Carthik Sharma

The Gnu Privacy Handbook stresses the importance of creating a revocation certificate for your gpg keys soon after you create your key-pair(s).

Update: the official FAQ lists the following, too, more or less. Why is it that you always find what you were looking for after the event?

It does not, however say how to revoke your keys using the generated certificate at a later date.

So here’s an overview:

Create a revocation certificate by :
gpg --output ~/myrevoke.asc --gen-revoke your_user_id
The above command will generate a revocation certificate, and save it as myrevoke.asc in your home directory. Save the myrevoke.asc file – guard it, since if I get my hands on it, I can revoke your certificate.

Protect it by:

• Encrypt your revoke cert with gpg -c file. As you are using symmetric encryption with -c, the password is the only key you need. Then, burn the key on a cd (or two), store them away properly and erase the key plus any temp files the burning program might have created (also, dd if=/dev/zero of=/partition/of/swap might be a good idea, /dev/urandom for the tin foil hats)
• You can enable others to generate revokation keys for your own private key with via gpg –desig-revoke (or just hand them a cd with your encrypted revoke cert if you trust them not to brute-force it.

Thanks to Richih of irc://irc.freenode.net/linuxhelp for help with the above.

On a later day, when like me, you grow suspicious about the integrity of your key-pair, you want to revoke the key-pair using the revocation certificate that you already have, do the following:

Import the revocation certificate to revoke the key-pair on your system:
gpg --import ~/myrevoke.asc
The above command assumes that the revocation certificate is named myrevoke.asc and resides in your home directory.

Now send the updated keys to a keyserver near you:
gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --send-keys your_user_id

Now you are all set. Whenever someone refreshes their keys database, they will know that the old keys have been revoked.

Forget me

Originally uploaded by Carthik.
Posted here by Carthik

Seen on a door somewhere in an apartment complex. I find the American obsession with pets amusing, and at times, alarming.

The first thing I thought when I saw the sign, though, was, “How the hell will someone be able to search for a cat in a fire?”. The second thing I thought was that the cat would probably the first to leave – through a window, or any opening, in case of a fire.

NITW (National Institue of Technology, Warangal), formerly known as RECW (Regional Engineering College, Warangal) is where I did my Bachelors in Technology (B.Tech) in Electrical and Electronics Engineering. The college seems to be doing great in recent times.

In a recent IDC-Dataquest-Nasscom survey, NIT Warangal ranked in 7th nationwide!

Though the top ranks are devoid of any major surprises, there are a few new institutes among the top ten. Banaras Hindu University is ranked five, followed by IIT Guwahati at sixth place. National Institute of Technology, Warangal, and NIT, Tiruchi were at numbers seven and eight.

Source: The Hindu

So the ranking is :

1. IIT Kanpur
2. IIT Mumbai
3. IIT Chennai
4. IIT Kharagpur
5. Benares Hindu University
6. IIT Guwahati
7. NIT Warangal
8. NIT, Tiruchi

IIT Delhi was not a participant in the survey. BHU is a very old, reputed and prestigious university. I am overjoyed to know that I graduated from an institute that’s ranked in the top 10 in my country! Job placements (student outcomes) have been stellar this past year. One of my juniors got placed in Goldman-Sachs, and will be trained at New York, no less!

Way to go, NITW!

Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker to Obi Wan Kenobi : “You are either with me, or my enemy.”
Obi Wan, in reply: “Only the Sith speak in absolutes. Now I must do what I have to.”
Obi Wan then turns his tubelight on, and starts the fight.

Point is, has anyone else heard the “You are with us, or against us” logic recently? I can’t recollect where I last heard it, for the life of me.

Star Wars – III is entertaining. No nude women, no jokes, but lots of eye candy. I even found myself thinking, whenever Yoda spoke — splitting sentences in half and rejoining them the right way requires a little effort.

Alright, so everythings over at ServInt’s server now. This blog as well as WordLog, and a few other sites that no one would know of, are now at the new server.

I want to install an SVN server at the new web server, but looks like apache over there does not have the mod_dav stuff thats required. Will figure it out in a day or two. If anyone has tips, clues or a well-written write up to point me to, which describes how to take an apache server that does not have the modules that svn needs, and create an svn server from there, please let me know. Please spare me links to the installation docs for svn at the red book, though

Matt told me that TextDrive is good with svn, but I found them a bit too pricey, and I felt like I wouldnt have total control over the hosted account, but otherwise, yes, txd seems nice.

A perl script written by a guy at the Directadmin forums was indispensible in moving the data over from CPanel. I may post how exactly I did it, depending on whether someone else is interested, and on how much time I have.

P.S. If you are a friend I host, and you have a problem after the move, give me a call

On Monday morning, I got to the office at the university at 1:00 AM, and since it was the first day of the semester, my keycard wasn’t working, it needed renewal. The kind cleaning lady helped me get into the room, but I locked myself out again at 3:00 AM, when I left the room with a freshly brewed cup of coffee, and too many parallel thoughts in my head.

Since the laptop was on the wireless network, there was no way to access the files on the laptop. Now before someone starts telling me about the importance of backing up regularly, let me tell you that I had two backups, one on an external hard disk, and another on my iPod. Sadly, though both were in the room, the iPod in my bag.

So I get home, and spend two hours trying to re-write the program from a one month old version, give up, start working on other tasks, and finally get to school again at 8 AM. I had to wait till 9 to get the keycard renewed. While waiting, I learnt that I could have renewed the card the previous week — something three years of studying here hadn’t disclosed itself to me.

Anyway, I learnt two things:

1. Backups should be in physically distinct locations
2. Version control, off of a webserver is essential if you spend a large part of your days in front of a computer

I literally kicked myself in the a** on the way back home, at 3 in the morning. I mean, how much stupider could I have been?

It would have been great if UCF had made the servers at school available for use by students and professors, with minimal headaches. Instead, they choose to be paranoid about security and make it terribly difficult to run a webserver, or use a webserver to do anything beyond displaying .html pages.

I have to set a lot of things straight with my server. My hosting account at UltraUnix expired a couple of days ago, so I have to move the sites hosted there to the new server. The task is a bit complicated since the accounts are managed by Cpanel at the old, and Directadmin at the new server. I think I have a good plan to accomplish the task, nevertheless. I will do that today, and when I done moving, I will set up a Subversion repository for my own use. I hope that at least then, I won’t have to ever again perform the difficult maneuver of kicking myself in the posterior at 3 AM.

Excuse the dust when I move. Counting in the other tasks I have to do, hopefully, I should be done by tomorrow.

It is a protein, belonging to the “hedgehog” family.

Who would’ve thought.

Update:: There is no guarantee that this plugin works with the current version of WordPress. I have not been keeping it brushed up and ready as things have been changing with WordPress. If I do fix it in the future, I will notify you of the the fact here first.

I finally got to rewriting the Registered Only plugin. The new version works on WordPress version 1.5.1 and 1.5. The older version had some issues. The new version is much lighter, and uses a core WordPress function, and so should work without any issues. If there are any issues, please report them at the wp-plugins.org issue tracker.

The registered only plugin restricts access to the WordPress weblog and site (including Pages, if any), to registered users who are logged in. This will be useful for those that want a private blog, or a blog restricted to friends and family. Consider it the WordPress version of a friends-only Livejournal or similar.

The latest version has the tag (version number) 2005-05-12-2000. I will be using a YYYY-MM-DD-HHMM (in UTC time) (based on the ISO8601) format for version numbers, since it seems easily sortable, and conveys information about the freshness of the version. You can download it from the wp plugin repository, save the file as registered-only.php and then upload it to your wp-content directory on the web server.

There is now a readme file with relevant details.

Many thanks to the many users who wrote in regarding this plugin over the days. Leave me a comment if you use the plugin and like, or better still, dislike it.

Update: This plugin does not protect your feeds. So you may want to delete the feed files.

Kal Penn, (previously “Kalpen Modi”, I hear), is an actor you must have seen in some comedy movies. Well, he’s blogging about his next movie The Namesake, which is nice.