Tag: tech

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

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

First-party Google Analytics

Third party analytics services are suffering from the growing prevalence of ad blocking, tracking protection, and the trend of minimizing connections and requests. However, from a site owner perspective, receiving usage information remains important for measuring site growth. My expectation is that we are already on the curve where ads and tracking software will be… Continue reading First-party Google Analytics

Thoughts on China’s Updated Cyber-security Regulations

On Monday, China ratified an updated cybersecurity legislation that will enter effect next June. The policy regulates a number of aspects of the Chinese Internet: What data companies need to keep on domestic servers, the interaction between companies and the government, and the interaction between companies and Chinese users. Notably, when considering the impact on… Continue reading Thoughts on China’s Updated Cyber-security Regulations

Clock

A topic of conversation recently has focused on the practicality of Decimal time. Days would have 10 hours, each with 100 minutes. I recently completed a side project of converting an old clock to use decimal time. (If you aren’t willing to switch to decimal time fully, there’s an web version as well.)

Watch your PAC

In the last week at Blackhat / Defcon two groups looked deeply at one of the lesser known implementations of network policy called Proxy Autoconfig. (In particular, badWPAD by Maxim and Crippling HTTPS with unholy PAC by Safebreach.) Proxy AutoConfig (PAC) is a mechanism used by many organizations to configure an advanced policy for connecting… Continue reading Watch your PAC

Stunning

I’ve started to dive once again into the mess of connection establishment. Network address translation (NAT) is a reality today for most Internet users, and poses a significant hurdle in creating the user-user (or peer-peer) connections. NAT is the process used by your router to provide multiple internal (192.168.x.x) addresses that are all only visible… Continue reading Stunning