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...

2d

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...

5d

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...

4w

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,...

4w

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 the detailed location info needed to be responsive to a geofence warrant?...

Sep 2021

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 matter turn on your tap or open a can of beans. The fact that you're...

Jul 2021

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 note about risk analysis. For many people, "risk" means something...

Jul 2021

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 ransomware news events happened...

Jul 2021

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 uses number crunching to decode the signal into...

Jul 2021

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 will need more than 64-bits to address all the memory...

Jun 2021