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So, you have a service that needs a TLS certificate. A convenient way to get a certificate is to utilize a certificate authority that supports the ACME protocol. For example Let’s Encrypt. Below, I will refer to this as the ACME server. The ACME server has no idea who you really are. But they can verify that you are affiliated with the domains in question. During the ordering process they will…
One person’s pragmatism is the other person’s kludge.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about systems for secrets management. Let’s call it SM for short. In AWS, you have Secrets Manager. But that doesn’t help for on-prem environments. Outside of the SM offered by the public cloud vendors, HashiCorp Vault seems to be one of the most popular solutions. But it does have a bit of competition. Here’s a list of the SM solutions I’ve found that seems most…
From time to time, people ask about Nordic security companies. So I thought it could be a good idea to save this info somewhere permanent and not just in Slack chats that become inaccessible after three months. I haven’t yet come up with a good way to categorize them, so for now, here’s the list straight up. 0x4A Assured dpella Kryptogram Omegapoint Recurity Sentor Truesec WithSecure Zacco
How does one override a systemd unit for a package that was installed by the system’s package manager? (E.g. APT or Yum.) It’s simple! Just install your own unit file in /etc/systemd/system. systemd will look there before it looks in /usr/lib/systemd/system. For additional info, see the section System Unit Search Path in the systemd.unit documentation. Why not just edit the unit in…
Poignant analysis from 'coffeefirst on Hacker News: Generative AI is a superpower for spammers and content farmers. It’s hard enough to look up recipes, product reviews, or anything about health today, and they’re going to make it worse. The consequence for this is an opportunity to build for trust over convenience. More value for things like Wirecutter/Consumer Reports, less for Amazon reviews…
MFA doesn’t need to be a great hassle! I think Google has really nailed the UI/UX of their MFA flow. Of the online services I use, Google’s has the least friction when it comes to MFA. I like the fact that they usually do not require re-entering of both password and MFA at the same time. Much much smoother than e.g. Apple, Discord, and others.
So this just happened – and it’s definitely not the first time. I went to that search engine, the one with its own verb, and searched for "python" "cobra" "cli". Found a Reddit thread with the question: “Is there a python library equivalent to the Cobra CLI Library from Go?” And of course, on that very thread, there’s this bloke, who just had to post this inane response: “I just goggled[sic] cobra…
If you want to tweak the indentation size for Emacs’ sh-mode you can do so conveniently via the variable sh-basic-offset. For example you could add the following line to your initialization file: (setq sh-basic-offset 2) This variable used to be called sh-indentation but that name was made obsolete in Emacs 26.1. For additional information, see the file lisp/progmodes/sh-script.el in Emacs’…
Bakgrund Denna artikel riktar sig först och främst till teknikfantaster som är kritiska till Signal, men den kan även vara av intresse för en bredare publik som har intresse av säker och smidig kommunikation. Wått’s dö maddefakking diil? Så, vad är grejen med Signal? Varför använder folk denna centraliserade applikation, trots dess skavanker? Det tänkte jag försöka förklara i denna text.…
One thing that I find quite fascinating when I read technical discussions is when there are people involved in the discussion that have a Slavic language as their mother tongue. In that context it’s not unusual to label something as “he”. See for example this comment on Server Fault. The poster is from Prague, in the Czech Republic. I’m not 100% sure, but I believe that “he” in this case refers to…
“SHA-512/256” is quite a tricky name for a hash function. It’s easy to confuse with SHA-512. That, and the slash in there, makes it the opposite of search-friendly. That’s one thing that SHA-384 has going for it – it’s easy to google and easy to tell apart from other hash functions. I guess security might also be kind of important but I reckon unambiguity should count for something at least 🙂
After long hesitation I’ve finally dipped my toes into the world of Samba. I have also considered NFS, but in this day and age I think Samba is more ergonomic. It may be a little tricky to find a good tutorial for configuring Samba, but skimming through the smb.conf man page can be enlightening. Figuring out how to harden the Samba install can also be delicate. Not all clients support the latest…
Recently I’ve increased my usage of Google Drive and Google Docs. It’s incredibly convenient. It also makes me ponder upon my strategies for handling backups when it comes to data I’ve stored in the cloud (i.e. on someone else’s computer). I definitely need to come up with a better solution than what I currently have. (*ahem*) If anyone reading this have come up with clever solutions for backup of…
As you may have noticed, there are lots of startups launching in Sweden at the moment. Not only in Stockholm, but also in other regions, which I think is great. If you want to keep up with all the startup-news I can warmly recommend Martin Weigert’s formidable news letter, Swedish Tech Weekly. Two other good resources are Di Digital and Breakit, but unlike Martin’s newsletter those are primarily…
I’ve decided to level up my Vagrant game. A quite convenient tool indeed. In my case I wanted to spin up a few virtual machines on my laptop in order to simulate a prod environment. I opted for Debian as the foundation for the VMs. I already know it well. Not too much fluff there, a quite stable base without too frequent kernel upgrades etc. It really gets out of the way.
AWS CloudFront can be used for many things. For example it’s a very convenient way of doing redirects and similar HTTP operations. On 2021-05-03 Amazon introduced a new concept called CloudFront Functions, which means that you can define custom operations without the need for Lambda@Edge. Instead of spinning up Caddy or Nginx, you can handle this kind of stuff directly in CloudFront. Once you get…
I wonder if we will see a third AI winter coming in the ’20s. It wouldn’t surprise me. Perhaps within three years or so? Maybe five? He who lives will see.
When you’re on macOS and connect to a Microsoft Windows system via RDP you sometimes find that you must use Ctrl-Alt-Del for some tasks. E.g. changing your password. The question is, how do you issue that command on a Mac keyboard? Try this sequence: Fn+Control+Option+Delete Works fine for me on macOS Catalina. Thanks to Robert Whittenberg for pointing this out over at Super User.
A few days ago I launched my newest site. I call it Kalenderbitaren. A direct translation of the word kalenderbitare might be “calendar biter” but I’m not sure that would make much sense. A more idiomatic translation would probably be “trivia buff”. The site is currently tiny and so far only in Swedish. Despite that it feels good that I (thanks to Hugo) have a virtual home for collecting my…
Ladies and Gentlemen! Let me introduce to you… ¯\＿(ツ)＿/¯ …the marvelous Markdown-safe shruggie!
During this cursed winter I decided to take some time for a little hobby project. After years of using WordPress I felt that it was finally time to learn how to build websites using a static site generator. For this purpose, I chose Hugo. Such a great system! Compared to WordPress it really feels like a breath of fresh air. No DBMS required. No PHP. A really nice templating system. All text can be…
A while ago I did some experimenting with the FreeBSD operating system. One of the first tasks that I set out for myself was to get acquainted with the firewall. Or, should I say, one of the firewalls. In FreeBSD there are three different firewalls to choose from: IPFW, PF and IPFilter. In this article we will use IPFW. IPFW is a versatile firewall and could very well be used to set up a router if…