“How dare you take my money and not deliver my product?!” – a statement heard by companies all over the world, only to find that their customer placed an order on a fake website, paid a scammer a bunch of money, and never received the product they paid for. They blame you for this, yet you had nothing to do it. To understand the issue, we have to do a break… Read Article →
What is this Wannacrypt?
There’s a ton of technical information on Wannacrypt, but what I did not see, is some layman’s overview of the global hack, that stopped at least 250,000 computers globally from May 12th. With this post, I will attempt to explain what Wannacrypt is, and how it works for the non-technical crowd. Microsoft Windows, the most widely used computer operating system in the world, has a built in feature that allows… Read Article →
HOWTO – Encryption with Perl
I’m a huge fan of encryption, and here I’d like to show you how you can utilize the Crypt::Rijldael module to encrypt any blob of data. First, we need to initialize some modules. use Crypt::Rijndael; use MIME::Base64;use Crypt::Rijndael; use MIME::Base64; Let’s create the encryption function. The function will take two inputs, the plain text, and the pass key to use. It will output a base64 encoded blob of data. sub… Read Article →
Protect your family from porn – for free
Technology has a way to to infiltrate our lives in ways we can’t even imagine. Kids have devices with wifi and access to the internet, and without even realizing, our children have access to all sorts of unsavory things on the internet. There are a bunch of software available that you can use to lock down the various devices in your house. I’ve used some of them. I found them… Read Article →
A simple guitar tuner – SOX
sox is a command line audio tool. I use it from time to time to automate some audio related activities. I play guitar from time to time, and I do like the idea of tuning my guitar by simply listening to the note. Now there’s a ton of apps out there that can do the trick, but I decided to create an audio file that I can copy onto my… Read Article →
Why the Yahoo! hack should scare you
Last week, the folks at Yahoo informed us that 500 million users‘ details got leaked in a massive hack. On face value it just seems like yet another hack. Yahoo was downplaying the hack, but the reality is, you need to be scared (if you have a Yahoo account that is). Companies like Yahoo! store all sorts of information about you. The most common type of information they store are… Read Article →
What happened on Census night?
August 9 2016, census night… Families all over the country are preparing to complete their census online, but no, they can not access the website. People are venting, the ABS is copping it left, right and center, and our PM is being hammered for the government’s incompetence or running a proper census. And then we hear the news… The site was hacked, but it wasn’t hacked, and people started complaining…. Read Article →
Why I don’t church anymore
I am a Christian. I was brought up as one, grew up in the church, and for as long as I can remember, God has been a part of my life. I am also logical. I like to understand things, be able to explain things, and for the last few years, I started observing some problems with my religion. When you look at the Bible, and in particular the teachings… Read Article →
TOTP in Perl
TOTP (or Time-based One-time Password Algorithm) is an algorithm used to generate a one-time password from a previously shared key. Now if that confused you, maybe you’re more familiar with Google Authenticator. If you’re keen to generate an OTP in Perl, or integrate it in your web application, then the code below can be used to either generate the OTP, or to check if the OTP is valid. #!/usr/bin/perl #… Read Article →
Microsoft Continuum – First thoughts
Microsoft has released Continuum for their line of Lumia 950 phones. Continuum is the ability to use your phone as a desktop. By plugging the phone into a dock, you can control the phone with a regular keyboard and screen. Let’s look at the phone. The Lumia 950 is ok. It’s not spectacular, just ok. It’s the first time I’m using the Windows platform (just having migrated from Android). The… Read Article →