adnan Hm. Assuming he's not a total jerkface it looks like we could get along. Lots of shared interests and such.
night all
@kalina Sweet dreams!
@ScottPack awww
00:22
oy where's @AviD these days?
@tylerl What?
@ScottPack you're so sweet!
I wish I had my own @ScottPack to tuck me in at night.
Ah, @tylerl's turning into @Simon!
@ManishEarth did I call him daddy?
give it time
00:34
You people have low standards.
@Adnan Done. We'll see how it goes.
 
4 hours later…
04:13
@tylerl Back off, he's still mine.
04:36
I just had a thought. Who wants to build "Password strength checker as a Service" and see how many idiots sign up? ;)
@TerryChia You'd be sorely disappointed. Just a bunch of baseball1 and 123456.
@tylerl It's more a "which dev is stupid enough to use this" thing.
Also, all you need it something that says "sign up for a free account to view our site" and you get their email account and email password.
@tylerl No, you misunderstand. I'm thinking more of a SaaS thing. ;)
@TerryChia Yes, I understood you. I'm just pointing out how utterly unnecessary it would be to go though all that trouble.
04:43
I don't really care for the passwords. I just want to see how many webapps are stupid enough to use the service. ;)
@TerryChia you do that, then.
I've already got a list mildly malicious todo's that I haven't gotten around to.
 
4 hours later…
08:39
morning
@kalina Morning.
quick, let's make lots of noise so that when the others wake up they have to read several hundred lines of conversation between us
I'm eating M&Ms for breakfast
because... reasons
no?
you don't want to create lots of text for others to read?
that's a little disappointing
I would have thought you would be totally up for that
I guess I'm alone
alone in my overwhelming will to have fun
@ScottPack Interesting. Where's the middle-man dude located? US or Finland?
oh no, a wild @Adnan appeared
@deed02392 I see that you're not married, then.
@AJHenderson oh! congrats!
09:04
@kalina You should have pinged. :P
Busy watching House of Cards.
...
09:45
morning
@kiBytes Mourning
moaning
so, anyway, I have started drafting a blog post on the BIOS protection question. We have a few others on the QOTW list that folks could write up if they wanted...
19
Q: Requests for Question of The Week blog posts

Rory AlsopSince starting the Security Stack Exchange Blog on 15 July 2011 we have some excellent blog posts, and a large number of these are from our Question of the Week posts. Going forwards, it is probably simplest to post your favourite Questions of the week as answers on this question, and vote for yo...

just saying...
and hinting...
not very subtlely
@RoryAlsop I think @AviD has owed you a post for over a year now.
ayup. Bad @AviD. Naughty @AviD
10:02
@AviD according to linkedin you are connected to Jody Schnarr of Fibernetics?
10:14
@RoryAlsop I've pinged your email.
FUCK
I just spilled coffee down myself
now I look like such a tramp wearing a white blouse with a coffee stain down the front
so embarrassing
@kalina Is it all over you or just some spot?
just some spot
the spot is quite large though
@kalina How big is it?
like as large as my hand
10:20
Are you at work?
no I casually wear blouses while lounging around in bed
...
no I'm creating all of this fuss because I'm sat within arms reach of my wardrobe
...
yes I'm at work.
...
you could spill more coffee all over the blouse
so it becomes brown
WHY WOULD I DO THAT
are you freaking out?
A nice brown blouse
xD
10:22
@LucasKauffman not particularly, I am unhappy though
@kalina do you feel sad or frustrated?
why am I getting asked a million questions
I don't feel sad but I am slightly frustrated
@kalina why are you being so defensive?
I am not being defensive
so far I have been frustrated, sarcastic, and curious
and my frustration was aimed at the disbelief that somehow I miscalculated where my mouth was
@kalina One thing you haven't been, though. Careful.
10:25
facedesk
Was it coffee or coffee with milk?
coffee with milk
more specifically a latte
a latte, that's it, where are you from?
Earth, like it says in my profile
@kalina I am not going to be able to help you with your stain if you are not willing to collaborate. Though I am not sure yet how knowing where are you from is going to help.
10:28
there is nothing you can do to help me
this top is ruined
RUINED
FOREVER
@kalina Get you a new blouse if he happens to be near your area.
I have no choice but to suffer the indignity of wearing a top with coffee down it all day
One of his gf's, sister's, or mom's.
Q: How can I remove a fresh coffe stain from my clothes?
A: For fresh coffee stains, first try cold water.
Run cold water through the back of the stain. For a very fresh stain, this might be all that is needed. It is important to go through the back of the stain. You want the water mixed with coffee residue to have to travel through the least amount of fabric possible, so going out the way it came in is your best bet. If the stain isn't fully removed, or your stain is old, you'll need to move on to the second step.
oh sure, walk around with a see through top all day due to running water through it
10:32
This is really funny.
@TerryChia I hate you.
@kalina Hey, don't blame me. Blame the coffee.
sed 's/water/coffee/'
10:58
@AviD heh thanksfully not
 
1 hour later…
12:11
wow, properly zoned out there for a few minutes
12:46
Afternoon all
hai thar Rory
Very Rory.Such Rory. Much Rory. So Rory
WOW!
such rry
very utf-8
@LucasKauffman I assume you made some money with dogecoin? ;)
@TerryChia meh about 30k so far
@LucasKauffman watcha
@deed02392 and the delight of no incorrect pings..
13:04
@RоryMcCune working with elastic search, quite interesting stuff
@LucasKauffman looking for vulns, or using for a project?
@RоryMcCune putting vulns inside it (as in putting data into it)
I heard NoSQL was what all the cool kids are using at the moment so we set up a project
@LucasKauffman roight, was wondering 'cause IIRC I came across it on a test a couple of weeks back..
@RоryMcCune yea there is no authentication :P
@LucasKauffman authentication is for sissies.
13:07
exactly
YOLO
@LucasKauffman I'd like to point out the topic of the room.
what's elastic search?
nosql database
how come nosql doesn't have authentication?
13:08
it's just not a feature
@LucasKauffman I like my link better!
well I'll be putting authentication on it by using an apache reverse proxy
since the interface is REST
@deed02392 a lot of the noSQL projects I've seen focus on speed and features to the exclusion of all else...
@LucasKauffman I find nginx much better as a reverse proxy. Apache is much too troublesome to setup.
@deed02392 So they'll say things like "we assume our product is only used on trusted networks" as if any such thing exists...
13:10
@RоryMcCune Ahh, makes sense
basically, implement your own auth
@deed02392 yeah at another layer, so e.g. at the OS layer you could do it by restricting to specific IP addresses. It's not a good idea as that's not very granular, but means that they don't have to worry about it...
Indeed. I need a reason to use nosql
If i started a new web project, I almost definitely wouldn't use an RDBMS
@TerryChia I'll have a look at it, all I want is basic auth so I can have some segregation
@LucasKauffman Have you tried RethinkDB?
@deed02392 to be honest the questions should be "what does my project look like" if everything is relational and you don't have string operations it's better to stick to RDBMS
@TerryChia what's that?
13:13
@LucasKauffman It's another NoSQL db. It's more mongo like than elasticsearch really.
I linked it here a few times before.
I dunno @Lucas, if you're a fan of the MVC methodology, keyvalue stores make a lot of sense
Hey Rory - how goes it? Haven't seen you in weeks.
especially given the ease of replication and redundancy you get
@TerryChia ah yes I think I commented that you were a bit of a hipster I think
13:15
@deed02392 Don't let your application dictate the db choice. Use the more appropriate one for your dataset.
@RoryAlsop <waves> not too bad, just moved our second tonne of topsoil up to the house :)
@RoryAlsop BTW you know anyone who would have any use for rock band drums and things?
If MVC is an appropriate choice for the application then you probably have data appropriate for a keyvalue store
@Adnan oh cool
I agree with Terry. It mainly depends on the kind of data you want to store.
@RоryMcCune let me know if he needs a guitar too
@deed02392 in 99% of the cases it still makes sense to use RDBMS
13:17
@LucasKauffman This makes me happy.
we changed to elastic search as heavy string operations were needed, and this is a performance killer on rdbms
what you doin' with strings @Lucas?
@LucasKauffman Especially given that rdbms have way mature management tools, replication stuff etc.
Plus you know... the damn ORM makes life a lot simpler.
@deed02392 we are indexing tons of information from the internet and try to intelligently search for vulnerabilities which have a rather high impact and cross link this across different sources
nice
randomly or for customers?
13:20
customers
we already have something similar I built a year ago
but we want to expand it, more sources, more data and especially more performance
@LucasKauffman Nothing like bigass servers with tons of memory for performance. ;)
sweet, was it much effort to switch to a keyvalue store?
currently it took about 20 minutes to agregate data and we want to get to real time indexing on the fly
what were you on before?
@deed02392 mariadb
not really actually
well not for the backend
the frontend will be a bit different
13:22
@LucasKauffman what you need is SSDs
lots and lots of SSDs
I guess it depends how well your model organising is
@RоryMcCune we have 3 normally as well as 32 GB of memory
should be ample for now
@LucasKauffman shit and it took 20 mins to run
were you CPU bound/IO bound or mem bound?
@RоryMcCune ah no that's the new one, the old one only had about 8 GB and was running on SCSI
must be some data set
@LucasKauffman ah well there's your problem :)
13:24
@RоryMcCune currently we retrieve about 12 GB of data a day, but we don't keep it all
@RоryMcCune RAM > SSDs. ;)
@TerryChia true but that counts for cost as well as perf :)
I'm also adding tons of multi threading to reduce wait times
@LucasKauffman Heh. That sounds like a major PITA.
@LucasKauffman for reads only I'd guess... multi-threading for writes can be tricksy from all I've read
13:25
personally I'd want a 4 x 10 core CPU and 128 GB of memory together with 4 SSDs, but that's a bit too expensive
@RоryMcCune nope for writes too, because it's not RDBMS we are quite alright at pumping in data into it as long as you don't write to the same index I think
@LucasKauffman Really? Elasticsearch doesn't have a write lock?
That sounds.... dangerous.
@TerryChia it might have if you write to the same index
@LucasKauffman interesting, well if you get weird data inconsistencies that'll be the place to look but you could well be right...
@RоryMcCune I had that at first, but it was due to me being a retard :P
3
@LucasKauffman That's always my first assumption.
13:28
because we have an index per source, no thread is writing to the same index at the same time. Multiple threads are writing to different indexes, this is how we reduce latency when waiting for sockets to connect
so that shouldn't be an issue normally
but we are still in a dev fase
we even have a scrum board!
@LucasKauffman Freaking devs!
can one of you geniuses have a looksie at this and tell me where my obvious mistake is...
Hello people from all countries
@kalina I don't know, but I bet it's @LucasKauffman's fault.
@ThomasPornin Hail the Bear!
I need your collective help to investigate a configuration issue.
There is some server (that I do not control) which serves CRL to the World at large.
Apparently I can no longer reach it from Europe.
and tell me if they get it or not
13:32
@ThomasPornin Thomas, let's be a bit reasonable, if you don't know the answer we probably don't either
3
from Belgium: nope
@ThomasPornin Nada. (From Singapore)
I have accounts on two servers in France and one in UK, and they don't reach it. However, I can get it from my home and also over 3G.
@kalina all that's done is get you tagged as "person I ask SQL questions of " :op
@ThomasPornin no joy from UK, not looking promising from an Azure instance either (although that is Europe based too)
@ThomasPornin Nothing from my Linode VPN in Tokyo as well.
Nothing from Manchester (that's where I appear to be routing at the moment)
13:37
@ThomasPornin Nothing from Finland.
@ThomasPornin Nothing from Germany
@kalina - stijn's comment appears valid. have you checked that?
@RoryAlsop yeah I have
@ThomasPornin Nothing from Romania
you think I'd check for the existence of triggers but not that the table is empty before starting? :P
regardless, the procedure that manually rebuilds the cache actually drops the table in question as the first action it undertakes
so that possibility was never an actual possibility before I even arrived to investigate the duplicates issue
sorry - I didn't mean to imply that @kalina
13:41
@ThomasPornin Working in the United States. (AC SecurSante.crl Size:1.5KB)
@kalina so is the type of ObjectId the same in the main table and your temp one?
@RoryAlsop oh, that line was said with a smirk, don't worry :p
@RоryMcCune int not null in both instances, yeah
there is no logical reason for this to happen
Ok, thanks to everybody; I now have enough ammunition to make those zealous firewall admins fell my wrath.
13:44
@kalina ahh the only thing that occurred would have been a difference in type causing a truncation of the data to make it the same, otherwise that's super-weird. you could look at your two instances and see if there's anything odd/weird about the data when it's in your temp table (i.e. when it's in the temp table what are the two records that end up being dupes?)
@ThomasPornin Strangely, working in Mexico.
The information we have so far indicates that the specific link @Thomas is checking is in fact water-soluble.
@kalina Are you going to set the SQL server on fire?
Rory - sadly I have a full set of Rock Band and Guitar Hero hardware. I can ask around to see whether any of my contacts would be interested
@Terry - sounds like that song by Electric 6
Fire in the DMZ
Fire in the site of Sec
Fire in the DMZ
Fire in the SQL
@RоryMcCune data in the temp table is fine from what I can see, the issue only occurs after the insert
@RoryAlsop coolio, no worries if not but I've got a box of stuff that I need to either find a home for or skip next week. :) (sale of bankton glade getting finalized \o/ )
13:57
no plans to ebay/gumtree it?
oh, and YAY
@kalina and no oddness in the content fields of either of the records that end up being dups?
@RoryAlsop prob not thought might. Planning to get a charity place round to take away the furniture that's there at the moment (new place is packed) if the new peeps don't want to buy any of it..
14:20
feel free to ping us a list of techy kit that's in there - I may have a small amount of free budget for toys
@RоryMcCune just to make this even more weird, the issue stopped
after I left it alone for ~15 minutes while raising the question on SO and chatting with people about it, I re-ran the entire script and it "just worked"
@RоryMcCune do you know much about Cyber Security Challenge UK?
@kalina those are the best sort of problems, the ones that go away before you find them...
@RоryMcCune I'm not surprised, we've seen this error four times on four different customer sites and it's vanished before we even investigated it in three instances
@deed02392 I don't really, although I sponsored some drinks for one of their events once, Mr @RoryAlsop may well though....
14:22
this is the only one I've been able to (partially?) reproduce
freshly installed windows 7, ay tips?
@LiarLiarPantsonFire www.ninite.com
@kalina sucks :(
@LiarLiarPantsonFire Install linux instead? (Sorry, I had to :P)
@LiarLiarPantsonFire ninite
@LiarLiarPantsonFire Quickly! Uninstall it!
14:23
and that looks like a cheeky version of photoshop...
@RоryMcCune haha really, where was the event?
@deed02392 Strathclyde Uni, one of their sponsors dropped out and I kind of owed a favour to one of the organisers, so I helped out sponsoring the evening drinks
ah good job, CSCUK is doing good for this country
@LiarLiarPantsonFire install EMET and an anti-virus
@LucasKauffman ahh EMET Q. for you, is it fire and forget or is there a lot of config involved?
@RоryMcCune pretty good as is
14:27
@LucasKauffman cool, does it trip up testing tools much or generally stay out of the way..
it's made for stupid people, they have red yellow and green configurations
@RоryMcCune I don't test from a machine running emet :p
but normally it shouldn't it only protects a few processes like IE, Flash and Office
It's essentially a watchdog for things like Adobe Reader and Java
@LucasKauffman roight, could be interesting to install but I'm always leary of things messing up low-level testy stuff..
You should be OK @RоryMcCune, I think it's designed to only affect the processes you configure
@deed02392 cool ta
14:31
@TerryChia linux does not FULLY support ms office, and other softwares
@LucasKauffman what is emet
@kiBytes why?
@LucasKauffman surely that should be lmbtfy.com/?q=microsoft+emet
@LiarLiarPantsonFire Not defending Linux or anything, as I think you should use whatever software you like, but that argument (in its current state) doesn't make much sense.
I've been using Ubuntu as my main and only OS for 6 (could be more, I don't remember) years. Fantastic.
@RоryMcCune you microsoft fanboy
I use Windows at home and Linux for all servers
and to pentest
@LucasKauffman just sayin' if you're going to look up EMET, you'd hope bing would be the best SE
@LucasKauffman I use windows for desktop prod, linux for testing and servers and anything low-level and OSX for video editing
14:34
@LucasKauffman If I were a gamer (or otherwise required very specialized software), I'd use Windows and still be happy about it.
In the end, whatever actually works for you.
I wonder what @RoryAlsop his first operating system was, mine was Windows 3.11
on my old IBM that had a key to turn it on
@LiarLiarPantsonFire You can use LibreOffice which can produce Microsoft-Office-compatible files. If Office is your concern.
(I highly don't recommend using Linux if your work environment is largely Windows)
@Adnan tbh I still prefer office above open office especially when it comes to Excel
or vice versa
@LucasKauffman I completely agree. I do work stuff on the work computer which Windows. Mainly Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.
@LucasKauffman MS office for Excel, iWork for Keynote, whatever for documents.
14:39
@Adnan well with the caveat that Libre office isn't as good at complex docs (IME anyway) and if you need to interoperate with people who use MS office, then using MS office is a very good idea..
@RоryMcCune No arguments from me there. That's why I use MS Office Excel for anything that is not personal (ie, work stuff)
@Adnan Apparently Jesper couldn't forward it on. There's a bug in forwarding invitations
@Adnan He said to send the invitation directly to him and he would forward it on
@ScottPack God damn it, LinkedIn!
@ScottPack What shall I do?
Pretty much
linkedin seems to have a lot of technical problems for such a large company
14:53
Send the invitation to Jesper and he'll forward it to the guy you wanted
@deed02392 So does Facebook. What does that tell you?
He's a bit of a connection whore so just send a request and he'll accept it
@ScottPack The issue is that all I know about this Jesper is his first name. Could you please link me to his profile?
@TerryChia Not as many as LI
@Scott Okay. Luckily, you have your connections displayed. I found the only Jesper there.
15:10
I'm on mobile only for a few days, sorry.
But yeah, Jesper is a pretty dang uncommon name
Alison Sperling on February 19, 2014

In 2013, our Stack Overflow community grew from 21.5 million to 26.9 million monthly visitors from 242 countries around the world. We’re doing a lot to keep growing with the community — we now have localized versions of Careers 2.0 for French and German audiences, we’re developing iOS and Android mobile apps for our entire network, and our first ever localized version of Stack Overflow with the Portuguese site currently in beta. As a way for us to make sure we’re doing the most for our users and community on Stack Overflow, we conduct a survey every year to see what you …

@ScottPack isn't it the name of one of the simpsons characters?
@Adnan Heh, i finally got my free flat rate boxes from the postal service, but we've been getting slammed with snow lately we probably have close to three and a half feet on the ground right now. I've spent more time shoveling in the past two weeks than anything else
15:28
@ton.yeung I have been watching prison break again lately. I had a dream about sweeping my house for bugs last night
@ton.yeung It's a good show it just... gets awful... quick.
I've been enjoying Boardwalk Empire
@Lucas - my first OS was 8080 assembly, closely followed by 6501/2 assembly, then 6809 and 68000 assembly. After that, I think Forth was first
maybe cp/m
Mine was AmigaDOS 1.2 followed by HPUX
As far as Microsoft goes, I think I got into it around DOS 3 or 4
Think my first Unix was a 4.somethingBSD
My first Microsoft was 3.1.1, then 2 months later, Win95
15:43
I did like 3.11, but not 95
3.11 was blisteringly fast
I still have machines running CP/M, SunOS, Solaris, HPUX, Irix and Forth
And I think one is on a very early Slackware :-)
We bought a gateway to replace our Amiga during the time that they shipped with 3.11 and included a free 95 upgrade when it was released
Gave an explanation of HTTPS+SSL on our google group, one of the members -- a guy who knows almost everything -- said that :D
(Yes, HTTPS != crypto, but implementations are taught in the course)
@ManishEarth Why didn't you just link him to the answer we have here?
@TerryChia because meh
also I was sleepy and bored and wasn't thinking so much
@ton.yeung Yeah, from what I read it's a flaw in the firmware itself. Although it's possible the original firmware was duplicated in some chunks and that included the flaws in the original firmware.
It's worth just checking with the PoC if you're susceptible or not.
Try what out? Aren't you already on 3rd party fw?
16:20
@ton.yeung I doubt third-party firmware is any more secure, by nature, than open-source software is to closed-source software. However, it is probably less likely to be targeted in the same way Mac OS & Linux are less likely to be targets than Windows.
@ton.yeung I personally use DD-WRT at the moment
16:35
I use Tomato and love it
I did have dd-wrt but there were a few weird behavioural issues with it
Tomato appears more polished, which makes sense since it targets fewer devices
00:00 - 17:0018:00 - 00:00

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