NotAwful.Security

I have spoken about the importance of a Code of Conduct in the past. Since conversations have cropped up around several communities and events in technology regarding Codes of Conduct, I am going to discuss my experiences with them. Over the years I have spent a lot of time in and around gaming communities. During that time I realized that community guidelines and a code of conduct are an important tool. In watching these recent conversations, I feel some people have been too focused on their practical application. So I will talk about why a community should have a code of conduct, what you stand to gain by implementing one, and address some of the common arguments against them. I wrote a step-by-step guide to writing a code of conduct here , taken from an earlier blog post addressing another community that lacked a code of conduct. I'm not a bad person, why do I need one? I have not read the code of conduct for most communities I have been a part of one. I also do not know...

One of the many things that I paid attention to as I walked the halls of Defcon nearly a month ago was the devices people used for the capture-the-flag (CTF) events. During my first walk around the contest area I noticed many people sat against walls or such with macbooks. On later passes I started taking note of the devices that other people were using and a common one was the Asus C201 chromebook. Chromebooks are basically low-spec linux laptops designed around the use of Google Chrome. Though like many linux devices once you gain access to a terminal you often have free reign to alter the system and gain access to powerful command line tools. About a week and a half ago I picked up an Asus C201 for about $250 CAD. I will talk about what my typical use case is, what I wanted out of the C201, what my experience was, and a walk-through of how I set mine up to meet my use case. UPDATE:   Sarah Jamie Lewis wrote a thread on twitter adding her 2.5 years of experience to th...

Technology is created to solve a problem. All technology has been a response to a perceived problem that exists in the world. Then, a bunch of nerds (engineers) got together and worked out a solution that addresses the problem in their use case. Any time that you pick up a piece of technology you should ask yourself what problems it was designed to solve from the viewpoint of the people who were likely to have made it. I am currently a little frustrated because people are demonstrating that they still don't understand what a Virtual Private Network (VPN) is for. So I am going to take some time to explain what a VPN was designed for, what problems it solves, and what it is not designed to do and how it doesn't solve those problems. The Problem In The Past, a Business decided to open a second office on the other side of town. They wanted to share their telephones since they had their telephone system all hooked up in their first office. The company made a decision to conn...