Technology, Science, and the pursuit of Enlightenment
What happens when an AI hallucination leads to bombing an elementary school? ⚠ Disclaimer: While there is sufficient evidence to indicate that Israel has used AI to determine the targets of their bombing, there is currently insufficient evidence to conclude that the US military is using AI to determine the targets of their bombings. The allegation that the United States is using AI to determine…
Or how to avoid getting locked-out of another Google Account This guide will describe how to setup a persistent browser (for Evil Corp) that’s isolated in a sandbox (with firejail) and forced to use a SOCKS5 proxy to retain a static IP address (using proxychains) Have you ever been locked out of your own account, and then got an email for your service provider annoyingly letting you know that…
I’m super happy that Techlore invited me on their YouTube channel to talk security and privacy 😀 Henry was mostly interested in my work with BusKill (an open-source dead man switch), but our conversation ran a gamut of issues regarding security and privacy — including How to mitigate State-sponsored interdiction attacks, minimizing attack surfaces of mobile phones with broadband processors, the…
This article will show how to check if a given Onion Service (ie some .onion address) is alive or dead. Why? Lots of Onion Services are “here today, gone tomorrow”. If you encountered a large list of Onion Services and want to quickly check to see which are still alive, the best way to do that is by querying the Tor network’s Hidden Service Directory (HSDir). Of course, you could just paste the…
Why was I banned from GrapheneOS? That’s a good question. Anyone who follows me on GitHub knows that I make a lot of contributions to many different open-source projects, especially security-related ones. A couple years ago, I wanted to try-out both GrapheneOS and CalyxOS, but I found that a niche security feature that’s very important to me hasn’t been implemented in either ROM, so I opened a…
This guide will show you how to generate vector-based topopgraphic maps, for printing very large & high-quality paper wall maps using inkscape. All of the tools used in this guide are free (as in beer). Intro I recently volunteered at a Biological Research Station located on the eastern slopes of the Andes mountains. If the skies were clear (which is almost never, as it’s a cloud forest), you…
This article will describe how to download an image from a (docker) container registry. Intro Remember the good ‘ol days when you could just download software by visiting a website and click “download”? Even apt and yum repositories were just simple HTTP servers that you could just curl (or wget) from. Using the package manager was, of course, more secure and convenient — but you could always just…
This article introduces the concept of “3TOFU” — a harm-reduction process when downloading software that cannot be verified cryptographically. ⚠ NOTE: This article is about harm reduction. It is dangerous to download and run binaries (or code) whose authenticity you cannot verify (using a cryptographic signature from a key stored offline). However, sometimes we cannot avoid it. If you’re going to…
This article will describe how lemmy instance admins can purge images from pict-rs (click here if you just want to know how). This is (also) a horror story about accidentally uploading very sensitive data to Lemmy, and the (surprisingly) difficult task of deleting it. Intro tl;dr I (accidentally) uploaded a photo of my State-issued ID to Lemmy, and I couldn’t delete it. Friends don’t let friends…
This article will show reddit refugees how to easily search-for and subscribe-to to popular lemmy subreddits communities across all lemmy instances. tl;dr use the Lemmy Community Browser https://browse.feddit.de/ Intro Lemmy is a federated reddit alternative that started in 2019. Thanks to funding from NLNet, Open Collective, Patreon, and Librapay, the project has two full-time developers. Unlike…