I know, I know. It’s not very flashy is it? I mean no pictures, no graphics, no social media links? What the heck is that all about? The truth is that this website is meant for the nerds who use lynx, the geeks who know what the 1mb club is, and the hackers who made the web a great place to be until advertisers decided to spread across it. I want it to be a place where I can show off a bit without giving money or clicks to Youtube or X. If that sounds good to you, then welcome aboard! And if not… I mean, the rest of the web is for you. What are you doing here? Shoo.
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Another day, another piece of drama, eh?
If you haven’t heard, the Linux project is going through another dramatic fight. This time it’s over X11. For those of you with lives who don’t care all that much about computers, X11 is a display server. it’s the piece of software that draws all the windows that you use. On Linux, there are 2 options. X11 is the old version that’s been rocking since the 80’s and Wayland, which is the new kid on the block.
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Ok, so this is going to come with a trigger warning. I’m about to talk about evil… or rather, what I define as evil.
In my vernacular evil is the act of voluntarily inflicting suffering on another for gain.
It might not be accurate, but it’s a decent enough starting point.
Why are you talking about this, nerd? I live in America and have friends spanning both sides of the political aisle. Friends from one party blame every problem of evil on the friends of the other party and vice versa.
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There are a lot of tools you can use to see what a company is up to techwise. Dig is good, whois is good, spidering through webapps looking for links and apis is good, but my favorite… really dead simple way of getting information on a domain is to just checkout https://crt.sh.
The script To even call this a script is an insult to scripting. I’m just curling the csv endpoint of the crt.sh website and using some cli-foo to turn it into subdomains.
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Not sure who needs to know this, but here’s some fun trivia for you:
You can send text messages from 4G/LTE enabled routers..
This functionally means that if you were particularly disciplined with how you dealt with texting, you could place one of those routers literally anywhere in the world, use a compatible SIM card that’s attached to your identity, and you have yourself a little covert operative that misleads your ISP into thinking you are somewhere you are not. Make sure that all of the texts you make to banks, businesses, etc are run from that router and SIM.
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If you’ve dealt with the hacker and security crowd for any amount of time, you’ll know that a lot of us are invested in techniques that help us preserve privacy. We’ll also cry foul when Governments and Corporations across the planet implement some kind of a compensating control or law that will limit, curtail, or derail privacy.
The arguments haven’t changed since the freaking 60’s, but the strongest arrow in the quiver of the powerful is this phrase:
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If I could pick a theme for this blog, it would most likely be “digital independence”. I may spend some time focusing my efforts on hacking, productivity software, command-line ballyhoo, or general philosophy, but in general I focus my efforts on tools and techniques that make me less reliant on others.
Why use Gitea if you can use ssh and git?
Why use Google Authenticator if you can use GNU pass?
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I recently had the opportunity to meet with a few aspiring cybersecurity students and talk to them about the virtues of IDSes, IPSes, Firewalls, Honey Pots, and compensating controls. It was a blast, and it’s clear that the future is in good hands with these professionals at the wheel.
After my little talk, I told them about a tool that would help them learn how to hack WiFi even if they didn’t have equipment. I had gotten the knowledge from Black Hill’s Security Blog. I asked if any of the students had heard of Black Hills, and they said. “No”. I responded that Black Hills was one of my favorite blogs that came across my RSS feed. I saw some puzzled looks.
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This is gonna be a pretty short article, but hopefully it saves someone some time.
Ever since NixOS hit the scene, there has been a growing movement of linux practitioners that extol the idea of an immutable distribution, which is an OS where the system itself is read-only, and all the applications are installed via containers.
My Uninformed Opinion This idea is a bit of a mixed bag for me.
On the first hand, I love using live linux distros as “ghost operating systems” where I do my thing and nothing is left behind. It keeps the system stable, uncluttered, and I can’t think of a setup that’s more private than one that forgets everything you do.
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So here is a newsflash for all non-Linux people:
EVERYTHING IN LINUX IS A FILE. LITERALLY EVERYTHING Microphones Your devices like your camera and microphone are mounted at /dev. The ulility “arecord” from the alsa-utils uses this little trick to allow you to do stuff like open the microphone file and forward the data to other command line tools like mpv:
arecord -f cd - | mpv - Cameras The same can be done with your camera, except it’s ffmpeg that relies on the camera being a file:
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Or Ostara if you are Pagan, Sunday if you’re atheist. Nothing technical or philosophical. I just hope you have a nice day. That’s all.