Skip to main content

Airport Web Browser Security

Contrary to the popular perception, the world is not round - it is a giant polygon and my work has taken me to many a strange corner.

Travelling with a laptop computer is a risky business.  They are easily stolen and the financial cost pales into insignificance compared to the inconvenience of having to set up a new one again after having lost all your contacts and other keyboard kreature komforts.

On a Linux system, you absolutely must use 'full disk encryption'.  This is so easy to set up, that there is no excuse not to.  It only protects your data when at rest - when the machine is turned off, but your ordinary perp will try to log in, won't get past your 16 character password, then reboot and promptly get stuck at your 20 character encryption password (OK not everyone is as paranoid as me, but you should use at least 12 characters for a password).  After a few days, the machine will be re-installed with Windows XP and sold on Ebay, while your personal and financial data will be safely in data heaven.

While travelling to a distant corner of the globe, you will necessarily spend lots of time in Airports, using captive portals and coffee shop WiFi network connections.  These things are almost certainly bugged by at least three different organizations in the interest of national curiosity, but what bothers me more are my fellow bored geeks snooping my data over WiFi using things like Kismet or Firesheep (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firesheep).

One simple way to befuddle the snoops, or wiggle through a restrictive local firewall, is The Onion Router.  TOR provides multiple layers of SSL between you and a seemingly randomly chosen end point.  That still leaves you somewhat at the mercy of the end point operator (who can see your traffic but probably doesn't know who you are), but I suspect that a goodly number of the TOR endpoints are run by friendly police forces the world over, so you are probably quite safe:
https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en

The browser bundle is a super easy way to get going with TOR.  On a reasonably modern laptop machine it is quite fast enough.  Give it a go. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Parasitic Quadrifilar Helical Antenna

This article was reprinted in OSCAR News, March 2018:  http://www.amsat-uk.org If you want to receive Satellite Weather Pictures , then you need a decent antenna, otherwise you will receive more noise than picture. For polar orbit satellites, one needs an antenna with a mushroom shaped radiation pattern .  It needs to have strong gain towards the horizon where the satellites are distant, less gain upwards where they are close and as little as possible downwards, which would be wasted and a source of noise.  Most satellites are spin stabilized and therefore the antenna also needs circular polarization, otherwise the received signal will flutter as the antennas rotate through nulls. The helical antenna, first proposed by Kraus in 1948, is the natural solution to circular polarized satellite communications.  It is a simple twisted wire - there seems to be nothing to it.  Various papers have been published on helix antennas, so the operation is pretty well ...

Unlock CRA PDF Forms

Unlock Canada Revenue Agency PDF Forms It appears that there is a relatively new PDF feature to prevent casual copying and saving of a file and that some programs save PDF files with these foolish features active by default.  Many forms from the Canada Revenue Agency are locked in this way, which makes it difficult to do one's taxes, since one can fill the form, but cannot save it.  One can only print the form.  It should be possible to print to a file or export it to a new PDF file, but it is far better to reset the annoying anti-taxpayer flags, since the 'printed' form cannot be edited easily any more and I always manage to make a mistake or three that need to be corrected after review. If there is a Linux (virtual) machine handy, install qpdf and use it to reset the silly flags: $ su - password # dnf update # dnf install qpdf # exit $ qpdf --decrypt lockedfile.pdf unlockedfile.pdf One doesn't need a password to unlock these flags, so the fix is instant. La voila! He...

To C or not to C, That is the Question

As most would know, the Kernighan and Ritchie C Programming Language is an improved version of B, which is a simplified version of BCPL, which is derived from ALGOL, which is the Ur computer language that started the whole madness, when Adam needed an operating system for his Abacus, to count Eve's apples in the garden of Eden in Iraq.  The result is that C is my favourite, most hated computer language , which I use for everything. At university, I learned FORTRAN with punch cards on a Sperry-Univac, in order to run SPICE, to simulate an operational amplifier.  Computers rapidly lost their glamour after that era! Nobody taught me C.  I bought the book and figured it out myself. Over time, I wrote a couple of assemblers, a linker-locator, various low level debuggers and schedulers and I even fixed a bug in a C compiler - not because I wanted to, but because I had to, to get the job done!   Much of my software work was down in the weeds with DSP and radio modems...