apt Archives - Michael Altfield's Tech Blog

Techlore Interview (BusKill, Interdiction, and OpSec)

By Michael Altfield, on December 9th, 2025

I’m super happy that Techlore invited me on their YouTube channel to talk security and privacy 😀

Henry was mostly interested in my work with BusKill (an open-source dead man switch), but our conversation ran a gamut of issues regarding security and privacy — including

How to mitigate State-sponsored interdiction attacks, minimizing attack surfaces of mobile phones with broadband processors, the threats of AI “identity verification” systems on privacy, and much more

You can watch the full video below

Can’t see video above? Watch it on PeerTube at tehlore.tv or on YouTube at youtu.be/cptk6aBbJpU

If you’d like to purchase a BusKill cable, click here.

Michael Altfield

Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡

About Michael

tech.michaelaltfield.net/

Package Manager Search Commands

By Michael Altfield, on December 23rd, 2010

In a given week, I touch maybe a half dozen different Operating Systems/Distributions. Some are similar to others (centos, rhel), some–not so much (solaris). The common commands are easy enough to remember ( @ls@ vs @dir@ ), but I always forget how to search through each OS’s package manager for a software package. For my reference (and perhaps yours?) here’s a list for each of the OSs’ package managers I use frequently:

yum – RHEL/CentOS

yum list

apt – Debian/Ubuntu

apt-cache search

pacman – Arch

pacman –sync –search pacman -Ss

portage – Gentoo

emerge –search # pkg names only emerge –searchdesc # pkg names & descriptions emerge -S # alias of –searchdesc

See Also: “Install ‘build-essential’ on RHEL/CentOS and OpenSolaris”:/wp/?p=231

Michael Altfield

Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡

About Michael