Featured Articles

Nightmare on Lemmy Street (A Fediverse GDPR Horror Story)
Hardening Guide for phpList
WordPress Multisite on the Darknet (Mercator .onion alias)
Trusted Boot (Anti-Evil-Maid, Heads, and PureBoot)
Introducing BusKill: A Kill Cord for your Laptop
Continuous Documentation: Hosting Read the Docs on GitHub Pages (2/2)
Crowdfunding on Crowd Supply (Review of my experience)
WordPress Profiling with XHProf (Debugging & Optimizing Speed)
Detecting (Malicious) Unicode in GitHub PRs
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Crowdfunding on Crowd Supply (Review of my experience)

Crowd Supply Review - My experience crowdfunding $18,507 in open-source security hardware

In 2021, I raised $18,507 on CrowdSupply to manufacture and sell the BusKill cable. This article will review my experience working with Crowd Supply.

Introduction

So you have a great idea for a cool product, but you’re not sure how to scrap up the necessary funds to ramp-up production and sell it? If you’re a traditional capitalist then you’d be considering financing your new entrepreneurial venture through loans or venture capital.

But you’re not a capitalist. You want to avoid the fat cats draining equity from your hard labor. Your idea is so cool, why not try your hand at crowdfunding direct from your soon-to-be customers?

Why Crowd Supply?

The first place I looked was Kickstarter. But I did some googling, and I saw so many people complain that they backed a project on kickstarter and never received anything from the creator. In fact, Kickstarter’s own Fulfillment Report says that 9% of all their projects fail to deliver.

And, especially in the computer security department, if anyone with half a brain scans through the projects on kickstarter, even the ones that raise $1 million scream SCAM! Either their promises are unrealistic, they clearly have no idea what they’re talking
. . . → Read More: Crowdfunding on Crowd Supply (Review of my experience)

Detecting (Malicious) Unicode in GitHub PRs

Detecting Malicious Unicode in GitHub Pull Requests

This article will describe how you can utilize GitHub Actions to scan user-contributed PRs for unicode and automatically warn you if such commits contain (potentially invisible & malicious) unicode characters.

Why

Last month Trojan Source was published — which described how malicious unicode characters could make source code appear benign, yet compile to something quite malicious.

Michael Altfield

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

About Michael


. . . → Read More: Detecting (Malicious) Unicode in GitHub PRs

Introducing BusKill: A Kill Cord for your Laptop

Bus Kill: A USB Kill Cord for your Laptop

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 ➡

About Michael


. . . → Read More: Introducing BusKill: A Kill Cord for your Laptop