Fact check: that “forensics” of the Mesa image is crazy
Tina Peters, the elections clerk from Mesa County (Colorado) went rogue, creating a "disk-image" of the election server, and posting that image to the public Internet. Conspiracy theorists have been analyzing the disk-image trying to find anomalies supporting their conspiracy-theories. A recent example is this "forensics" report. In this blogpost, ... Read More
100 terabyte home NAS
So, as a nerd, let's say you need 100 terabytes of home storage. What do you do?My solution would be a commercial NAS RAID, like from Synology, QNAP, or Asustor. I'm a nerd, and I have setup my own Linux systems with RAID, but I'd rather get a commercial product ... Read More
Check: that Republican audit of Maricopa
Author: Robert Graham (@erratarob)Later today (Friday, September 24, 2021), Republican auditors release their final report on the found with elections in Maricopa county. Draft copies have circulated online. In this blogpost, I write up my comments on the cybersecurity portions of their draft.https://arizonaagenda.substack.com/p/we-got-the-senate-audit-reportThe three main problems are:They misapply cybersecurity principles ... Read More
That Alfa-Trump Sussman indictment
Five years ago, online magazine Slate broke a story about how DNS packets showed secret communications between Alfa Bank in Russia and the Trump Organization, proving a link that Trump denied. I was the only prominent tech expert that debunked this as just a conspiracy-theory[*][*][*].Last week, I was vindicated by ... Read More
How not to get caught in law-enforcement geofence requests
I thought I'd write up a response to this question from well-known 4th Amendment and CFAA lawyer Orin Kerr:Question for tech people related to "geofence" warrants served on Google: How easy is it for a cell phone user, either of an Android or an iPhone, to stop Google from generating ... Read More
Of course you can’t trust scientists on politics
Many people make the same claim as this tweet. It's obviously wrong. Yes,, the right-wing has a problem with science, but this isn't it.If you think you don't trust scientists, you're mistaken. You trust scientists in a million different ways every time you step on a plane, or for that ... Read More
Risk analysis for DEF CON 2021
It's the second year of the pandemic and the DEF CON hacker conference wasn't canceled. However, the Delta variant is spreading. I thought I'd do a little bit of risk analysis. TL;DR: I'm not canceling my ticket, but changing my plans what I do in Vegas during the convention.First, a ... Read More
Ransomware: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes
Many claim that "ransomware" is due to cybersecurity failures. It's not really true. We are adequately protecting users and computers. The failure is in the inability of cybersecurity guardians to protect themselves. Ransomware doesn't make the news when it only accesses the files normal users have access to. The big ... Read More
Some quick notes on SDR
I'm trying to create perfect screen captures of SDR to explain the world of radio around us. In this blogpost, I'm going to discuss some of the imperfect captures I'm getting, specifically, some notes about WiFi and Bluetooth.An SDR is a "software defined radio" which digitally samples radio waves and ... Read More
When we’ll get a 128-bit CPU
On Hacker News, this article claiming "You won't live to see a 128-bit CPU" is trending". Sadly, it was non-technical, so didn't really contain anything useful. I thought I'd write up some technical notes.The issue isn't the CPU, but memory. It's not about the size of computations, but when CPUs ... Read More
