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Ever wonder how to create packages for your operating system distro? I did – in fact for a long time I didn’t know much about how they worked – they just did. For linux users, life would be rough without these amazing helpers that keep track of versions and dependencies. They install, upgrade, remove and […]

VPNs are becoming so widely used, it’s worth taking a closer look at them. Previously in Intro to VPNs we talked about the basics including what a VPN is and what they’re used for by individuals and businesses. Let’s focus now on personal use of VPN providers in this post. Never use a free VPN […]

In the last post about biometric identification, “Fingers, Eyes & Veins” we looked at some of the technologies in use today, after an introduction to facial recognition in the previous post. Now let’s look at what governments are doing with the biometric data they’re collecting and using. They believe this will drive efficiency and fairness […]

We mentioned that hiding text within text is the common ancestor of all steganographic techniques earlier, in our initial post on digital steganography basics. However, in the digital age there are some new wrinkles due to the existence of various kinds of computer files. Of course text messages can be concealed in any number of […]

I’m new to Python although I’ve been programming for years in other languages. So imagine my surprise when I found out how great scapy is! In a couple of earlier posts I wrote about crafting custom packets and using scapy commands, so now I’m going to talk about programming with scapy. Instead of finishing scripts […]

What are VPNs? Virtual Private Networks are popular and a useful tool in your quest to guard your online security and privacy, as well as being an important tool for companies to allow remote access to their internal networks. Wikipedia defines them as follows, “A virtual private network (VPN) extends a private network across a […]

Fingerprint readers are commonly used today to unlock smartphones, as well as providing a second factor in physical access control systems. In the previous post we took a look at facial recognition systems, now let’s introduce some other types of biometric identifiers commonly used today. Certain fingerprints will match a variety of similar prints; they […]

Let’s talk about modern steganography. I don’t want to cover the long history of it, since that requires dedicating a full post to the techniques used over the centuries to conceal information. Old techniques are typically meant to hide text messages, since audio and video recording was not possible, and recorded images were not digital. […]

Facial recognition systems measure and match facial feature patterns to identify people. The only thing required in terms of sensors is a camera, so it is well suited for use with mobile phones and CCTV cameras. This technology works well with crowds of people as well as with individuals, so it is not only used […]

Welcome to the second part of our scapy series of posts. In the previous post we discussed creating custom packets using scapy and gave some simple examples. In this post we’ll cover common commands for operations on packets like inspecting them and for network operations like sniffing traffic. In the next post we’ll introduce programming […]

Authentication in computer systems means validating that you are who you say you are. There are many ways to authenticate users these days, and they have important implications for privacy. Username and password combinations are problematic, yet we don’t really have great alternatives at this point. Fingerprints and facial recognition systems are the most common […]