Security
Social media: it's not me, it's you (Feb 2025)It's not my fault that my avoidance of social media makes me hard to contact. It's your fault for letting yourself become hooked on it.
Categories: degoogling, security
No good deed goes unpunished: can we now be sued over software we give away? (Feb 2025)For too long, mega-corporations have been able to avoid liability for defective software. But will upcoming changes to the law adversely affect those who distribute open-source software free-of-charge?
Categories: general computing, security
Watch out: the Chinese domain registration scam is getting slicker (Jan 2025)It's an old scam, but it's recently resurfaced in a slicker, more convincing form
Categories: security
Log4J -- ask yourself: do I really need that library? (Oct 2024)What can the software industry learn from the Log4J security debacle?
Categories: software development, Java, security
Using Private Internet Access VPN with Gentoo Linux (Jun 2024)It's not that difficult, but there's no built-in support.
Do you need to wipe that hard drive? And can you? (May 2024)Is it safe to sell a used hard drive without securely erasing all the data? And is it even possible to erase all the data, even if we want to?
Categories: general computing, security
Does the use of custom Android ROMs improve or worsen security? (Sep 2023)This question is not particularly easy to answer, but understanding the implications helps.
Categories: degoogling, security
UTF-8 and the problem of over-long characters (Feb 2022)How an oddity in the way UTF-8 encoding works can cause all sorts of problems for unwary developers, including security weaknesses.
Categories: software development, security
Juice-jacking -- it's a problem, but not because it's a problem (Feb 2022)Juice-jacking is the alleged practice of getting unauthorized access to the contents of a cellphone by subverting public USB charging points. It doesn't happen, and probably never has; so why has there been a recent increase in scare stories?
Categories: science and technology, security
How Unicode reading direction characters defeat source code inspection, and what it means for the open-source movement (Feb 2022)There's been a recent scare that Unicode reading direction characters could be used to conceal malicious code in open-source projects. This is undoubtedly true, but that fact doesn't make it significantly harder to ensure the security of open-source code than it already is.
Categories: software development, security
