@RoryAlsop I wholeheartedly agree. When I said reddit explains it I did not mean to imply that reddit is omniscient but rather that this information coming to your attention via reddit is not a surprise.
@Rhino ah yes but on Friday I'm out for drinks/food with a load of people who've been in InfoSec a loooong time (in some cases), cynicism is kind of inevitable
Oh yeah me too I know all these people! How's Rory these days? And Rory? And Rory on the fourth floor? And Rory in accounts? And did you meet Rory the mail delivery driver today?
@RоryMcCune I see... ok I suppose. It still feels like the wrong thing to be doing on a Friday though, being cynical. That's for thursdays when you've been doing this stuff for four days straight and OH MAN why are 5 day weeks even legal what is this?
Friday is like being in 24. 8am-9am Jack arrives at work, contemplates weekend. 9am-12pm Jack does everything that will absolutely get him fired if he doesn't do it by the end of the day, 12pm-1pm Jack has lunch. 1pm-5pm Jack pretends to work, but postpones dealing with any terrorist incidents "until Monday".
That is, assuming Jack is still in the office at 5pm which is not guaranteed on the weekend before a public holiday.
@DavidFreitag If you want to make it really painful, install self destructing cookies, requestpolicy and noscript
after you successfully manage to persuade it to let you redirect to your OpenID provider and back, you think you've made it only to find out because you navigated away from stackauth.com in the process, self destructing cookies destructed your cookies over there :)
@AviD @LucasKauffman Not me, unfortunately. I use a traditional French Press, and don't know anything about the Aeropress other than that it's somehow different.
@DavidFreitag ah yeah. I actually have that working because I use chat over https too - if you authenticate to https se but use http chat, which I think is the default, you don't get no cookie
Since browsers don't like '*.*.stackexchange.com' wildcard certificates, or 'meta.*.stackexchange.com' either, they would have to buy many certificates.
You can use regex but with millions of instances it is pretty much guaranteed that there will be many remaining problems, probably too much to be handled manually.
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@Simon some of it, but not resources the site links to as @ThomasPornin says. And also the wildcard cert issue from the bear - you can only have one * at the beginning for certs. Browsers don't handle anything else.
and I don't think you could get a CA to issue one.
The options for handling this involve managed PKI i.e. lots of money
@Rhino Although RFC 2818 was a lot more flexible, browsers did not implement it properly, mostly out of incompetence, although they now say that it was "for security".
@Simon In fact, X.509 already has a solution for making intermediate CA limited to a single domain, with the 'Name Constraints' extension, but nobody really supports that extension.
Commercial CA are not keen in helping people get working sub-domain certificates, since the alternative is to buy a lot of individual certificates from commercial CA.
In fact when I visited the security group at Birmingham uni, their head of group spoke french and so did two thirds of the postdocs, even though none were French. They had gone to ENS at a point or another.
It's a bit late once everything is built up to think about adding on some security... Also Simon was this the question you were upset was having its certification tag removed?
I didn't read the question, I have no idea if the tag fits or not. I just noticed that the same user edited multiple questions to strip the certification tag.
@Rhino It's a bit more complex than that, of course, but that's the gist.
Initially, the ENS was supposed to be the school for the people who would become the teachers for the schools where would go the future teachers who would then go through France and teach everything to everybody, starting with reading, writing and counting.
This was back at the end of the 18th century.
Nowadays, the ENS are like "the Grande École for academics"
whereas most other Grandes Écoles are for creating engineers or businessmen or artists.
Being an ENS pupil is quite convenient, because you have a statute of public servant, and thus you get paid for being schooled.
The ENS Ulm (the one I went to, which is "rue d'Ulm" in Paris) also hosts one of the most ancient crypto lab, so many crypto-oriented academics have went there at one point or another.
@Rhino entering is hard. Very hard. I had some classes as an external student with ENS Rennes students, and it was okay but they were better. And entering ENS Lyon or Ulm would be nigh impossible for me, even though I'm in UCL.
They're very adept at doing abstract, formal research.
@ThomasPornin I see - I think for my A-level (baccalaureat) French I had to learn "culturual references" about France and this was one of them. I'd forgotten I even knew this much.
@SteveDL I gathered and isn't there an extra year of study just to enter the grand écoles? I can't remember what it's called but it's after the bac
@ThomasPornin that's the one I was thinking of - I didn't actually know there were others until I looked at wikipedia.
@Rhino The normal method for entering a Grande École is through the entry contest; you study for two (or three) years in a Classe Préparatoire to train for that contest.
"taupinage". then after 2 years you take a variety of nation-wide exams for groups of schools, the biggest exam is CCP (concours commun of something...)
And it's certainly true that the french currently have a very strong showing cryptographically. I can name three french cryptographers off the top of my head, but only one English one (that is without looking)(bearing in mind I'm not "in academia" therefore the work has to make it out to the likes of me)
@SteveDL It is "Concours Common Polytechniques". Mind the final 's': it is an attempt at leeching on the reputation of "Polytechnique", one of the highest-valued Écoles.
Client-side VPNs (AnyConnect, RDP) use transport mode because they set up end-to-end or end-to-site encryption. They do not rely on any other security infrastructure to create and maintain the tunnel.
Tunnel mode is most often done between VPN gateways (routers) that maintain the tunnel without ...
I think that they process about 15000 students per year in all. Correspondingly there is no real engineering in Universities.
This is a French specificity.
Then there are some weird things, like the ENS, that are a Grande École, but send you back to the University system (albeit with specially organized courses, so you don't have to physically meet commoners).
Universities are definitely different, they're more sciency when touching topics also covered in engineering. But they're also somewhat more difficult. I found that I learnt more at Master's level in a public uni than in an engineering school.
@ThomasPornin come on :p I took classes with Normaliens :p
Everybody with the Bac can enter the University, there is no real selection. So selection occurs later on. At Master's level, considerable winnowing has taken place.
@Rhino depends on uni but in mine, the math department kept up to 120 students in year 2, 20-30 in year 3 (final BSc year) and 5 or so in year 4 (the start of the Master's - the M1)
@SteveDL Also, one of the greatest possible crimes in French Academia is working on something that is suspected to be actually useful. This is akin to being sold to the Capital.
The CS dept kept up to 120 for year 3 and roughly 30-40 across two or three MScs. The uni at which I did my MRes kept 60 people for 10 different MRes programs (so roughly 6 per class, yaaaaaay)
Mathematicians who work in algebra scorn the mathematicians who work on function analysis, because the latter can be used by physicists. That's treachery.
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