Sunday, May 6, 2018

What was I reading in April 2018?

Another busy month. Participated in a local CTF (team placed third!). Took a class on ISA standards for industrial control systems (now studying for those tests). Spent most of the last two weeks face down in a single spreadsheet and the danged thing still won't load.

In any case, here's this past month's list...

2018-04-02

- sigrok - Short version: a portable, cross-platform, Free/Libre/Open-Source signal analysis software suite. Supposedly ti will work with the HackRF One.
- "Error 19874: You must have Office Professional Edition to read this content please upgrade your licence." - Lower tech malware with in interesting twist.
- A Pickpocket's Tale
- Fewbytes/rubber-docker - Understanding Docker by building it (or something like it) from scratch.
- Poor grades tied to class times that don't match our biological clocks - Not true! I aced the 8 a.m. basic electronics class. (Or was that because I'd already had the theory in trade school?)
- Turn TensorFlow functions into mathematical notations and diagrams

2018-04-06

- 1.1.1.1: Cloudflare's new DNS attracting 'gigabits per second' of rubbish - Exposing DNS shenanigans, because not everyone learned to play nicely in Kindergarten. Note: there's also a web server at that address. They also have a Twitter feed.
- chpmrc/zero-width-chrome-extension - Exposing web bugs by replacing them with emojis?
- Venetian Cryptography - A bit of history.
- Failing to secure DNS is 'savage ignorance': Geoff Huston - Not sure that I'd agree with the "it must not lie" part. There's all sorts of lies in the DNS system that we rely on (e.g., poisoning your own DNS is a simple/quick way of keeping your users off of certain sites).
- Computer system transcribes words users speak silently - Remember the looks we'd get when Bluetooth headsets first came out? I don't care, I want one of these.
- Writing To The Framebuffer Just keeping track of a needed reference here...
- Google bug bounty for security exploit that influences search results
- Giving every Tor Hidden Service a IPv6 address
- Linux kernel lockdown and UEFI Secure Boot - This is an attempt to make things better, unlike other shenanigans that can be performed within that architecture (including persistent "malware"). Hint: go read the guidance.

2018-04-07

- Another reason why your Docker containers may be slow
- iliasam/OpenSimpleLidar - Open Hardware scanning laser rangefinder

2018-04-18

- Probability Theory For Scientists and Engineers
- The chemistry of William Gibson's Neuromancer.

2018-04-19

- Toward better phone call and video transcription with new Cloud Speech-to-Text

2018-04-20

- A graphene roll-out - Weird things to come, I'll bet.
- (semi-related to the above) Graphene is Grown With the Same Band Gap as Silicon
- Tokyo and Hong Kong in 2018
- Scuttlebutt: A Decentralized Alternative To Facebook
- WiFi Backscatter
- nslookup, host, dig, whois: DNS Information Gathering - Basic theory, know-your-tools skills

2018-04-22

- how I taught people about load balancers - This one is very interesting as it explains why things are very bad when load balancers go awry.
- A Moby-based container engine for IoT - I'm still not convinced that this is a good idea (adding complexity rarely improves security in the long run).

2018-04-23

- Many Amazon Warehouse Workers are on Food Stamps - My biggest problem with the post: it doesn't suggest a solution. It's just stereotypical Internet bitching. This is nothing more than a hit piece. Same comment about public assistance can be said about U.S. military and adult burger flippers.

2018-04-29

- The Pentagon's Ray Gun Can Stall Cars - Knew a guy in the 70's that could do this but he used a spark-gap generator and a directional antenna (car had to be idling, too).
- Microsoft Attempts To Spin Its Role in Counterfeiting Case
- Intel Movidus and the Forthcoming AI Overlord Revolution - Still haven't had much time to play with this.
- A Mass of Copyrighted Works Will Soon Enter the Public Domain - Holding breath. Watching.

Above was generated by a homegrown bolt-on script for Wallabag, which is a free utility for capturing web content so that it can be read later.