Introducing the byobu.co website!

It's hard to believe that it's been almost a year since the last Byobu blog post here!  How time flies :-)  I've been a little busy on the home front, as well as the work front in the last year, so hopefully you'll forgive me...

But at this time, I'm delighted to introduce the new Byobu community website at byobu.co.

The layout is loosely based on the same template as our eCryptfs.org site.  And likewise, here, you'll find all the usual links in an open source project website.

• About the project
• Download and installation instructions for:
• Arch, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Mac OS, Mint, and Ubuntu
• Source code links for Launchpad and Github
• Support and FAQs
• Documentation and manpages
• News links

Also new...

As usual, feedback and suggestions are welcome.

Cheers,
:-Dustin

Homebrew inspired by Ubuntu -- Ubrewtu

You Brew Too!?! is cross-posted from my new blog, Ubrewtu.com.

Shortly after starting this new blog, I read that one of my heroes,

Wil Wheaton started a home brew blog of his own.  Pretty cool.  Enjoy!

Ubrewtu is a play on two of my passions -- home brewing beer, and Ubuntu.  Ubuntu (pronounced ooh-BUN-too, though many people pronounce it YOU-bun-too), is an open source computer operating system.  It's an alternative to Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X on the desktop.  It also works on some mobile devices, in place of Google Android and Microsoft Windows Mobile.  I have personally worked on the server version of Ubuntu for over 5 years now, where the Ubuntu server is the operating system of some of the largest websites and cloud infrastructures in the world.

In the development of Ubuntu, the ideals of openness and collaboration are essential.  Ubuntu leverages and extends the best of open source software in the world.  Thousands of expert developers come together to build an operating system that's bigger and better than what any smaller group could have cobbled together on their own.

I am who I am because of who we all are.  That's an approximate translation of the concept of Ubuntu, as espoused in the ancient African philosophy from which Mark Shuttleworth initial borrowed the word.

This marvelous idea around the good things that humanity can produce when working together has been applied to hundreds of endeavors.  Famously, Doc Rivers brought the concept to the Boston Celtics, who won the NBA championship a couple of years ago.  Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu have used it in their own sociopolitical efforts.

Having seen how effectively the concept of Ubuntu has worked in the open source software world, I'm borrowing those principles for use on a much smaller scale -- that of home brewing with this little Ubrewtu project.

I have a scattering of posts about my passions for home brewing, micro brews, vineyards, wineries, and distilleries -- spread across my personal blog, my family/travel blog, Google Plus, and Facebook.

This site is intended to consolidate all of those into a single coherent home, document what has and hasn't worked well for me as well as others, collaborate and share our passions for home brewing openly.  I hope you find something interesting here, and I invite you to share your own experiences in the comments as well!

Cheers,
:-Dustin

Johnny Football sure looks familiar...

Who exactly is Desmond blocking here?  Because he's holding the ball in the wrong hand to strike a Hesiman pose...

Certainly not Alabama cornerback Deion Belue.

Johnny Manziel for the Heisman!

:-Dustin

Fascinating, Unique, Memorable Authentication Strings

I was asked a very interesting question by a reporter earlier this week.  To paraphrase, I was asked for "better ways" a website might secure information, rather than a password.

Here's an article I've written in the past on the topic, as to how I manage my own passwords.  I still use a long, randomly generated password for each and every account (200+ and counting), to this day, but honestly, great passwords are unfortunately impossible to remember.

It's absolutely ABOMINABLE and should be ILLEGAL when sites try to identify you or recover your password by using some marginally public information.

• Which of the following phone numbers have you been associated with in the past?
• Which of these addresses have you used in the past?
• What's the name of the street you grew up on?
• What's your mother's maiden name?
• What's your high school mascot?

All of those are trivial to discover about a person.  Try it on someone you sort of know -- a friend or colleague.  I bet you could socially engineer your way through 4 or 5 of those in a matter of minutes.

Fortunately, there's a much better approach.  Unfortunately, very few people sites actually use it.

The best such sites actually enable you to choose both your security question/hint/challenge, and the answer/response.

Now, selecting a great question/hint/challenge is a bit of an art, but here's an excellent strategy...

Given a short sentence fragment consisting of pronouns, each and every human mind can make some fascinating, unique, and most importantly, memorable, connections.  The more pronouns, the better.  Pronouns are basically variables, with distinct but difficult-to-guessable values.  I'm sure you've played a Mad Lib game before as a kid, right?
Here's a simple example, to introduce the concept:

• Challenge: He looked at her
• Response: BogartBergman

The question is a reference to the line in Casablanca, "Here's lookin' at you kid".  In that quote, Rick (Humphrey Bogart) toasts Lisa (Ingrid Bergman).  That question will jog my memory and I'll remember the rest.  Others probably won't make that connection.  Pronouns are like programming variables.  I happen to have their values in memory, but others won't.  Out of context, it makes no sense whatsoever.  Just say it outloud, "He looked at her."

The more pronouns you use the better.  Here's another example:

• Challenge: He traversed it for his mother
• Response: CaesarRubiconAurelia

If classic movies and classic Rome aren't in your wheelhouse, use something more personal.  Maybe your Dad took your Mom on a nice vacation...

• Challenge: He took her here for this
• Response: JimDianeBaliAnniversary

Almost anything sufficiently ambiguous would work...

• Challenge: Best that ever was
• Response: BrettFavre4

Pose that same question to a few thousand people and you'll get anything from MuhammadAli to TyrannosaurusRex to SharkWeek1987 or billions of other responses.  But ask the same person that question, and they'll come up with a memorable response.  In this case, it's almost like a hash or HMAC.

The reason that this works is that these challenge/responses are subjective, rather than objective and discoverable facts, like your Mom's middle name.

Hopefully you're starting to get the idea :-)

Use longer challenges, with more pronouns, for higher quality, more entropy in your responses!  Perhaps you can post your own suggestions in the comments below...

I'm actually working on an automatic challenge creator, that you'll soon be able to use to generate your own challenges, and derive your own response.

:-Dustin

Secure Your Keys, Tokens, Certs and Passwords

Enabling Multifactor Authentication in the Cloud

Storing Keys & Passwords with Gazzang zTrustee