(skip to after Disclaimer if you just want the technical details)
When I arived home for my month-long winter break, I realized my parents had a problem: their two year old wireless-N router couldn’t quite handle the up to 20+ devices they and my siblings would have connected in the evenings. It was an Asus rt-n66u, which I had been quite happy with, but it just couldn’t keep up, and anyways it only supported wireless-N and wireless-AC is the New Cool Thing™.
As most of you probably haven’t noticed, this blog is no longer running on a DigitalOcean dropplet, but “serverless” on AWS. Here are all the pieces needed to make it work.
Note that I’ve taken a ton of inspiration from Stephen Brennan’s blog post about the same subject.
Route 53 This part is pretty straight forward. I moved my dns to Route 53, copied the old records from bentley.link, and copied the same settings to bentley.
Secure boot is a part of the relatively new Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (uefi) specification that allows verifying the legitimacy of early boot code using a public key infrastructure. It has been widely criticised due to the fact that it could prevent non-Microsoft-blessed software from booting if a user cannot change the keys or disable the feature.
I am going to ignore the political issues, and focus on how to use secure boot to protect the boot process of an Arch Linux system running on a Thinkpad x240.
Almost four months ago, I decided to run an exec position on the Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) Undergraduate Student Government (USG).
The current Vice President of Information Technology was stepping down for a semester long internship (also called a co-op), and the General Assembly (GA) needed to elect a replacement for the semester. On the recommendation of one of my fraternity brothers, I decided to go for it. I showed up to Adelbert on a snowy Tuesday night, delivered a three minute pitch (speech) about why the representatives should vote for me, answered a few questions, and stepped out of the room to allow the other candidates to do the same.
Introduction and Background This post is an attempt to explain the encryption dispute between Apple and the FBI. It will provide general background on the whole so-called “security vs privacy” debate, historical context of how the United States government has interacted with encryption, and finally talk about the events leading up to and the actual dispute between Apple and the FBI regarding unlocking an iPhone 5c, used by one of the San Bernardino shooters.
I want to spend a few minutes sharing my thoughts about hacker culture, hackathon culture, and why there is a divide between the two.
First, a brief introduction to what these things are.
“Hacker culture” is a mentality of using technology in new, often unconventional ways. It comes out of the original computer science groups at universities such as MIT and UC Berkeley. As far as I can tell, in the earliest days, before the internet, most of these groups had separate cultures.
As my very few readers may have noticed, I recently changed the theme of this blog. At the same time, I also switched from Ghost to Hugo. Here is the Python script I developed to migrate my ghost database to Hugo:
The USB Armory comes with a nice little LED on board. In the default Debian image, it is set up to blink based on CPU usage. To control it manually, take the following steps:
The default image for the USB Armory defaults to using the g_ether driver to provide an ethernet device to the host. However, that does not give you a USB mass storage device. The alternative is to modrpobe -r g_ether and modprobe g_mass_storage file=/path/to/block/device, but that leaves you without ethernet, and thus without a method of communicating with the armory.
I just got my newest toy: the USB Armory by Inverse Path. Rather then me tell
you about it, I’ll let the creators do that:
It seems that, as I get to know people in Cleveland, more and more of them are starting to move to my home city of Seattle. Because of this, I have decided to write a short post about what you need to do if you move to Seattle.
Here I describe more security measures I’ve taken for my new FreeBSD 10.1 server.
This is a brief guide to securing your web/mail server, with a focus on FreeBSD. Some of this is simply links to other blogs, and the rest is my own setup.
From my own experience, meditation seems to have really taken off in popularity recently. A number of recent news stories and podcasts I have listened to proclaim its usefulness in keeping a healthy mind and body. However, not everyone sees it like that yet. Many see it as some Buddhist exercise that’s not relevant their Christian/Jewish/Muslim/Atheist belief system. This could not be further from the truth; in fact, your religion (or lack thereof) is completely irrelevant to the benefits you can gain from it.
As 2015 gets under way, I want to give my readers an idea of where I like to get my news and entertainment. As you might notice, many of these are podcasts. Podcasts are great because I can listen to them while walking between classes.
Since this will partially be a technical blog, I want to spend some time talking about this blog. I wrote an overview for the about page, so go there if you want a really quick overview.
Another year passes, and another blog begins.
To start off 2015, and finally get this blog going, here are my new years resolutions. I haven’t really done these in the past, so this is a bit new. However, I think it is important to have a number of goals and expectations for myself in the new year.
Hello, world