Openvpn On My Machine: Easy-RSA: Building My Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) part I

I have been on the lookout for third party VPN providers for a year now. Since the start of 2017, privacy is in the top of my to-do list. After installing Arch linux early February, and configuring basic maintenance and security procedures, I am now ready to embark on connecting to somekind of vpn service. From what I've read so far my best bet is a third party vpn provider which gives me a secure and private connection to the Internet and easy to configure. I also went to the Arch linux wiki, specifically, Openvpn and Easy-RSA pages. Arch linux has a culture of "do-it-yourself" and "keep-it-simple-shit" (KISS, maybe I got that wrong).

The latter course is the subject of my post (hopefully in the next post(s) I could bring good news too). Openvpn is based on machines authenticating themselves to servers which connect to the Internet securely. I have to build up my public key infrastructure PKI to make this possible. In the wiki, it is recommended that the CA issuing machine be different (more entropy capable) from the server and of course the client machines. This path assumes I have more than one machine. What if I only have one?

Openvpn is a flexible and highly configurable software. It says so in the manual:

"OpenVPN is an open source VPN daemon by James Yonan. Because OpenVPN tries to be a universal VPN tool offering a great
deal of flexibility, there are a lot of options..."

Also:

            "OpenVPN is a robust and highly flexible VPN daemon. OpenVPN supports SSL/TLS security, ethernet bridging,     TCP or UDP tun‐
       nel transport through proxies or NAT, support for dynamic IP addresses and DHCP, scalability to hundreds or     thousands of
       users, and portability to most major OS platforms.

       OpenVPN is tightly bound to the OpenSSL library, and derives much of its crypto capabilities from it.

       OpenVPN supports conventional encryption using a pre-shared secret key (Static Key mode) or public key         security (SSL/TLS)."

But what closed the deal for me is this:

            "Sample OpenVPN 2.0 config file for            #
# multi-client server.                          #
#                                               #
# This file is for the server side              #
# of a many-clients <-> one-server              #
# OpenVPN configuration.                        #
#                                               #
# OpenVPN also supports                         #
# single-machine <-> single-machine             #
# configurations (See the Examples page         #
# on the web site for more info).

I hope single machine is what it means and I can make this work.

Mailvelope, Encryption for Webmail

Encryption is the topic of week. I wrote about it in a related post here. While encryption is a very good idea, doing it and doing it every day as part of your work flow is another thing. My view is that if you're already using an email client then it is easier, simpler and more convenient to adopt encryption. That is not the case if you're using a webmail service. If you are using the browser to check, compose and send your email, what are your options? The answer is: it's complicated. Looking for a way to do encryption with Google Chrome and Gmail, I found this. I also read that Google just released code for email encryption as open source. But it's a long way to being used by end users. The extension for Google Chrome works fine if the recipient also uses Google Chrome. But I went ahead and check this on Evolution.

Donald Trump Is The 45th President of the United States

and he is preparing to move with his transition team into the Oval Office. His election is a shock to many political observers and the world in general. Donald Trump, the president-elect, ran against Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State and for many the most qualified candidate for the presidency in many years. This has led to many post election analysis of how this upset happened. The numbers of votes for each candidate and the comparisons with previous presidential elections point to the fact that the white vote for Mr. Trump is solid all throughout but the minority and black votes did not come for Mrs. Clinton. This is what happened in crucial States like Michigan and Florida. The Republicans kept Congress and the Senate. It is quite notable that Russia and in particular, Vladimir Putin, is happy that they are going to talk to Mr. Trump rather than Mrs. Clinton. It is also a ...

Webapps in Unity

So it has been 4 months since Ubuntu 14.04 came out. This is LTS and supported for 6 years by Canonical. The first mobile device with Ubuntu pre-installed is promised to come out later this year, 2014. It's time to check out how the apps perform so far. It is a good idea. I use Gmail and Twitter and Facebook. Why not a webapp in a desktop? So I start the Twitter and Gmail webapp. So far it has crashed my computer 6 times. Not a very good sign. On the other hand it does work but not as stable as opening them in Firefox. -- Use my PGP key if you want to encrypt your replies/messages to me. You are invited to also send me your PGP keys so we can communicate in private.

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