Tag Archives: Security

Guess Who Was Responsible for the Missouri SSN Leak

Posted on 2022-02-23 by jcs

Back in October of last year Irreal recounted the hilarious but sad tale of the Missouri governor trying to press charges against the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for discovering, notifying the state, and then reporting on the fact that a state … Continue reading →

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How To Avoid Search Warrants

Posted on 2021-10-20 by jcs

Last week, DuckDuckGo tweeted that they have had zero search warrants since their founding in 2008. That’s because they don’t log their users’ searches so there’s no useful information for law enforcement to demand access to. Contrast that to Google … Continue reading →

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Prosecuting the Press

Posted on 2021-10-15 by jcs

As you all know, Irreal doesn’t think very highly of journalists and the press. What Irreal likes even less is know-nothing politicos who nevertheless feel fully qualified to opine and pass judgment on technical matters. The Congressional hearings on social … Continue reading →

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The Technical Problems with Apple’s CSAM Scanning

Posted on 2021-09-08 by jcs

I’ve written several posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) about Apple’s planned CSAM scanning project but those posts have always focused on how Apple was betraying their long held promise to protect our privacy and not allow random … Continue reading →

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Apple and Backdoors

Posted on 2021-09-04 by jcs

In the ongoing Apple CSAM saga, Irreal has mostly been concerned with Apple’s betrayal of their promise to protect their users’ privacy but there’s also the issue the long term security consequences of Apple’s decision. We’ll take a look at … Continue reading →

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Malware Using “Exotic” Languages

Posted on 2021-08-07 by jcs

I tagged this post Security but it might just as well have been tagged Humor. ZDNet is reporting that malware authors are using “exotic” languages to avoid detection by the antivirus folks. If, like the majority of the technical press, … Continue reading →

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On Passwords and SolarWinds

Posted on 2021-03-03 by jcs

By now everyone knows about the major breach of the U.S. Government (and probably others) that had its genesis in an exploit that gave attackers access to the SolarWinds build chain. Some are reporting that the problem was a leaked … Continue reading →

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Burner Emails

Posted on 2021-02-10 by jcs

FourZeroThree has a nice four and a half minute video on how and why you should have a burner email account. The idea has been around for a long time under the name of disposable email addresses. The idea is … Continue reading →

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Setting Up and Using Authinfo With Emacs

Posted on 2021-01-12 by jcs

Once you start moving more and more of your computing tasks into Emacs, you’re going to need a way of handling passwords. Mail is the canonical example but there are also things like blogging sites, ftp servers and other functions … Continue reading →

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Read Meat Friday: A Trojan In Your Editor

Posted on 2021-01-08 by jcs

Is there a backdoor in your editor? Probably not, even if you’re using IntelliJ, but in a moment of schadenfreude for FOSS folks, the New York Times is reporting that JetBrains software may have been used as vector in the … Continue reading →

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