What is a secure computer?

Shawn K. Quinn skquinn at rushpost.com
Sat Sep 9 23:16:52 PDT 2017


On 09/10/2017 12:53 AM, Ryan Carboni wrote:
> No idea why TAILS automatically sets the clock.

Because Tor requires a properly set clock, especially for hidden
services. HTTPS also requires a properly set clock to validate certificates.

If you start Tails and tell it not to connect to the network at all, I
don't think it tries to set the clock. Almost everything Tails does with
networking goes over Tor, so if Tor is broken on Tails, networking is
broken. (If it sets the clock over NTP, that doesn't, but it's no more
incriminating than anyone else's use of NTP.)

> RFC 2324 "Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP/1.0)." L.
> Masinter. April 1, 1998. This has a serious purpose -- it identifies
> many of the ways in which HTTP has been extended inappropriately.

Okay, why does everything use HTTP/HTTPS if it possibly can?

Because there are so many birdbrained administrators that block just
about every other protocol. You'd think they think the Internet is only
ports 80 and 443.

Not that long ago, I was on a hospital's public wifi and I could not
even connect to my PC back home on SSH port 22, much less over OpenVPN
or even Iodine (IP tunneling over DNS requests). Now, OpenVPN and SSH
work from the Starbucks locations around me... for now. In the future I
may have to tunnel those over HTTPS as well. I shouldn't have to; you're
right. But blame the birdbrained network admins that block everything else.

-- 
Shawn K. Quinn <skquinn at rushpost.com>
http://www.rantroulette.com
http://www.skqrecordquest.com


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