Author: Perry Donham
Promote free speech via Tor, earn a slapdown
[I wrote this a few years ago, but it is still relevant, perhaps even more so now -PD] I’ve been a privacy advocate for a long time; back in the mid-90s I’d wear my PGP ‘munition’ T-shirt while walking around the Boston common, both to support Phil Zimmerman’s defense fund and to enact my own […]
Using JWTs for Authentication in RESTful Applications
The problem Applications built using the MEAN stack typically use Node, MongoDB and Express on the back end to implement business logic fronted by a RESTful interface. Most of the work is done on the back end, and Angular serves as an enhanced view in the MVC (model-view-controller) pattern. Keeping business rules and logic on […]
Composing the results of nested asynchronous calls in Javascript
Grokking asynchronicity One of the toughest things to get your head around in Javascript is how to handle nested asynchronous calls, especially when a function depends on the result of a preceding one. I see this quite a bit in my software engineering course where teams are required to synthesize new information from two distinct third-party data […]
The Death of Trust
The tl;dr: Assume that anything you do online is being recorded by the government. I had a conversation this past week with one of my students who was interested in some of the operational aspects of anonymity; he wanted to know to what extent either Tor or a VPN or both would protect his identity […]
Booker’s 2015-06 “Noe Secret” vs Old Rip Van Winkle 10 Year Bourbon
A slight departure today from my usual computer science rants (er, posts) as I do a side-by-side sampling of two of my favorite bourbons. First, let me say that I am a wheated bourbon fan, and my go-to pour is Old Weller Antique, which is a Buffalo Trace product and closely related to the Pappy […]
I still think WhatsApp has a security problem
Last week The Guardian ran a story that claimed a backdoor was embedded in Facebook’s WhatsApp messaging service. Bloggers went nuts as we do when it looks like there’s some nefarious code lurking in a popular application, and of course Facebook is a favorite target of everybody. I tweeted my disdain for WhatsApp moments after reading […]
What I’m Using for Privacy: Cloud
This post is part of a series on technologies that I’m currently using for privacy, and my reasons for them. You can see the entire list in the first post. tl;dr: I don’t trust anyone with my data except myself, and neither should you. If you aren’t paying for it, you are the product I think […]
Sliding out of the Apple ecosystem?
A recent post on CNet describing the author’s Hackintosh build made me reflect on a few things that I’ve done lately that are slowly sliding me away from Apple’s ecosystem. Let me start by saying that I’ve been an Apple fanboy for many years; pretty much every piece of tech I use is either an […]
What I’m Using for Privacy: Email
This post is part of a series on technologies that I’m currently using for privacy, and my reasons for them. You can see the entire list in the first post. Email privacy is a tough nut to crack. To start, the protocol that’s used to move email around the internet, SMTP, is extremely simple and […]
Rethinking PGP encryption
Filippo Valsorda wrote an article recently on ArsTechnica titled I’m Throwing in the Towel on PGP, and I Work in Security that really made me think. Filippo is the real deal when it comes to PGP; few have his bona fides in the security arena, and when he talks, people should listen. The basic message of […]