cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions

  • 56 Posts
  • 28 Comments
Joined 5 years ago
Cake day: January 17th, 2022
  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlOPtoWorld News@lemmy.ml•Iran to close Strait of Hormuz, strike twice as many targets in response to any US attackEnglish
    8·
    2 months ago

    Their certificate was revoked (by their certificate authority, Actalis, part of the Aruba Group) on July 6. Presumably the CA was pressured to revoke it by the Italian and/or US government, and they will get a new certificate from someone else soon.

    There is a hexbear thread here about it; afaict there doesn’t appear to yet be any reporting about it. But in the CRL you can see it was revoked July 6:

    $ curl -s http://crl15.actalis.it/Repository/tls-subca-rsa-dv-2025/getLastCRL | openssl crl -noout -text |grep -A 4 02295E6BB25717C4652321F4ED9D2B29
    Serial Number: 02295E6BB25717C4652321F4ED9D2B29
        Revocation Date: Jul  6 13:54:09 2026 GMT
        CRL entry extensions:
            X509v3 CRL Reason Code: 
                Privilege Withdrawn

    The reason “Privilege Withdrawn” means it was the CA’s decision rather than their own.

    Because certificate revocation has never worked very well, many people can still access it (until their browser fetches the certificate revocation list, or checks OCSP, does some newfangled proprietary other thing i don’t understand…).

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•Companies now block older browser versions from accessing their websites!English
    1·
    3 months ago

    Companies now block older browser versions

    Now? This has been happening since the dawn of the web. At least the screenshot you pasted represents all of the big three rendering engines - it used to be common to see “Internet Explorer version XYZ required”, sometimes with javascript to prevent you from using the site with any other browser (even if in some cases it would actually work fine if you simply spoofed your user agent string).

    I have used kinda retro devices to surf the web at times

    Most websites became HTTPS-only sometime after the snowden disclosures in 2013.

    Over time old versions of TLS have been deprecated and eventually support for them is dropped from browsers and web servers alike. So, a browser from even 15 years ago literally cannot connect to most webservers today.

    Planned obsolescence is terrible but it’s a minor factor here: it’s actually dangerous to use even (especially?) a slightly-out-of-date web browser because every new release fixes vulnerabilities which can be exploited to run malicious code on your computer. The planned obsolescence which prevents people from being able to have an up-to-date browser comes mostly from proprietary operating system vendors; to have up-to-date software while continuing to use somewhat older computers you need to use free/libre software.

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•Handy flock camera license plate reader mapEnglish
    3·
    3 months ago

    The 2021 paper OSRM-CCTV: Open-source CCTV-aware routing and navigation system for privacy, anonymity and safety says they published source code at https://github.com/Fuziih but I don’t see it there now (though there is a related project called cctv-exposure).

    The final published version of the paper seems to be paywalled; it’s probably on scihub but there is also a preprint of it here on arxiv.

    https://github.com/FNBIP/ghost-route (just 3 commits, from February this year) says it is inspired by the paper and “extended to a production-grade multi-mode threat routing system”. It’s a node app you run locally (there doesn’t appear to be a public instance currently) which would be nice if it could work offline but unfortunately “Offline mode with pre-downloaded OSM tiles” is still on the roadmap and it currently lists “A Mapbox GL JS token (free tier works)” as a requirement (which is probably why there isn’t a public instance - someone would need to pay mapbox if they wanted to run it for other people).

    I have not tried it; if anyone reading this has or does please post here about how it works!

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlOPtoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•"Scan to Verify You're Human": Google's reCAPTCHA is trialing a new "experimental challenge type" which requires desktop users to use an Android or iOS device to be able to pass itEnglish
    6·
    3 months ago

    Is this something that websites opt into and add to their own site?

    Yes.

    reCAPTCHA is google’s “anti-abuse” service which many websites use to prevent slightly increase the cost of operating automated crawlers (which somewhat ironically google operates one of the largest of itself, for their search engine).

    Before neural networks could solve CAPTCHAs reliably, spammers were solving them with human labor; solving services like anti-captcha.com (intentionally not a clickable link…) today use a mixture of automated and human solvers.

    In the future google is apparently building, solving services will need farms of able-to-run-a-recent-android-release mobile devices with some kind of trusted computing hardware, each one of which they’ll have to use sparingly enough to keep usage of its unique ID under some plausibly-human threshold.

    And even if you do have a phone and are willing to identify yourself with it, if it is too old to run a recent enough Android you also will sometimes be denied services for being unable to pass a robots’ “human” test.

    🤮

Moderates