DS620slim tiny home server

In this blogpost, I describe the Synology DS620slim. Mostly these are notes for myself, so when I need to replace something in the future, I can remember how I built the system. It's a "NAS" (network attached storage) server that has six hot-swappable bays for 2.5 inch laptop drives.That's right, laptop 2.5 inch drives. It makes this a tiny server that...

Jul 2022

No, a researcher didn't find Olympics app spying on you

For the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, the Chinese government requires everyone to download an app onto their phone. It has many security/privacy concerns, as CitizenLab documents. However, another researcher goes further, claiming his analysis proves the app is recording all audio all the time. His analysis is fraudulent. He shows a lot of technical...

Jan 2022

Journalists: stop selling NFTs that you don't understand

The reason you don't really understand NFTs is because the journalists describing them to you don't understand them, either. We can see that when they attempt to sell an NFT as part of their stories (e.g. AP and NYTimes). They get important details wrong.The latest is Reason.com magazine selling an NFT. As libertarians, you'd think at least they'd get...

Dec 2021

Example: forensicating the Mesa County system image

Tina Peters, the election clerk in Mesa County (Colorado) went rogue and dumped disk images of an election computer on the Internet. They are available on the Internet via BitTorrent [Mesa1][Mesa2], The Colorado Secretary of State is now suing her over the incident.The lawsuit describes the facts of the case, how she entered the building with an accomplice...

Nov 2021

Debunking: that Jones Alfa-Trump report

The Alfa-Trump conspiracy-theory has gotten a new life. Among the new things is a report done by Democrat operative Daniel Jones [*]. In this blogpost, I debunk that report.If you'll recall, the conspiracy-theory comes from anomalous DNS traffic captured by cybersecurity researchers. In the summer of 2016, while Trump was denying involvement with Russian...

Oct 2021

Review: Dune

One of the most important classic sci-fi stories is the book "Dune" from Frank Herbert. It was recently made into a movie. I thought I'd write a quick review.The summary is this: just read the book. It's a classic for a good reason, and you'll be missing a lot by not reading it.But the movie Dune (2021) movie is very good. The most important thing to...

Oct 2021

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, I...

Oct 2021

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. When a disk fails, and a disk will always eventually fail, then I want something that will...

Oct 2021

Check: that Republican audit of Maricopa

Author: Robert Graham (@erratarob)Later today (Friday, September 24, 2021), Republican auditors release their final report on what they 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...

Sep 2021

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 the indictment of a lawyer involved,...

Sep 2021