macos 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 ➡

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Manually Downloading Container Images (Docker, Github Packages)

By Michael Altfield, on September 3rd, 2024

This article will describe how to download an image from a (docker) container registry.

Intro

Remember the good ‘ol days when you could just download software by visiting a website and click “download”?

Even apt and yum repositories were just simple HTTP servers that you could just curl (or wget) from. Using the package manager was, of course, more secure and convenient — but you could always just download packages manually, if you wanted.

But have you ever tried to curl an image from a container registry, such as docker? Well friends, I have tried. And I have the scars to prove it.

It was a remarkably complex process that took me weeks to figure-out. Lucky you, this article will break it down.

Examples

Specifically, we’ll look at how to download files from two OCI registries.

Docker Hub GitHub Packages Terms

First, here’s some terminology used by OCI

OCI – Open Container Initiative blob – A “blob” in the OCI spec just means a file manifest – A “manifest” in the OCI spec means a list of files Prerequisites

This guide was written in 2024, and it uses the following software and versions:

debian 12 (bookworm) curl 7.88.1 OCI
. . . → Read More: Manually Downloading Container Images (Docker, Github Packages)