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
Tag: tech
Video from my CCC talk last week is here.
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
Excited to see Satellite chosen as best student paper this year at USENIX ATC. Slides and audio from the talk should be online shortly.
The CS department, as always, is on top of its news releases.
Satellite
I’m excited to present Satellite, a network measurement project I’ve been working on over the last couple years, at USENIX ATC next month. Satellite takes a look at understanding shared CDN behaviors and automatically detecting censorship by regularly querying open DNS resolvers around the world. For example, we can watch the trends in censorship in… Continue reading Satellite
I’m scheduled to give a talk at toorcamp next month about packet spoofing and SP^3.