As promised, here is my adaption of the second act of Beethoven‘s one and only opera Fidelio. Read the first act if you haven’t already. Continue reading “Fidelio, Act Two”
Author: Dag-Erling Smørgrav
Fidelio, Act One
I went to see a concert version of Fidelio at the Norwegian National Opera last night. For those of you who aren’t well versed in opera or in the classical or romantic eras of Western music, Fidelio is Beethoven‘s only opera; initially written in 1804 under the title Leonore, oder Der Triumph der ehelichen Liebe, it took ten years and numerous rewrites before it became what we know today as Fidelio. I know Fidelio quite well, having owned a copy of Karajan’s 1970 recording since my teens, but never really paid attention to the lyrics as a whole until I saw it on stage. I was mildly surprised at how progressive and (in places) possibly even scandalous they are, for their time. They deserve wider recognition. So without further ado, I present my abridged and somewhat… improved version of the libretto. Continue reading “Fidelio, Act One”
Not up to our usual standards
For a few years now, I’ve been working on and off on a set of libraries which collect cryptography- and security-related code I’ve written for other projects as well as functionality which is not already available under a permissive license, or where existing implementations do not meet my expectations of cleanliness, readability, portability and embeddability.
(Aside: the reasons why this has taken years, when I initially expected to publish the first release in the spring or summer of 2014, are too complex to explain here; I may write about them at a later date. Keywords are health, family and world events.)
Two of the major features of that collection are the OATH Authentication Methods (which includes the algorithm used by Google Authenticator and a number of commercial one-time code fobs) and the Common Platform Enumeration, part of the Security Content Automation Protocol. I implemented the former years ago for my employer, and it has languished in the OpenPAM repository since 2012. The latter, however, has proven particularly elusive and frustrating, to the point where it has existed for two years as merely a header file and a set of mostly empty functions, just to sketch out the API. I decided to have another go at it yesterday, and actually made quite a bit of progress, only to hit the wall again. And this morning, I realized why. Continue reading “Not up to our usual standards”
How to solve every problem in the world
- Identify a complex problem in country A which is deeply rooted in that country’s demography / economy / culture / political system.
- Point out that country B, which has a completely different demography / economy / culture / political system, does not have that problem or has found a simple solution to it.
- Declare that the problem is trivial and that country A are idiots for having it in the first place.
- Job done, have a beer.
FreeBSD and CVE-2015-7547
As you have probably heard by now, a buffer overflow was recently discovered in GNU libc’s resolver code which can allow a malicious DNS server to inject code into a vulnerable client. This was announced yesterday as CVE-2015-7547. The best sources of information on the bug are currently Google’s Online Security Blog and Carlos O’Donnell’s in-depth analysis.
Naturally, people have started asking whether FreeBSD is affected. The FreeBSD Security Officer has not yet released an official statement, but in the meantime, here is a brief look at the issue as far as FreeBSD is concerned.