This guide will show you how to generate vector-based topopgraphic maps, for printing very large & high-quality paper wall maps using inkscape. All of the tools used in this guide are free (as in beer).
Intro
I recently volunteered at a Biological Research Station located on the eastern slopes of the Andes mountains. If the skies were clear (which is almost never, as it’s a cloud forest), you would have a great view overlooking the Amazon Rainforest below.
Yanayacu is in a cloud forest on the east slopes of the Andes mountains, just 30 km from the summit of the glacial-capped Antisana volcano (source)
The field station was many years old with some permanent structures and a network of established trails that meandered towards the border of Antisana National Park – a protected area rich with biodiversity that attracts biologists from around the world. At the top of the park is a glacial-capped volcano with a summit at 5,753 meters.
Surprisingly, though Estacion Biologicia Yanayacu was over 30 years old, nobody ever prepared a proper map of their trails. And certainly there was no high-resolution topographical map of the area to be found at the Station.
This article will describe how to point a .onion domain at your existing wordpress sites (on wordpress multisite) so that your website will be accessible both on the clearnet and directly on the darknet via a .onion domain.
Intro
There are numerous security benefits for why millions of people use tor every day. Besides the obvious privacy benefits for journalists, activists, cancer patients, etc — Tor has a fundamentally different approach to encryption (read: it’s more secure).
Instead of using the untrustworthy X.509 PKI model, all connections to a v3 .onion address is made to a single pinned certificate that is directly correlated to the domain itself (the domain is just a hash of the public key + some metadata).
Moreover, some of the most secure operating systems send all the user’s Internet traffic through the Tor network — for the ultimate data security & privacy of its users.
In short, your users are much safer communicating to your site using a .onion domain than its clearnet domain.
For all these reasons, I wanted to make all my wordpress sites directly available to tor users. Unfortunately, I found that it’s not especially easy to point a .onion domain at . . . → Read More: WordPress Multisite on the Darknet (Mercator .onion alias)
This website is now accessible on the darknet. And how!
Why
Fun fact: the most popular website on the darknet is facebook. There are hundreds of other popular sites on the darknet, including debian, the CIA, the NYT, the BBC, ProPublica, and–now–michaelaltfield.net.
All of these organizations chose to make their websites available over .onion addresses so their website will be accessible from millions of daily tor users without leaving the darknet. Besides the obvious privacy benefits for journalists, activists, cancer patients, etc — Tor has a fundamentally different approach to encryption (read: it’s more secure).
Instead of using the untrustworthy X.509 PKI model, all connections to a v3 .onion address is made to a single pinned certificate that is directly correlated to the domain itself (the domain is just a hash of the public key + some metadata).
Moreover, some of the most secure operating systems send all the user’s Internet traffic through the Tor network — for the ultimate data security & privacy of its users.
In short, your users are much safer communicating to your site using a .onion domain than its clearnet domain.
This post will describe how to host a sphinx-powered site (using the Read the Docs theme) on your own GitHub Pages site, built with GitHub’s free CI/CD tools.
ⓘ Note: If you don’t care about how this works and you just want to make a functional repo, you can just fork my ‘rtd-github-pages’ GitHub repo.
Michael Altfield
Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡
I woke up on April 2nd to discover that over 1 million people on earth had tested positive for coronavirus. “I couldn’t find a website that was extrapolating the COVID-19 dataset, so I decided to build one”
It took over 4 months for COVID-19 to hit 1 million world-wide, and the graph was showing a horrifying exponential growth of cases. When I saw this, a question popped-into my head: when will it hit 2 million? (spoiler: it took only 13 days to go from 1 million to 2 million)
When will it infect 4 million? 8 million? 100 million? 1 billion? 50% of the population on Earth?
I searched-and-searched, but I couldn’t find a website that was extrapolating the COVID-19 dataset daily to predict the future spread of the virus, so I decided to build one myself.
Michael Altfield
Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡
This post will outline recommended steps to harden phpList after install to make it reasonably secure.
phpList is the most popular open-source software for managing mailing lists. Like wordpress, they have a phplist.com for paid hosting services and phplist.org for free self-hosting.
Earlier this week, it was announced that phpList had a critical security vulnerability permitting an attacker to bypass authentication and login as an administrator using an incorrect & carefully-crafted password in some cases. This bug is a result of the fact that [a] PHP is a loosely typed language and [b] the phpList team was using the ‘==‘ operator to test for equality of the user’s hashed password against the DB. This security pitfall has been known in PHP since at least 2010 (a decade ago!), but I’m sure the same mistake will be made again..
Indeed, security is porous. There’s no such thing as 100% vulnerability-free code, and phpList is no exception. But if we’re careful in adding layers of security to our infrastructure, then we might be able to protect ourselves from certain 0-days.
That said, here’s my recommended steps to making your phpList install reasonably secure.
This post will introduce a simple udev rule and ~$20 in USB hardware that effectively implements a kill cord Dead Man Switch to trigger your machine to self-destruct in the event that you’re kicked out of the helm position.
Rubber Ducky I <3 you; you make hack time lots of fun!
Let’s consider a scenario: You’re at a public location (let’s say a cafe) while necessarily authenticated into some super important service (let’s say online banking). But what if–after you’ve carefully authenticated–someone snatch-and-runs with your laptop?
Maybe you can call your bank to freeze your accounts before they’ve done significant financial harm. Maybe you can’t.
Or maybe your laptop was connected to your work VPN. In less than 60 seconds and with the help of a rubber ducky, the thief could literally cause millions of dollars in damages to your organization.
Surely there must be some solution to trigger your computer to lock, shutdown, or self-destruct when it’s physically separated from you! There is: I call it BusKill.
Michael Altfield
Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡
This article is a part 3/3 of a series describing how to setup an Ephemeral Firefox session as a Site-Specific Browser. The ultimate goal is to be able to have a self-destructing browsing session that can only access a single company’s services, such as Google or Facebook.
Part 1/3: Ephemeral Firefox in Ubuntu Part 2/3: Ephemeral Firefox with Extensions Part 3/3: Ephemeral Firefox as a Site-Specific Browser
After setting up the Site-Specific Ephemeral Firefox Browser, you can then blacklist services designated to your Site-Specific browser(s) (such as Google or Facebook) from your main browser. This significantly improves your ability to browse the internet without your activity being tracked by these companies — leaving your sensitive data vulnerable to being stolen by hackers.
Michael Altfield
Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡
I recently posted about how to create a sandboxed firefox profile to compartmentalize (and shred) your firefox browsing history in an Ephemeral Firefox session. But so far I’ve only covered how to create a simple vanilla firefox profile. What if you want your Ephemeral Firefox to include a few basic extensions?
This post will cover how to add extensions to your Ephemeral Firefox profile.
Part 1/3: Ephemeral Firefox in Ubuntu Part 2/3: Ephemeral Firefox with Extensions Part 3/3: Ephemeral Firefox as a Site-Specific Browser Michael Altfield
Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡
This post will describe how to create an Ephemeral Firefox session. The ultimate goal of an Ephemeral Firefox session is to unlink your browsing sessions day-to-day and reduce tracking via fingerprinting.
Part 1/3: Ephemeral Firefox in Ubuntu Part 2/3: Ephemeral Firefox with Extensions Part 3/3: Ephemeral Firefox as a Site-Specific Browser
This technique can also be used to compartmentalize your internet activity by using the Ephemeral Firefox session as a Site Specific Browser. This can be especially useful for websites that are infamous for tracking users across the internet and selling the data they collect. For example, you can blacklist all facebook domains in your main browser and only use Ephemeral Firefox sessions that have been whitelisted exclusively for facebook domains–effectively compartmentalizing your facebook activity from the rest of your internet activity.
Another great use-case for an Ephemeral Firefox is for public access computers such as those at libraries, hotels, and printing shops.
Michael Altfield
Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡
