Year: 2016

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Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code for Windows, OS X and Linux hits 1.0

Visual Studio Code (VS Code), Microsoft’s cross-platform text editor for developers, hit version 1.0 today after about a year in beta. The company says more than 500,000 developers now actively use the application each month.

The launch of VS Code came as quite a surprise when the company first announced it at its Build developer conference last year. Microsoft, after all, had never offered a code editor for OS X and Linux before — and definitely not under the Visual Studio brand.

When Microsoft launched the application, it was still missing extensibility and the code for VS Code wasn’t open source yet, either. Since then, the company fixed both of these issues.

Source: Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code for Windows, OS X and Linux hits 1.0

And you can even get the source on Github. This is part of Microsoft’s push into the open source world as it courts a wider range of developers.

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My Twitter Digest for 04/12/2016

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Flaws detected in the Owncloud encryption module

First it is important to understand what this encryption module is actually supposed to do and understand the threat scenario. The encryption provides no security against a malicious server operator, because the encryption happens on the server. The only scenario where this encryption helps is if one has a trusted server that is using an untrusted storage space.

Source: Pwncloud – bad crypto in the Owncloud encryption module – Hanno’s blog

A good read, but also worth noting that encrypting data at rest on a server is rarely bullet proof anyway. If an attacker can get access to the server they can decrypt the data. I wouldn’t even bother encrypting the data store for something like Owncloud anyway since the data is at the end of a long chain where significant security is needed. For example, is the local copy of the data encrypted? Is the web component using HTTPS? Are Owncloud accounts secure with long passwords and 2FA? Is access to the sever running Owncloud properly secure with very limited access? Encrypting data at rest in Owncloud is the least of my worries.

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My Twitter Digest for 04/01/2016