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Many of you will have seen in the news: there is a bit of a ruckus surrounding Wikileaks. As readers of this blog know, late March and beginning of April of this year, I helped Wikileaks release the leaked video that showed a US helicopter crew in Baghdad (apparently mistakenly) firing on Reuters journalists and then (without provocation) on unarmed occupants of a van that is coming to take the wounded.
In more recent developments, Wired has written about the arrest of a soldier in Iraq called Bradley Manning, who is aledged to have told hacker and journalist Adrian Lamo about leaking this video to Wikileaks. According to Lamo, Manning also talked about about leaking a host of other secrets to Wikileaks. Lamo then went to the military, and Manning was arrested. Recent discoveries regarding the background and timeline of that story are an interesting read also.
 Right now, there is apparently an international manhunt on for Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks. The Pentagon is said to ‘want a word’ regarding publication of any further secret documents that Wikileaks is said to have.
This is a story worth following and there are many many more things to be said. And I would too, except all of it can be much more eloquently said by Glenn Greenwald, Birgitta Jónsdóttir and Daniel Ellsberg in this footage from Democracy Now.
Now because of my involvement in the release of the video, people have begun asking me about these events. Before everyone asks me the same questions, let me note that:
- I do not know where Julian is. Really. I hope he is safe, and I think the fact that there apparently needs to be worry over his well-being is a freaking outrage.
- I have helped out Wikileaks with the Iraq video, and I’ve helped Icelandic MP Birgitta Jónsdóttir on the partly Wikileaks-inspired IMMI proposal in Iceland. I consider these to have been worthwhile adventures. However I am not a Wikileaks spokesperson or staff member.
- Apart from the Iraq video I never had any documents or materials that weren’t public yet.
- I do not know what’s going to happen next and follow the news sites and tweets with as much anxiety as anyone else. Julian is scheduled to speak in Brussels tomorrow. It starts at 14:30 Brussels time and there will apparently be a live stream. Do note that Julian has skipped earlier appearances citing security concerns.
Update: It is now Monday June 21st, 16:42 and Julian is indeed on stage in Brussels in a discussion about Freedom of Speech. I watched his opening remarks (it’s a forum setting), but the stream keeps breaking up.
I got a little tired of the growing number of pages where I can see which of my friends were already there, with the implication that my friends would also see this when I visited somewhere first. Somehow, whatever privacy option I click on Facebook this remains on. And I don’t like sending unnecessary data to Facebook and then clicking some stupid “please don’t use it” button, anyway.
So… If you have AdBlock Plus or something like that (and you should) you can simply add a filter for the facebook crap (which is in an <iframe>), and all will be good. For now, anyway. In AbBlock Plus, the filter rules are:
|http://www.facebook.com/widgets/*
|http://www.facebook.com/plugins/*
If you do this, the Facebook site itself will still work fine.
Update, June 21st: as commenters have pointed out, the IFRAME can be in the widgets or in the plugins direcyory, so both should be blocked. I added it above…
I will be delivering a welcome address at a really cool computer security conference in Amsterdam on Thursday July 1st. The conference is called “Hack In The Box”, which originates from Malaysia and is run by really knowledgeable, nice and friendly people. It’s two days, so July 1st and 2nd. There’s a special hacker community deal, and the program is jam-packed with interesting talks. Check out some of the highlights:
The entire program is here and registration is here.
FreeWDE is a “minimal install” FreeBSD image that you can write to a USB stick or SD-card. When booted from, FreeWDE will ask some questions and then create an AES-256 encrypted partition on the same device. It will then copy the operating system there. You call tell FreeWDE to additionally install an unencrypted FAT32 (Windows) partition which will make a USB stick or SD-card seem like a normal storage device to Windows or Mac machines. It can hold your camera’s pictures or be used for files that you want to move in and out of an offline encrypted system. You can set sizes for all these partitions as well as for the encrypted swap. You can also opt to mount /tmp and /var/log as tmpfs ramdisks.
Or, in normal language, you boot from a stick or any other device and get a basic unix operating system that is fully encrypted and not any slower than it needs to be. Of course, you’ll still want to use the fastest media you can get hold of, and a bit of processor speed for the crypto doesn’t hurt either. It runs fine on my eeePC 1005PE.
This just installs a basic FreeBSD unix system. It does not include X-Windows, web-browsers, mail clients or whatever else you’d like. You can of course install all that after the encryption is set up. Or compile your own image with everything you need already packaged in it.
Please have a play if you are so inclined, and use the comments to tell me what you think.
Continue reading FreeWDE – FreeBSD with Whole Disk Encryption
This morning’s events (see previous post) came at a very weird time: 15 minutes before the planned coordinated launch of some interesting research I took part in. Not that I cared even the slightest bit his morning, but the timing actually could not have been much more awkward. I had worked through the night to
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My son Milo has diabetes, which can seriously suck in its own right. But early this morning he had the accident we feared the most: he went unconscious on the stairs. He must have fallen almost the entire distance, because I found him all the way down the stairs against the front door, out cold
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Another little tool: something I made a while ago. When I swapped servers it had disappeared from the web, now it will have a definitive spot here. It’s a fractions calculator that shows all the intermediate steps that I built for my kids when they were first doing fractional calculus in school. Pressing the equals
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I sometimes make little tools that are useful for more people than just me and that I really should be sharing with the world. Which may or may not be as interesting to you as some of the other things I blog about, but I need a place where such tools will stick around and
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I’m in Washington DC right now where I just assisted WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange put on a press conference. Before today I was in Iceland for almost two weeks, yet again without properly seeing it. Apart from that one day at the volcano I haven’t gotten out much. That is to say: I have literally
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I’m in Reykjavik again, rushed in to help out with Wikileaks’ ongoing projects. And yesterday we took a day off to see the eruption. All in all we were out of Reykjavik for over 12 hours, and we spent many of these hours making our way over a glacier in a monstrously big 4 wheel
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A friend of mine, Sandy Sandfort, writes the script for a science fiction web-comic that I read. So imagine you are me a couple of days ago, clicking the day’s link from my RSS-reader and then this pops up. As it turns out in my other life I am the “Celestial Mechanic” for a space
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As I slowly shake off the winter and re-enter communications mode I joined Facebook yesterday, after dramatically saying goodbye to all social networking two years ago. Two reasons. Facebook has developed into an indispensable tool for political awareness, mobilization and campaigning and I see people being very effective in reaching a lot of like-minded people
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