Something happened to me recently which made me realise there is sometimes a fundamental disconnect between humans and cryptography, it's often been said that humans are the weakest link, and in this post I hope to point out several ways that the very nature of being human hinders our ability do anything securely until the humanness is hammered out.
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I have been living as a Kopimist for the past 7 years, and realistically my ideology has been a reflection of its core values for a lot longer - although I may not have had a succinct label or the right word to describe exactly what my beliefs are.
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In response to an interesting concept brought to my attention, and a recent BT Young Scientist award for Post-Quantum, Geographically Sharded, "Quorum Key Technology" - also known as qcry.pt or getqcrypt.com, I decided to delve into the details.
Continue Reading ▸The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
What's interesting when I come across a new piece of software is how the initial impressions change after reading the code. If you're looking to setup a new YouTube® style website, PHP Melody ranks highly for many search terms; it's convincingly marketed and looks polished even to an expert eye.
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In this article we're tracing the bootup sequence of the Sophos SafeGuard Enteprise disk encryption product, the perspective taken is that if I were to use this product would it be prevent evil-maid attacks and be resiliant to key extraction and reverse engineering.
Continue Reading ▸An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.
APIs are a language programmers use to simplify and encapsulate abstractions and enable the re-use code, but given the fundamental nature of the C ABI and it's limitations there are additional layers of design criteria which must be considered if the API is to stand the test of time.
Continue Reading ▸Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death.
The first port of call in most people's efforts to secure a server are to install a firewall; explicitly defining what is allowed to connect and be connected to is a well understood security practice, but what about application level firewalls?
Continue Reading ▸'Freedom from fear' could be said to sum up the whole philosophy of human rights.
— Dag Hammarskjöld
As a new year begins one must make an effort to continue their personal development by following creative endeavors, while I've had blogs in the past I found that I had gotten out of the habit of creative technical writing and decided to take this opportunity to try out Jekyll with a new design and format for the blog.
Continue Reading ▸Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.
— Milan Kundera#!/usr/bin/env python
print sum(ord(c) for c in 'Happy new year to you!')