Category: Software
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let’s encrypt
I never bought a commercial grade SSL certificate for my private website, but I used free ones before. Usually from startssl. While it worked, the process was cumbersome. And then when I wanted to renew, my browser showed a warning that their own certificate was out of order. When the letsencrypt initiative (supported by mozilla […]
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Verifying downloads
Last week I stumbled across a post from last year, where somebody described how it was impossible to download an important infrastructure program securely on Windows. My first reaction was of course to pity the poor souls that are still stuck with Windows. How easy is it to just type apt-get install and have all […]
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connecting home securely
It has been probably close to a decade that I run a small server at home. At first it was only because I could not find a web hosting company that would serve my fcgi libwt apps at an affordable price. Then I added this blog to it. In the meantime I added a lot […]
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ubuntu phone will be great, but it is not yet
The BQ Aquaris ubuntu phone that I waited for so eagerly was delivered today. Full of anticipation I unpacked it and switched it on. After playing with it for a while the excitement turned into dissatisfaction. I hate to say it, but on a phone the solid base and polished user experience is not enough, […]
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libreboot and trisquel
Last month I saw somebody on the fsfe mailing list talk about an OpenMoko phone. As I had one of those collecting dust in the drawer, I asked if anybody was interested. Promptly I got an offer to exchange it for a Lenovo X60 notebook with libreboot. I didn’t need another notebook, but libreboot seemed […]
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Code coverage for C++
Ever since I wrote automated tests, I wondered how complete the coverage was. Of course you have a feeling which parts are better covered than others. For some legacy code you might prefer not to know at all. But I thought test coverage was something easy to do with a language running on a VM […]
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decentralized social communication
When you think about social networks, do you even realize how centralized and compartmentalized the prevalent systems are? Neither centralization nor artificial borders are inherent traits of a network though. Imagine you could only talk to customers of the same phone company you use. Or you could exchange emails only with customers of the same […]
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wake up to a clean state
I used to have problems when my ultrabook woke up from sleeping mode. Nothing serious, but annoying. One thing was that the empathy messenger application fully occupied one CPU core, effectively transforming the power out of the battery into heat. I grew tired of manually terminate it every time. So I did some research, and […]
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fido universal 2nd factor authentication
In the time since my rant about passwords, more and more sites adopt OAuth. I don’t like this development. Usually they offer login with facebook, sometimes with google or twitter and rarely with linkedin. The problem with OAuth is that the site operator decides what providers are supported. With OpenID on the other hand, I […]
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MultiSig with HardwareWallets
2014 is touted as the year of multi-signature for BitCoin. It is being integrated into some wallets and services. But not quite the way I expected. Electrum has an implementation that assumes multiple hierarchical deterministic wallets distributed over different machines, that know the other’s master private keys. -> This should work well for corporate environments […]