ThisTooWillPaUSE
ThisTooWillPa
Safety is something often taken for granted, its importance only being realized after its very existence becomes compromised. Much like diabetes, taking steps to care for and maintain one’s overall health by taking preventative measures such as monitoring one’s diet can completely prevent an individual from becoming medically compromised. The endocrine system parallels the complexity and network-like structure of personal computers in regard to both software and hardware. The levels of insulin and glucagon secreted by alpha and beta cells in response to blood sugar and various other variables mimics the port component. seen in basic network services. Monitoring these ports and becoming familiar with what typical traffic looks like could prevent someone from loosing their leg or their entire sense of personal computer security. One such tool for this is Portmaster, a service that monitors and provides users a means to establish control over every connection to and from one’s PC.
The PostMaster software contains a UI where you can view incoming and outgoing connections and block/allow to your heart’s desire. The core service is where the majority of the software’s consumption of resources takes place. Much like a firewall or DNS server, Postmaster serves to protect its users from the evils of malicious blood sugar concentrations, or your apartment complexes management. Privacy is as important as security and although PortMaster provides a solution to many such qualms, some issues require a physicality that PortMaster can’t offer. For those I suggest an app I’m working on:
Feel free to contribute by submitting a report here, here or here.
Love Brandon XOXO Gossip Girl
I2p, but do you? Enough with the potty talk and onto the discussion of private parts, or, uhh, privacy… online. This post is going to cover a technology relatively new to me, but that has existed in some form or another since 2003 called The Invisible Internet Project, or I2p.
In recent months a similar anonymous communication solution, TOR has been victimized to such an extent that it would become unusable by those individuals whom stand in opposition to censorship and that possibly partake in unsavory online activities. A man’s gotta have his Darknet Adderall and who is to say that he can or can’t purchase such things (other than the DEA)? Another three lettered acronym, DoS or Denial of Service is a type of cyber attack that renders certain online services unusable and a very sophisticated form of this would strike the TOR network in Sep 22′ ensuring that no such person had access to any marketplace where such illicit substances could be purchased. Coincidence? Probably, but you never know with those three lettered agencies. As minutes turned to more minutes, those desperate individuals in need of… whatever it is they needed would google away alternatives to TOR and their solution would come in the form of the I2p network.
The I2p network originated as a fork of a similar peer-to-peer network called Freenet in 2003. I2p manages to hide a user’s identity by acting as an anonymous network layer in respect to the OSI model of how the internet is structured/works. It routes a users activity through “peers” which then reroute said activity to other peers before it reaches a final destination. These peers, or routers are similar to proxy servers/nodes that any user of the I2p network contributes to the existence of via a browser-based I2P router console that is included with the overall software package.
It remains to be seen whether I2p will or can completely fill the void left when TOR becomes virtually unusable due to the previously mentioned and future DoS attacks. Intrinsically, I2p’s hard requirement of forcing users to contribute some amount of bandwidth in order to use the service can and will prevail in comparison to TOR’s optional and bandwidth handicapping stance on the matter. Like everything else on the internet, I2P’s decentralized nature makes it a hot topic and potential/surefire replacement for it’s centralized equivalent in TOR, however, there already exist theoretical variations of DoS and other such attacks that could hinder I2p and other peer-to-peer services in a similarly crippling fashion. Such cyber-crime could be the topic of a future blog, but if that never manifests, this paper covers the topic in detail.
UNTIL NEXT TIME…
As a child of the 90’s, I like many others grew up in a virtual world of mystery and wonder defined by the existence of 150 (151 if you knew what you were doing) creatures known as Pokemon. Many memories were made traversing through places like the Viridian Forest or Seafoam Islands in the pursuit of completing a Pokedex, my favorite piece of technology of all time. My fondness for Nintendo, however, has very little to due with why I chose to work on a blatant knock-off of Poke-something GO, instead my desire to build such an application stems from a shared use of features between it and another mobile application I’ve been working on in my spare time.
Poke-something GO’s reliance on many GPS-related features and overall mobile nature represent attributes similar to those needed in slightly altered formats for a gym/fitness-related application that has been more constrained to the metaphorical Poke Ball that is my thoughts rather than brought to life in any editor. I blame this on a condition commonly referred to as Pkrs (Procrastination Keeps Ruining S***) which manifests in the form of me spending way too much time toiling away with non-coding related activities as my bookmarks folder becomes inundated with Swift tutorials that I keep telling myself I’ll look into but never actually do.
Pkrs is a strange condition, as not all of it’s symptoms are necessarily detrimental to ones livelihood. I personally have also applied to some 75+ jobs via indeed/linked-in as a result of this affliction and although the disease has progressed to the interview stage at times, it’s final destination, that is the one in which I obtain employment has not yet been met. It’s also forced me to really get back into the gym, like the literal gym and my overall health is the best that it’s been in recent memory. I cant stress enough how much of an overall boon both emotionally and physically that regular exercise can have on the body and being able to contribute to the world an app that motivates people to get into and stay into fitness is something that I’m more than passionate about and is unquestionably the motivation behind my project choice for CS467.
