Modern digital currency mostly seem to revolve around a construct called a blockchain, which – by design – is a (mostly![1]) append-only distributed database that is intended to keeps all the transactions for all time. Blockchains use strong cryptographic methods to ensure its integrity and fidelity, and is typically decentralized, meaning that the entire chain is distributed in close-to-real-time fashion over the Internet to all computers that are using […]
A bit over 2 years ago I started on a journey that has become a bit surreal; I had what seemed like a modest goal, simply create something that would facilitate confidential (e.g. encrypted) sharing of information in an easy way. Then snowden came along, and things started become even more… interesting, in the Chinese way. Tragedy, comedy, farce, delays and complications beyond belief followed. But the basic problem […]
Security Policies Let us praise, slay, and bury security policies together. A security policy is perhaps the best way to deal with the security monster. It concerns itself with business and organizational issues, and is designed to assist the organization succeed in spite of human nature. I sometimes not-so-glibly say that a security policy is simply an expression of your desire. What do you want to see within your organization […]
npm is the defacto package manager for the node.js javascript network programming environment thingee. The folks who make npm have taken a security leap: npm no longer supports its self-signed certificates Ah, they build the bastions of light and goodness, protecting us from the sins of the masses by standing tall. So… how do you install npm, anyway? Ah, yes, you look it up on their site… let’s see… why, […]
I wrote this while I was at my company Elemental, and was meant for engineers to implement, so despite some of the very specific language for implementation purposes it was never meant to be dogmatic. I love the idea of calculating value based on… not much. I don’t know how accurate it is, but I can say that when run on systems (just before Elemental spontaneously combusted) it produced some really cool […]