I spent the last two days trying to set up the Aluminium Mac Mini (rev. 4,1)
as a home NAS server with encrypted storage, and I
wanted a BSD system on it. There’s already an
embedded OpenBSD onto the soekris gateway, and another companion would have
been nice. :-)
FreeBSD 8.2-RC1 boots but, due to the same bug, doesn’t recognize any
SATA drive nor any USB
umass device;
NetBSD 5.1 boots fine, handles SATA disks via the generic pciide driver (no DMA, thus quite slow) but, unluckily, doesn’t handle
the BCM57762 ethernet controller. I tried with quick
and dirty patches to bring the
bge driver up to date with -current, but still no luck: the MII link detection works, the card transmits but
doesn’t receive. The sdmmc controller as well works with -current but not
with 5.1-RELEASE. ACPI works correctly;
OpenBSD 4.8 boots, can access the SATA drives
without DMA, and recognizes the bge network card, but
exposes the very same behaviour as NetBSD 5.1 with the -current driver fitted
in;
DragonFlyBSD 2.8.2 doesn’t even enter kernel mode, I suspect
due to ACPI bugs;
PureDarwin didn’t
inspire me too much, due to the many blocking issues.
All of them support encrypted storage, I built up a NetBSD CGD disk flawlessly onto dk wedges; FreeBSD has got the
interesting gbde(8) and
geli(8) GEOM-based tools that I wasn’t able to test, while OpenBSD
supports crypto via a softraid
personality. Unluckily, support for the, nowadays, exotic Apple hardware is
a no-brainer.
So, with no other way left open, I decided to go the Linux route, using the
excellent sysresccd, that I elect today as
the successor of the pld-linux
rescuecd, companion of endless system recoveries :-). Anyway, you’ll
need the 2.6.36 kernel to make it boot onto the MacMini4,1, due to the
aforementioned MCP89 bug. Ethernet card and SD card
reader work out-of-the-box.
Now, I’m playing with LUKS and, while I’m not that competent in
cryptography, looks like it is more evolved than the *BSD counterparts, and
anyway it is more versatile tool than the tools in OpenBSD and NetBSD. On the
latter, having to set up GPT and DK Wedges to make
the CGD and synch MBR and
Disklabel to make the boot loader work (yuck!), everything coupled with rEFIt
is quite a mess™. There’s a GPT loader for NetBSD but I hadn’t a chance to
try it out.
I hope this information is useful to anyone who tries a similar adventure,
comments are appreciated :-).
Out of curiosity, I was looking how a browser interacts with the Google Instant
backend. While looking at the HTTP exchanges via Firebug, I first asked myself
why they’re encoding HTML and JS with \xYY escape sequences, then why the
very same JS functions are sent back and forth on every request, and later I
stumbled upon the google.com/s?q=QUERY JSONp service.
Give it a query, and it’ll return the suggested related phrases that are used
to build the menu under the search input while using suggestions and/or instant
(didn’t dig too much into all the other parameters).
Anyway, what’s interesting is that, of course, the suggestions are customized
on a per-country basis. To show the differences explicitly, let’s ask the
service the simplest query possible, a:
aer lingus, aib, argos, amazon.co.uk, argos.ie, asos, aa route planner, amazon, aldi, aib internet banking
Lastly, because I’ve been there lately and it has been a profound experience, Cuba:
asus, antonio maceo, amor, amigos, ain, antivirus, avira, alba, aduana, as
I’m sure @nhaima is smiling while seeing these words, because hell yeah, over
there they really google antivirus software (avira is one of them) a lot
because it’s a world without the Internet, thus without free software: you’re
condemned in using Windows stuff, and you take what you pay for. Antonio Maceo
has been an hero of the 19th century revolution, and it’s in the heart of Cuban
people. Amor, Amigos! :-)
Anyway, looks like that simple queries like this really give an insight on what
a population thinks and/or needs, because they’re surely generated by the
search trends, thus are the “most searched words”. Am I discovering hot water?
Maybe, but it was funny to rediscover it. Just make sure not to hammer the /s
service with too many requests, because they’ll anyway be handled by the same
cluster of machines, thus you’ll be banned early (I’ve been :-p).
On July 22nd 2010, Mikamai hosted a Ruby Social Club in
Milan, where
nearly 50 people attended watching five speeches about Ruby, Web development
and Startups. I was glad to be one of the speakers, and I presented a set of
Rails plugins we spinned off from our latest (and
greatest) project: Panmind (read more on the about
page) and released as Open Source on
GitHub.
The keynote is split in two parts: the first one explains why you should
follow the sane software engineering principle of writing modular and
interest-separated code and then how you could (and should) extract it from
your Rails application by decoupling configuration and then prepare for the
Open Source release, by writing documentation AND presenting to a Ruby
event so, hopefully, someone else will write unit tests! :-)
We released an SSL helper plugin that
implements filters (like Rails’ ssl_requirement) but also named route helpers:
no more <%= url_for :protocol => 'https' %>! You’ll have something like
plain_root_url and ssl_login_url - like they were built into the framework.
Then, a Google Analytics ultra-simple
plugin, with <noscript> support, a couple of test helpers and an
embryo
of a JS Analytics framework - hopefully it’ll evolve into a complete jQuery
plugin. Then, a ReCaptcha interface,
with AJAX validation support and eventually a
Zendesk interface for Rails.
As most of you already know, there are two open, critical
vulnerabilities in iPhone
OS versions from 3.x up. The first one resides in the Compact Font Format
component of the PDF renderer and the second one an error in the kernel,
allowing attackers to bypass the sandbox (SeatBelt) inside which applications
are run on the iPhone.
The two vulnerabilities were discovered by @comex,
@chpwn and other people.
Only few weeks later the .lnk design
flaw on windows (guys, you’re using
LoadLibraryW to load a damn icon!), these iPhone OS vulnerabilities are even
more interesting, because of the way the release is being handled by the
community and the vendor.
I spent 3 hours last night trying to find detalied information about the bug,
and except confused (and propagandistic) blog posts the only bit of
information is in this tweet,
and in the actual pdf exploit running on
jailbreakme.com. Where are the security lists
posts? Where is the CVE? Even the CERT still doesn’t say anything about this
vulnerability.
There’s something terribly wrong going on: the
cat-and-mouse-game that is making
the iphone-dev team researchers not disclose any
of the vulnerabilities they find has become very dangerous for end users: an
exploit that allows remote code execution and jail escape without no
interaction whatsoever by the user, carried via something that’s used to
consider “safe” (a PDF file) is what is called a critical hole; while the
exploit that uses it is called a 0-day. It’s the first time in my life I see
a 0-day packaged and distributed explicitly via a web site.
Anyway, the dev-team researchers did not have any other choice: if they had
communicated with Apple prior to public disclosure, we wouldn’t have had a so
easy jailbreak vector; OTOH now we have vulnerable phones and pads that can be
very easily exploited by mailcious parties. It’s also funny that in order to be
warned when a PDF is about to be loaded thus mitigating the risk, you should
jailbreak your device and install the PDF Loading
Warner afterhand.
My stand on this is that the real problem is Apple itself: they’ve crated a
walled garden,
outside any legislation, where they’re the absolute god and give and take
whatever they want. It’s not gonna work forever. I really hope that people
will understand think that it’s not the hackers’ fault, rather it’s the
totalitarian companies’ fault, for not giving us control over the devices we
buy from them. Hackers are only trying to liberate them, and it’s fair use
under the DMCA, after all.
UPDATE 2010-10-05: I’ve posted a summary of this bug on the
full-disclosure mailing list
– you know, if it’s not on FD no one would think about it :-).
In a nutshell, it adds support for unmarshaling 1.9 strings, and implements the
last missing type (TYPE_LINK) that was missing from the code. Tests still
lack, can someone help ? :-)
Added TYPE_LINK, needed because of how ruby 1.9 marshals strings.
In 1.9, Ruby marshals the string encoding in the binary output, and
uses an Ivar construct (TYPE_IVAR) to wrap the string and adds an
"encoding" instance variable (notice: without a leading @) whose
value is the encoding itself.
While the Ivar code worked correctly, the values of the encodings
are actually *strings*, that are being reused via the TYPE_LINK
construct, that wasn't implemented.
So, the get() and put() primitives are being used to store not
only tuples {id, sym} for symbols, but now store either
{{symbol, ID}, sym}
OR
{{value, ID}, val}
for the other types that use TYPE_LINK.
By reading the ruby marshal.c source code, it looks like that MANY
data types save their values in the arg->data hashtable, but by
inspecting the binary marshal output of, e.g, an array of floats,
links aren't used.
Thus, in this unmarshaler, links are considered, for now, only for
strings and regexes.
