Reflections on RedHat/Fedora compromise

If you’re like me, you’ve heard by now about the weeklong downtime of Fedora infrastructure and today’s formal announcement that Fedora and RedHat’s infrastructure has been breached. After reading more into the details and timeline, I think Redhat/Fedora did everything right, and what happened was simply an unfortunate incident, and the aftermath was handled well.

What I wonder is how many other distros:

(1) Use a FIPS 140-2  hardware crypto signing key to protect key material from compromise

(2) Have as big  of an attacker base as Fedora/RHEL

(3) Would’ve caught the breach so quickly

(4) Would’ve restored services so quickly

If there’s one thing to criticize about this whole incident, it’s the lack of details from RedHat. I’d be interested in learning more about the technical details behind this attack, but I bet RedHat is planning legal action that prevents these details from coming out at the moment.

In any case, I’d like to just say that I’ve not lost any trust in RedHat’s information security procedures. If anything, the way this incident was detected and handled has bolstered my trust in those talented folks. Good luck to the team on restoring their services smoothly and bringing justice to the attackers.

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Yes, I got an iPhone 3G…

Our family AT&T contract was up for renewal and I went phone-shopping two weeks ago. Actually, my 8-year-old little sister was bugging us to get a cell phone for her (I will rant about this separately). At any rate, after looking through their selection of phones, I noticed that the ones I liked were all close to the $150 mark anyway, so I might as well get an iPhone which does so much more.

I choose the $199 black 8GB model, which took about a week for them to order and ship to the store. It’s almost my first full week with the phone and I’d just like to talk a bit about my experience with the phone. I know everyone is sick and tired of iPhone 3G reviews so I’ll keep it short and crisp.

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I’m back!

Well after an eternal (in internet time) hiatus I figured it’s worth our effort to start this blog back up. We had some great content but all got distracted doing other stuff. In the coming days I’ll try to post enough flamebait to get our traffic back again :)

Spoiler Alert: The next post from me may contain some Linux rants and Apple fanboyism. Or not.