Cryptography is a funny thing. Supposedly, if you do the right kind of maths to a message, you can send it off to somebody else, and as long as they’re the only one that knows a secret little thing, nobody else will be able to read it. We have all sorts of apps for this, […]
Can you remotely unlock an encrypted hard disk? [Jyn] needed to unlock their home server after it rebooted even if they weren’t home. Normally, they used Tailscale to remote in, but you can’t use tailscale to connect to the machine before the hard drive decrypts, right? Well, you can, sort of, and [Jyn] explains how. […]
Possibly the biggest privacy story of the year for Europeans and, by extension the rest of the world, has been ChatControl. Chatcontrol is a European Union proposal backed by Denmark for a mandatory backdoor in all online communications. As always with these things, it was touted as a think-of-the-children solution to online child abuse material, […]
In an era where running a website without HTTPS is shunned, and everyone wants you to encrypt your DNS queries, you’d expect that the telecommunications back-ends are secured tightly as well. Especially the wireless bits between terra firma and geosynchronous communication satellites. But as recently discovered by US researchers, the opposite is actually true. The […]
The Raspberry Pi has been used for many things over its lifetime, and we’re guessing that many of you will have one in perhaps its most common configuration, as a small server. [Thibault] has a Pi 4 in this role, and it’s used to back up the data from his VPS in a data centre. […]
There’s a section of our community who concern themselves with the technological aspects of preparing for an uncertain future, and for them a significant proportion of effort goes in to communication. This has always included amateur radio, but in more recent years it has been extended to LoRa. To that end, [Bertrand Selva] has created […]
One of the first things that an amateur radio operator is likely to do once receiving their license is grab a dual-band handheld and try to make contacts with a local repeater. After the initial contacts, though, many hams move on to more technically challenging aspects of the hobby. One of those being activating space-based […]
This project by [Miro] is awesome, not only did he build a replica Enigma machine using modern technologies, but after completing it, he went back and revised several components to make it more usable. We’ve featured Enigma machines here before; they are complex combinations of mechanical and electrical components that form one of the most […]
The Enigma machine is perhaps one of the most legendary devices to come out of World War II. The Germans used the ingenious cryptographic device to hide their communications from the Allies, who in turn spent an incredible amount of time and energy in finding a way to break it. While the original Enigma was […]
The invention of the computer is a tricky thing to pinpoint. There were some early attempts that were not well known and some early attempts that were deliberately secret. [Alan Turing]’s efforts with Colossus were top secret for years, and while that work built on earlier efforts in Poland, [Turing] has as much claim to […]