I’ve been using OpenPGP for email signing (and very rarely for email encryption) for ages. In fact, the key that I’ve been using so far is from 2001: This key (actually two sub-keys, one for signing, one for encryption) has a fairly low size by today’s standards. I’ve been aware of this for ages, but …
Category Archives: Technology
Shoot yourself in the foot: crypttab edition [en]
I’m running Ubuntu on my laptop, using the standard disk-encryption that the Ubuntu installer provides. (Well, the one it provided a couple of years back, when I last installed from scratch.) This setup uses cryptsetup with LUKS on the main partition. This in turn contains an LVM physical volume, which contains a volume group with …
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The Gotchas of Railroad-Safety [en]
They say trains are one of the safest modes of transportation. And while I can think of several horrific train crashes in the past, I generally believe it’s true. But now I’m wondering about all the small things that could go wrong? How common are they? On my last surf-trip, I witnessed this small incident …
Notes on exiftool Usage [en]
Most of the image manipulation and media organization applications that I’m using do not have great support for meta data. Sure, they can display and edit relevant meta data. But they’re not great at filtering, bulk-editing, etc. So I’m using the exiftool CLI to get some of the basic image meta-data straight, before uploading images …
The 80s called and want their communication tech back [en]
Well, they might as well. Because I just got my first fax machine today. No fax hardware though, just a virtual one. My e-mail provider is offering that as a service. Even got my own number (which I had to verify via snail mail) and I can send and receive faxes. It’s 2022 now, and …
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Small Money in Tanzania [en]
One thing that stands out here in Tanzania (yupp, I’m still here, greetings from Zanzibar!) is the huge wealth gap. Tourists can easily pay European prices at restaurants and hotels. Wealthy locals drive big SUVs and own generous houses (and other real estate). But many Tanzanians live in tremendously poor conditions, especially in rural areas. …
XSS Demo [en]
Finally some good use for my new infrastructure. I’ve had this small Angular app lying around, which I wrote for a presentation/demo on XSS a couple of years ago. So far, I’ve run it locally to demonstrate XSS vulnerabilities and how to exploit them. Now I have a place to put it and share it …
The B in BYOK stands for Bullshit [en]
I’ve recently encountered someone, who insisted on a Bring-Your-Own-Key (BYOK) setup for compliance reason. I’ve always been skeptical about that and I didn’t have to search long for confirmation. This is what the Wikipedia article on BYOK has to say: […] a cloud computing security marketing model […] […] gives the enterprise the perceived control …
Let’s Revoke! [en]
Getting TLS certificates from Let’s Encrypt is easy, but that’s just part of the story. It may sound paranoid, but being able to revoke certs is almost equally important. The premise is that there’s always a chance that your private keys will leak. Maybe it will never happen to me, but it will eventually happen …
Let’s Encrypt! [en]
… is where I’m getting the TLS certificates for this blog nowadays (after moving away from CAcert). I’ve been using Let’s Encrypt at work now and then. Many colleagues in my department are heavy users and my employer is a sponsor. So I knew what to expect and how to get started. Nevertheless, here’s a …