Quite strange that only Bruce Schneier has picked up on this so far but researches have developed a proof of concept of how to exploit HID (Human Interface Device) USB dongles for wireless mice and keyboards to accept keystrokes from rouge third party transmitters.
Continue reading MouseJack Vulnerability – Have You Already Patched Your Mouse?
Eduroam is a great Wi-Fi login system for students and researches that works with certificates for secure access of on-campus Wi-Fi networks and has the added benefit that Eduroam users can attach to any other Eduroam network around the globe without changing their Wi-Fi configuration. That’s the theory and paper is patient. So when I recently was at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands I tested if the theory holds up with an Eduroam setup of the University of Vienna.
Theoretical Internet speeds in fixed line and mobile networks keep rising, which is a nice thing. Unfortunately, round trip delay times are not decreasing at the same rate, mostly due to physical limits these days which at some point will limit the maximum throughput of a single TCP stream no matter how fat the pipe is and how fast a server can deliver data. So where is this limit?
In my quest to do as many things over IPv6 now that it’s supported not only by my VDSL line at home but also by my mobile network operator, the last success story I reported here was about how to update my IPv6 DNS entry whenever the dynamic IPv6 address of one of my servers at home changed. The procedure works like a charm but unfortunately I found a big bug in the DNS resolver in my Fritzbox VDSL router that pretty much forestalls my IPv6 home server ambitions for the moment.
Back in 2013 I published a post on the different levels on which a computing device could be understood from a working level down to the physics behind the individual gates. One facet that has been missing for me so far was a look at the features that make today’s CPUs so powerful. “Inside the Machine” by John Stokes filled that gap for me.
One downside of moving from 32-bit to 64-bit is that memory pointers are twice their size. In other words programs in memory require more RAM. But does it matter in practice?
To find out I ran the 32-bit version of Ubuntu 14.04 from a USB stick and compared the used and available memory in different situations on the same system when booting from a different memory stick with the 64-bit version of the OS.
Today I came across this great article by Robert Penz in which he describes measures how companies can reduce the risk of Ransomware encrypting their files on network shares and other devices in the local network. Also, he describes how a company can prepare itself in case it still happens to reduce their downtime as much as possible. I found one of his suggestions of particular interest: Snapshots of network shares.
Continue reading Good Advice To Block, Detect and Mitigate Ransomware Damage In Companies
After my initial thoughts about moving from Linux 32-bit to 64-bit I couldn’t of course hold back for long and decided to upgrade my Media PC I mostly use for video streaming from the 32-bit flavor of Ubuntu 15.10 to the 64-bit flavor. It should have been a straight forward reinstall, what could possibly go wrong!? Or so I thought…
Continue reading Hiccups While Moving To 64-bit On My Media PC
When it comes to investigative reporting in the telecommunication domain, German telecoms news website Teltarif certainly is at the forefront. Recently they noticed that the public network coverage maps of one of the network operators in Germany now show that in many cities, they have deployed LTE in three different frequency bands.
Continue reading One German LTE Network Operator Now On-Air with 50 MHz
I’ve been using SSDs for many years now and I’m more than happy as the speed difference on a notebook compared to hard disks is just like day and night. Unfortunately I use a one terabyte Samsung 840 Evo in my notebook that has now bitten me for the second time.