Certificate Pinning Is Back In Firefox!

How to assemble a tin foil hat
How to assemble a tin foil hat, seen at @35C3

tl;dr: Over the past weeks, I’ve put together a Firefox add-on for SSL certificate pinning so I would notice if ever a man-in-the-middle would use forged certificates to spy on me when I interact with my home servers, banking websites, and so on. I feel a lot safer now again! You can find it here and the source code here.

Once upon a time…

Continue reading Certificate Pinning Is Back In Firefox!

Close to an 8-Bit Overflow On This Blog

Time flies and I am always astounded that I’ve been writing this blog since 2005. Over the years, quite a number of posts have accumulated. As my current WordPress profile bundles them in pages of 10 posts, I’m now on page 255 and thus close to an 8-bit overflow. If you don’t get it, you are probably too young and never lived through the 8-bit home computer era ^^

5G: How To Control Beamforming

In the previous two posts on 5G NR massive MIMO, a.k.a. beam forming, I’ve gone into the basic principles of what it can be used for in practice and how antennas for beam forming will look like. Great background information from Keysight and Ericsson respectively. The next question I then had was how mobile device and the network communicate with each other to adapt downlink transmission in mobility situations.

Continue reading 5G: How To Control Beamforming

An Afternoon In The Computer Museum in Helmond

Helmond signA bit off the beaten path, I’ve been to Helmond this week, a city in the Netherlands not far from Eindhoven for a very particular purpose: To visit the Home Computer museum there that opened last year. Run by volunteers, I can’t quite remember anymore how I stumbled across them on the web, perhaps it was their short videos about how they found some space at the border of the city center and how it was converted for putting their collection on display. Based to the size and significance of Helmond I was expecting a small museum with a few exhibits which is why I was quite surprised when I saw its real dimensions.

Continue reading An Afternoon In The Computer Museum in Helmond

50th Anniversary of Apollo 11 – My Book Recommendations

Project Apollo InsigniaNot long now and we will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first human landing on the moon! 50 years ago, on the 20th July 1969, humankind’s greatest tech adventure culminated with Neil Armstrong setting foot on the lunar surface. Altough I wasn’t born back then, this has inspired me from early childhood and over the years my fascination grew even more. Even after several trips to the Manned Space Flight center in Huston and Kennedy Space Center in Florida, I still get goosebumps when I pick up a book about a particular aspect of the Apollo program. So in anticipation of the 50th anniversary celebrations, here are the top three books I think one should have read about Project Apollo: Continue reading 50th Anniversary of Apollo 11 – My Book Recommendations

Is There A Way To Clone An Android Installation?

Impact crater on phone displayWhen you accidentally drop your phone and it looks like on the picture on the left when you pick it up, your plans for the rest of the day are pretty much out the window. There are several options after such an accident one of them is to just get another device and start from scratch. This is what I did and spent the next 3 hours installing LineageOS and all apps and data from scratch again. Once done I thought I’d make the best out of the broken phone, which was still working, and see if I could have been faster (next time…) by just cloning the complete Android installation from one device to the other. This works great on the PC with Linux and I regularly do this to make sure I have a backup SSD with a working clone of my installation. After several hours and approaching the issue from several angles, I have to say that I came up empty handed.

Continue reading Is There A Way To Clone An Android Installation?