Disk encryption

I've set up my gentoo linux to use disk encryption in the following cases:

• encrypted swap using random key on each boot
  
• encrypted /tmp using random key on each boot
  
• encrypted disk partition for sensitive data

I'm trying out BestCrypt from Jetico Software, a Finnish company. First I thought of using cryptoloop or dm-crypt, but they have some security weaknesses. Kernels >= 2.6.10 include some stronger IV modes, according to the author of the patch. Does anyone know some other analysis of this new encryption mode?

On the other hand, I didn't find any formal analysis of BestCrypt either. But it also doesn't have any published weaknesses. It is a commercial piece of software, not very expensive, with two bonus features:

• hidden encrypted containers, and
• encrypted containers are readable on Win32.

The latter feature might come in handy. BestCrypt is also very user-friendly, flexible and almost trivial to use. I think it is worth its price.

Ah yes, my threat model, and why have I decided now to use disk encryption? Soon I'm going to travel around with my laptop and I don't want my work and personal data available to strangers if it gets stolen. So I'm moving all of my mails, work and private stuff to the encrypted partition. And all of the dot-files in my home directory. It's surprising how much data can be found there.

Blogger opera problems: update

I just received a reply from the user support. They say that the problem is known and that they are working on fixing it. So, wait and see a little bit longer what happens.

Blogger ate my post!

Yesterday I was typing my post, and blogger ate it! Well, almost. I had to stop my typing so I saved the text as draft. Usually I copy the text from the browser into some local scratch file before submitting it. Yesterday I forgot to do that. When I returned to continue editing the draft - no text was there! Today I tried to make a test post, with the same result. All of this I did using the Opera browser.

So I tried to publish something using Firefox - and it worked. It wouldn't be so surprising if I had not published 3-4 posts previously with Opera.

The conclusion - Google/Blogger made some changes in the meantime, and they've caused Opera to be unusable for publishing blogs! Time to contact them, if possible.

Another NetBSD kernel crash

It's a bit ironic to start getting frequent crashes after donating some money to the NetBSD project :) Seriously, I'm very happy with NetBSD (regardless of it rarely crashing in weird circumstances) and I'm eagerly waiting for the 3.0 release, so.. what the heck. I seriously think that the NetBSD is doing an excellent job and they deserve support.

Now, about the crash. Find the details here.

Linguistics part 2: tenses in indirect speech

I've learned another easy to learn, but to me unintuitive, "feature" of the Norwegian language. It concerns the indirect speech. I've been told that it also works this way in English, so I'm going to describe it on an english example. Consider the following sentences:

1. Each time I ask her something, she answers: "I don't know."


2. Yesterday I asked her something and she answered: "I don't know."


3. Yesterday I asked her something and she answered: "I didn't know."

and the following indirect speech sentences:

1. Each time I ask her something, she answers that she doesn't know.


2. Yesterday I asked her something, and she answered that she didn't know.


3. Yesterday I asked her something, and she answered that she doesn't know.

The 1st and 2nd sentence in direct speech translate to 1st and 2nd in the indirect speech. So, where is the stumbling stone? Well, according to "my" logic the correspondence should be 1(direct)-1(indirect), 2-3, 3-2. In the Croatian language, changing the tense in the reported speech, changes the semantics of what the person really said.

My thinking is not quite in line with the "correct" 1-1, 2-2 with 3(indirect) being nonsense as it is currently written (to make it correct, it should be changed to some "more past" tense - "hadn't known"?). This is yet another easy rule that I can accept, but it isn't logical to me (i.e. it is not in line how it works in Croatian).

I can't know whether I'll write more linguistic themes, but I've learned the following: your 1st spoken language deeply models the way you think. I might become a very good user of some foreign language not related to Slavic languages, like Norwegian or English, but I strongly doubt that I will ever really understand it.

And a small joke at the end: What is the most spoken language in the world? Answer: English, as spoken by foreigners.