• Icelandair is one of the nicer airlines I flew with recently
• they have really fancy inflight touchscreen entertainment systems
• …which are slow
• …and they try to charge you 10 quid for watching the feature films (the TV documentaries are free)
• …if you open the plastic seal from the headphones, it costs you 3 quid (NOT COOL. Bring your own)
• there’s an USB port next to the screen. Judging from the inflight magazine, it’s for some sort of game controller. I wonder what else you can do with it.
• getting drunk on a plane is even better than getting drunk on the train
• Iceland seems to have a law that requires all women to be exceedingly blonde and cute
• somewhat related, hot eastern european women seem to have jobs here that require them to be in hotel lounges at 3 AM, accompanied by their large, humorless male friends (the kind that you mentally nickname as “Bruno”)
• everybody in Iceland seems to speak English (it’s like having a Netherlands flashback)
• even though I haven’t seen much (besides the bus trip from Keflavik to my hotel in downtown Reykjavik), I have an overwhelming feeling that I’ve been here before. It’s really weird. 

termcapinfo xterm* ti@:te@

This should work with any xterm compatible terminal, although I’ve only tested it with gnome-terminal and putty. It only deals with the scrollback as xterm saw it, so it won’t work as you expect it to after you’ve just switched screen views. Still, it’s better than nothing and extremely useful if you tend to have windows attached to the same screen view for a long time.

Before you jump and say that Dawkins is crazy and that this whole thing is over the board for a group of people that aren’t supposed to care, consider that it was done “to counter the religious ads running on public transport, which featured a URL to a website telling non-Christians they would spend ‘all eternity in torment in hell’, burning in ‘a lake of fire’” (or better yet, just read the article).

1. Send loads of requests for nonexistent FQDNs to a resolver you want to poison. You can do this on non-public resolvers too - just get one of their clients to load a web page you control.
2. Start spoofing responses for those nonexistent FQDNs. Make sure you include glue records in them for, say, the .com zone.
3. Wait until one of your spoofed responses matches the QID that the resolver used.
4. ???
5. Profit! The target resolver is now delegating all .com queries to you. You did set a long TTL, right?

This sounds entirely unrealistic, until you start to do back-of-the-envelope math on just how many lookups and tries you must do - a couple minutes should be enough on any modern broadband link. I suspect Kaminsky’s presentation will come complete with number magic and tools to make this very quick and straightforward.

Amusing side note: Matasano’s blog just covered this story, linking to Flake’s blog. Not only they gave a simple technical introduction/explanation of how and why it works, but they also confirmed that “the cat is out of the bag”. That wasn’t just a guess about the validity of a guess - they know for sure because they’ve spoken with Kaminsky before and confirmed that the exploit is for real: “Dan has the goods“. The amusing part? They pulled the confirmation story about 2 hours after it was published. The cat is already out of the bag, guys ;-)

This attack is truly scary, for two reasons:

1. It’s dead simple, yet extremely effective. Patching all affected resolvers will take quite a while, leaving a lot of people vulnerable in the mean time. There are certain circumstances (mainly NAT setups) in which a patched resolver can still be poisoned.
2. The patch (randomizing source ports for DNS queries - and proving that DJB was wise, not paranoid) will only work for so long. The roughly 30 bits of entropy (instead of the current 16) will last a while, but connection speeds keep increasing, not to mention the probability of somebody coming up with an even more clever attack.

Update: Kaminsky confirms and provides details. Vixie and Dagon came up with a clever hack to extend the amount of entropy in QIDs.

Who the heck is Jeff Dean?! I hear you ask. He’s a Google Fellow (I believe that’s the highest engineering distinction you can have here), and so famous that somebody built a Chuck Norris-style “Jeff Dean facts” site for last year’s April fools. Here’s 3 of my favorite facts:

• During his own Google interview, Jeff Dean was asked the implications if P=NP were true. He said “P = 0 or N = 1.” Then, before the interviewer had even finished laughing, Jeff examined Google’s public certificate and wrote the private key on the whiteboard.
• Compilers don’t warn Jeff Dean. Jeff Dean warns compilers.
• The rate at which Jeff Dean produces code jumped by a factor of 40 in late 2000 when he upgraded his keyboard to USB2.0.

I spent most of my free time last week going through old data and backups. I now have all my old email archives cleaned up and imported into Gmail. The oldest message I have is from March 1999, and reading some of them feels like taking a trip in the time machine.

If I manage to dig up old blog archives, I’ll try to import them into the current blog.

Update: well, it looks like the video got taken down for some reason. It was funny while it lasted, though.