PUST in the news

The Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST) has shown up in a recent New York Times article, and I’m mentioned at the end. A couple notes on the article: While the school may have 250 acres if the affiliated cooperative farms are included, the actual campus is much smaller, with ~10 buildings built around… Continue reading PUST in the news

IETF 98

Last week I talked briefly about the state of open internet measurement for network anomalies at IETF 98. This was my first time attending an IETF in-person meeting, and it was very useful in getting a better understanding of how to navigate the standards process, how it’s used by others, and what value can be… Continue reading IETF 98

Another Strike against Domain Fronting

In 2014, Domain Fronting became the newest obfuscation technique for covert, difficult to censor communication. Even today, the Meek Pluggable transport serves ~400GB of Tor traffic each day, at a cost of ~$3000/month. The basic technique is to make an HTTPS connection to the CDN directly, and then once the encryption has begun, make the… Continue reading Another Strike against Domain Fronting

Koryolink Simulator

When I was in Pyongyang a few years ago and had access to a cell phone, I recorded a bunch of the prerecorded messages that you hear when dialing or mis-dialing numbers. I found them to be an interesting glimpse into the view of technology seen in that corner of the world, and helpfully they… Continue reading Koryolink Simulator

Privacy issues for City Wi-Fi Deployments

At the end of last month, Seattle posted a request for information exploring the feasibility of a municipal Wireless deployment. With others at the Seattle Privacy Coalition, I draft a response to the city flagging some of the major privacy issues that we hope they will consider in the initiative. I believe these are much… Continue reading Privacy issues for City Wi-Fi Deployments

Slab City

I wanted to try to put into words part of what I appreciate about community, through a description of one of the more unique communities I’ve visited: Slab City.

Thoughts on Wulim

One of the exciting developments at CCC last month was a talk discussing the copy protection features in the Wulim tablet produced by the Pyongyang Information Center. This post is an attempt to reconcile the features they describe with my experience with devices around Pyongyang and provide some additional context of the environment the device… Continue reading Thoughts on Wulim