gpg (which i use to encrypt my passwords, so it’s not really optional) started giving me a segmentation fault on a recent [emerge world] that bumped it to v2.0.19. I reverted to v2.0.17, same crash. I ran gdb on it, crash was happening in libgcrypt, which had also recently been bumped from v1.4.6 to v1.5.0-r2. I reverted to v1.4.6 and all is well again. Sometimes “stable” isn’t.
I’ve been having trouble with my server running out of file handles recently (ouch). Cyrus and Apache and rtorrent all do their fair share of abuse of my server, lsof typically reports 20k open files and sockets. rtorrent kept crapping out with “can’t resolve host” and “can’t save torrent file” errors, related to running out of file handles. Very hard to determine why this was happening. Eventually google turned up the answer on gentoo forums – re-emerge curl with these USE flags in [/etc/portage/package.use]:
net-misc/curl ares -threadsAll is full of light.
Here’s a snip from his June Crypto-Gram (you should subscribe to this!):
When I talk about “Liars and Outliers” to security audiences, one of the things I stress is our traditional security focus — on technical countermeasures — is much narrower than it could be. Leveraging moral, reputational, and institutional pressures are likely to be much more effective in motivating cooperative behavior. This story illustrates the point. It’s about the psychology of fraud, “why good people do bad things.”
Along similar lines, some years ago Ross Anderson made the suggestion that the webpages of people’s online bank accounts should include their photographs, based on the research that it’s harder to commit fraud against someone whom you identify with as a person. Two excellent papers on this topic: 1 2
This really resonates with me. I’d like to think, generally speaking, that there aren’t good guys and bad guys, just people with different perspectives on different situations and institutions, and that pretty much everyone has some form of moral code, even possibly overlapping in many areas. Isn’t that really our only hope as a species?
I recently bumped my primary email/database/webserver box up to date. Now all my gentoo boxes are past the annoyingly useless tweaks required for gentoo’s baselayout2. I love gentoo land, where every bit of pain is a lesson. This one included… (continued…)
Somewhere the AVG toolbar got installed on my laptop Windows install, perhaps without my permission when I installed PowerISO. You can remove it in Program Files, but afterwards it had still e.g. clobbered my home page. In case you need manual cleanup: (continued…)
