Petter Reinholdtsen

So the new president in the United States of America claim to be surprised to discover that he was wiretapped during the election before he was elected president. He even claim this must be illegal. Well, doh, if it is one thing the confirmations from Snowden documented, it is that the entire population in USA is wiretapped, one way or another. Of course the president candidates were wiretapped, alongside the senators, judges and the rest of the people in USA.

Next, the Federal Bureau of Investigation ask the Department of Justice to go public rejecting the claims that Donald Trump was wiretapped illegally. I fail to see the relevance, given that I am sure the surveillance industry in USA according to themselves believe they have all the legal backing they need to conduct mass surveillance on the entire world.

There is even the director of the FBI stating that he never saw an order requesting wiretapping of Donald Trump. That is not very surprising, given how the FISA court work, with all its activity being secret. Perhaps he only heard about it?

What I find most sad in this story is how Norwegian journalists present it. In a news reports the other day in the radio from the Norwegian National broadcasting Company (NRK), I heard the journalist claim that 'the FBI denies any wiretapping', while the reality is that 'the FBI denies any illegal wiretapping'. There is a fundamental and important difference, and it make me sad that the journalists are unable to grasp it.

For almost a year now, we have been working on making a Norwegian Bokmål edition of The Debian Administrator's Handbook. Now, thanks to the tireless effort of Ole-Erik, Ingrid and Andreas, the initial translation is complete, and we are working on the proof reading to ensure consistent language and use of correct computer science terms. The plan is to make the book available on paper, as well as in electronic form. For that to happen, the proof reading must be completed and all the figures need to be translated. If you want to help out, get in touch.

A fresh PDF edition in A4 format (the final book will have smaller pages) of the book created every morning is available for proofreading. If you find any errors, please visit Weblate and correct the error. The state of the translation including figures is a useful source for those provide Norwegian bokmål screen shots and figures.

A few days ago I ordered a small batch of the ChaosKey, a small USB dongle for generating entropy created by Bdale Garbee and Keith Packard. Yesterday it arrived, and I am very happy to report that it work great! According to its designers, to get it to work out of the box, you need the Linux kernel version 4.1 or later. I tested on a Debian Stretch machine (kernel version 4.9), and there it worked just fine, increasing the available entropy very quickly. I wrote a small test oneliner to test. It first print the current entropy level, drain /dev/random, and then print the entropy level for five seconds. Here is the situation without the ChaosKey inserted:

% cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
  dd bs=1M if=/dev/random of=/dev/null count=1; \
  for n in $(seq 1 5); do \
     cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
     sleep 1; \
  done
300
0+1 oppføringer inn
0+1 oppføringer ut
28 byte kopiert, 0,000264565 s, 106 kB/s
4
8
12
17
21
%

The entropy level increases by 3-4 every second. In such case any application requiring random bits (like a HTTPS enabled web server) will halt and wait for more entrpy. And here is the situation with the ChaosKey inserted:

% cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
  dd bs=1M if=/dev/random of=/dev/null count=1; \
  for n in $(seq 1 5); do \
     cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
     sleep 1; \
  done
1079
0+1 oppføringer inn
0+1 oppføringer ut
104 byte kopiert, 0,000487647 s, 213 kB/s
433
1028
1031
1035
1038
%

Quite the difference. :) I bought a few more than I need, in case someone want to buy one here in Norway. :)

Update: The dongle was presented at Debconf last year. You might find the talk recording illuminating. It explains exactly what the source of randomness is, if you are unable to spot it from the schema drawing available from the ChaosKey web site linked at the start of this blog post.