The other day, someone in my extended network posted something about how Toronto just isn’t safe for their kids. This has got me thinking about safety and responsibility. I thought about how when I was a kid, I was instructed on how to behave in public spaces. “Look wrong way, right way, then wrong wayContinue reading “Safety: Only YOU Can Prevent Harm to Yourself”
Category Archives: security
Just Say No to AR
I’m seeing a lot of people being excited, today, about putting in their orders for the first visionOS devices. Although it would be easy to dismiss this as simple Apple fan dribbling, their excitement is sort of hyperbolic. “This is a once in a lifetime opportunity,” says one person, talking about how now is theContinue reading “Just Say No to AR”
Khaaaaaaaaan!
Okay, so I caught COVID a week ago, so I’m confined to quarters until I stop testing positive. This is fine. Except that the stateroom is a pretty effective Faraday cage and I can’t get online much. Tired of watching BBC adverts for BBC shows, and tired of playing video games, I started poking deeperContinue reading “Khaaaaaaaaan!”
Put a Computer In It, Part…A Jillion
Got an email just now, from the marketing department of a company that makes some server software that I occasionally use. The notification of new email popped up on my screen, with a snippet of the body saying that cyberattacks are increasing in sophistication and volume, so I should…presumably, the rest of the email wasContinue reading “Put a Computer In It, Part…A Jillion”
Haxor to the Maxor
Today’s entry in the “put a computer on it” dopeslap file comes from Ars Technica. Turns out that ancient IoT devices are actually a giant security risk. If only someone had pointed this out at some time… Okay, so, maybe sticking the Internet into everything isn’t such a great idea? Maybe? Imagine a world whereContinue reading “Haxor to the Maxor”
Capture *This*
You know what’s dumb? Putting a “Prove you aren’t a robot” widget on your invoice payment flow. Imagine for a moment that you’re a service provider and you’ve done some work for someone. You send them an invoice, and now they want to pay you some money. With me on this hypothetical journey? Good. Now.Continue reading “Capture *This*”
Put a Bird on It
I have been nerdsniped by the dratted Russian hackers. Those darned “hackers”, causing trouble and getting people all excited about security. So now I’ve got to deal with thoughts and suggestions in my peripheral awareness, and remind myself that I’ve already done the work of threat modeling and risk analysis for my data and forContinue reading “Put a Bird on It”
VPN, part 2
Well, the configuration I’d put together before turned out not to work when I was at a hotel and trying it out. I got distracted and didn’t do anything about it for a while, but today I had some time and I started digging around. Guess what? Someone solved this problem ages ago and someoneContinue reading “VPN, part 2”
So, VPN
A couple weeks ago I read an article about a guy who set up a caching DNS server for his home network on a Raspberry Pi. The main thrust of the article was, “Hey, checkitout, Cloudflare has a public DNS at 1.1.1.1 and they pinky-swear promise not to write down what IP address originated theContinue reading “So, VPN”
Stupid Email Tricks
I’ve been working on adding play-by-email support to my turn-based game server. The first problem I hit was that the PGP signatures on the server’s messages were invalid when I checked them on my email client. This led to lots of debugging and unit tests in my crypto utility. That’s not really wasted effort, butContinue reading “Stupid Email Tricks”