Category: Side Notes

Site Updates

I made a few updates to the site. Why do things still look the same? Because all the changes I made were on the back end.

A report released by Netcraft discussed the severe lack of servers that implement perfect forward secrecy (PFS). I hadn’t given PFS any thought but I decided to implement it yesterday. What does this mean to you? As we know, the National Security Agency (NSA) has been busy collecting everybody’s data. The agency claims to dispose of any information from persons inside of the United States but save all encrypted data because the identify of the creator can’t be verified (in truth, the NSA is almost certainly keeping all data regardless of the physical location of the creator). It’s saving everything in the hopes of decrypting it later.

Normally, under Hyper Text Transport Protocol Secure (HTTPS), any intercepted data can be decrypted with the private key. PFS negotiates a temporary keypair between a server and each client. This means the NSA can’t decrypt HTTPS secured data even if they are able to obtain a copy of the server’s private key.

Additionally, I redirected the unsecured version of this site to the secured version. If you try to access http://blog.christopherburg.com your browser will automatically be redirected to https://blog.christopherburg.com/.

CryptoParty Postmortem

I don’t have anything else for you today because last night’s CryptoParty went longer than I expected. The turnout exceeded my expectations by a notable amount so I think we managed to get a good number of people setup with OpenPGP. As it turns out, explaining OpenPGP in two hours isn’t feasible so there is still some fine tuning requires on our behalf but I think we did far better than last time. If anybody reading this has previous CryptoParty experience feel free to comment below or send me an e-mail covering what you’ve learned.

Slow Blogging

Apple went and dropped a new version of iOS, which means I have to go update my know how again. Since I’ll be diving into pages of boring documentation to update my skill set things may be a little slow around here. I know I promised a guide on using Thurnderbird and Enigmail to send encrypted e-mails, and I will deliver it, but Apple’s latest drop is putting that guide on the back burning.

I’d apologize but I’m not sorry because I don’t get paid for blogging (unfortunately).

On Vacation

Today marked the beginning of a short vacation. Since I will be occupied with other matters I won’t be attending to this blog until the conclusion of my vacation. But have no fear, I wrote material for your enjoyment already!

Anyhow, enjoy yourselves.

OpenPGP Key

Many of you are aware that I can be reached by e-mail via blog [at] christopherburg [dot] com. Until now I haven’t published my OpenPGP public key, instead relying on people to first express interest in it before sending it. This isn’t a very effective policy so here is my OpenPGP public key for anybody interested in sending me encrypted e-mails:


-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: GnuPG/MacGPG2 v2.0.19 (Darwin)

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-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

First USPSA Match of the Season

Last night we had our first United States Practical Shooting Association (USPSA) match at the Oakdale Gun Club. Due to the ammunition crisis I’ve been sitting on my stockpile in anticipation for USPSA, which means I haven’t shot for months (I did shoot a little last week but I was mostly at the range to help my girlfriend sight in here new AR-15). Surprisingly I didn’t suck as much as I thought I was going to. Although I did hit one no-shoot I’m fairly certain he was a Klan member or a Nazi so I think it was OK.

I also lacked the time to get a bunch of blog posts up for today so you’re not going to get much. If this bothers you feel free to incentive me to write more by paying me money.

Back Online

Good news, if you’re seeing this it means my server is back online, running OpenBSD 5.3, and using the Nginx web server instead of Apache.

The only difference you may notice is Server Name Indication (SNI) is now working. What does this mean? It means you can use a secured (SSL) connection for https://blog.christopherburg.com/ and https://www.christopherburg.com/ (unless you’re still running Windows XP or an even older version of Windows, then SNI won’t work for you and you’ll have to keep using https://blog.christopherburg.com/ instead). Basically SNI allows me to have different virtual hosts use different certificates. Since I can get valid certificates for a single subdomain for free it’s cheaper for me to use a different certificate for each subdomain than to acquire a single certificate that is valid for every domain (if I made money off of this site I would have just purchased a certificate but I do this for free so you get what you pay for). I’m not sure if anybody will use it but it’s there for those who want to.

I’ll be tweaking things for a while so the site may be up and down throughout the evening.