I tweeted last week about the fallacy of the "Wild West Web" analogy, which is trotted out with depressing regularity. My tweets auto-delete, so this short blogpost reflects the key themes. It is not Read more
Archives: January 2022
An unplanned business continuity test, and what I learned from it
I did something stupid this week. I should probably hang my head about this, because, frankly, I shouldn't have got myself into this mess in the first place. But you know what? I'm not hanging my Read more
Implementing BusKill: shutting down a Debian 11 Bullseye machine when a specific USB device is removed
I saw the BusKill security project some time back, and thought "what a neat idea". In essence: BusKill is a Dead Man Switch triggered when a magnetic breakaway is tripped, severing a USB connection. Read more
Book review: "Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier"
Hacking - clever, innovative solutions to computer and telephony problems - fascinates me. "Underground" is a detailed look at the relatively early days of computer hacking, with a focus on the Read more
WireGuard not routing IPv6 traffic: GNOME 3 / Network Manager
A reminder for me. If you've got WireGuard configured as a VPN client in Debian 11 Bullseye's Network Manager, and it does not route IPv6, check Allowed IPs contains ::/0. Read more
End to end encryption, and services which let you meet and message people you do not already "know"
In the context of a prohibitions or limits on the deployment of end to end encryption, I've heard the argument that one should distinguish between: services which enable contact between "known" Read more
Installing Twitter client cawbird from the official Debian 11 Bullseye repo
cawbird is a superb GUI Twitter client for Linux. It's easy to use, it has none of the distractions of the Twitter web interface, and it supports multiple accounts. I'm a fan. (If there was a client Read more
Fixing "tee: command not found" on Debian 11 Bullseye
I get this error whenever I try to use tee on my Debian 11 Bullseye installation: tee: command not found tee is part of coreutils: Specifically, this package includes: arch base64 basename cat chcon Read more
A prohibition on end to end encryption could leave you with #NoPlaceToHide. And that's not a good thing.
The government's #NoPlaceToHide campaign (I've intentionally not included a URL) got me thinking: if end to end encryption on popular messaging services was prohibited, how many users would be left Read more
Age verification: an Epic mess
I have a Gmail account which I use for testing purposes. I get a lot of spam to it. Presumably, there are lots of people called "Neil Brown" who forget, or mistype, their own email address, and so Read more