Recent blog entries

A grim reflection on Australia Day

Submitted by Daniel.Pocock on Thu, 26/01/2012 - 01:00

Not so many people dare to criticize their country with a stinging blog entry like this on their national holiday. However, how can anyone celebrate a society that so readily accepts the brutalisation of other people and their cultures?

On this day of jubilation and national pride, shouldn't we reflect on whether our high standard of living is worth the cost, if that cost is to be paid for by the blood of innocent people, including children, suffering and dying out of our sight in concentration camps?

The sinister secret in every hard disk

Submitted by Daniel.Pocock on Wed, 04/01/2012 - 00:42
These are not my words...

"The job of any filesystem boils down to this: when asked to read (data), it should return the same data that was previously written ... Incredibly, most filesystems fail this test. They depend on the underlying hardware to detect and report errors. If a disk simply returns bad data, the average filesystem won't even detect it."

Has your phone been hacked too?

Submitted by Daniel.Pocock on Thu, 15/12/2011 - 14:01

2011 saw many explosive revelations about alleged phone hacking supposedly purported by the News Corporation tabloid, News of The World.

What is remarkable is that there has been virtually no discussion about how some phone companies let this happen: why didn't they have any systems in place to prevent it? Did their choices contribute to the vulnerabilities in their systems?

Migrating a SourceForge project from Subversion to Git

Submitted by Daniel.Pocock on Tue, 01/11/2011 - 16:28

Many projects are now contemplating the move from Subversion to a more modern, distributed version control system (VCS) such as Git or Mercurial.

Until recently, the default strategy was to take the whole source repository from the SourceForge site and import it into the rival GitHub site.

dynalogin presentation at FOSDEM 2011 in Brussels

Submitted by Daniel.Pocock on Sat, 15/01/2011 - 16:45

The annual FOSDEM conference takes place 5-6 February 2011 in Brussels, Belgium

The security devroom features a one-hour session, run by myself, on the dynalogin two-factor authentication framework.

This is an excellent opportunity for

  • System administrators - find out how easy it is to integrate two-factor (token) and mobile authentication into your network, without paying for an expensive solution from RSA

Assert your identity online

Submitted by Daniel.Pocock on Thu, 17/06/2010 - 18:01

Is your online identity killing your posture? Are you conscious of the fact that your competitors (in business or in the job market) have a slick online presence that is not diluted by skype IDs and hotmail addresses?

SIP or Jabber?

Submitted by Daniel.Pocock on Sat, 20/03/2010 - 22:31

Three open protocols (SIP, Jabber/XMPP and H.323) have been fighting it out to become the Internet equivalent of a phone call. What does this mean for you?