I mainly intend to use this space to braindump challenges I face and things I learn in my field. It is mainly for my own benefit, to reinforce things in my own mind, but maybe it will be of some use to someone else.

A couple of updates on my general lifestyle: I am attempting to use as much Free and Open Source (FOSS) software as possible, as well as migrating my online life to services run by companies that respect my privacy more than the current mainstream alternatives. Some examples:

  • Chrome -> Firefox / Tor browser / Brave Browser
  • Gmail -> Protonmail
  • No VPN -> ProtonVPN
  • Facebook -> Mastodon (I still use Facebook, just less)
  • Google Podcasts / Castbox -> AntennaPod
  • Play Store -> F-Droid (I still use the Play Store heavily, but always check F-Droid for alternatives first)
  • Dropbox / Google Drive / Spideroak / Tresorit -> Nextcloud (This one was quite the journey, but for now I’m settled on a Nextcloud instance hosted by a company in Switzerland)

I am now a supporter of the Tor Project, the Free Software Foundation (FSF), and the Electronic Frontier foundation (EFF).

Anyways, lately I have been very interested in cybersecurity, so I have been considering building a lab to play around with some things. There are a number of ways to approach this that immediately come to mind: setting up some Raspberry Pis or similar cheap single-board computers, making use of cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Digital Ocean, Linode, etc. It might also be fun to grab some old hardware from eBay - something like old routers or cheap “Internet of Things” devices with known exploits that are unlikely to have been patched. I’ve been consuming a lot of media on cybersecurity, but I don’t have much actual experience in this specific area, so we’ll see.