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How I finally fixed the dodgy wifi on my jet ski with Ubiquiti's UniFi Mesh

There are many challenging aspects about being an Australian. For example, being terrorised by kangaroos: Being terrorised by koalas: Or my own unique challenge: not having a decent wifi signal whilst my jet ski is moored on the jetty out the back of the house. This makes every day, normal activities like connecting to the home NAS to watch movies via Plex whilst sitting on the docked ski difficult and clearly, something had to be done. Ok, getting (a bit more) serious for a moment, a few mon...

Weekly update 24

Crikey, what a week! Between the two Cloud[thing] stories, most of the last 7 days has disappeared with research, writing, media and seeing the first Cloud[thing] turn into a bit of a non-event whilst recoiling in abject horror as the second Cloud[thing] continued to unfold. This ended up being a 35 minute "update" which is way longer than I'd normally do, but I really wanted to drill into those two stories in particular and try to express some views in a way that doesn't always come across in w...

A marathon (and a bit) in San Francisco, Lenovo Yoga 900 in tow

One of the best things I do on trips away is walk. It's a combination of things really; it's great for getting over jet lag, a fantastic way a seeing new places and if you do enough of it, a good workout too. I'll regularly walk 20+ kilometres when I've got a full day off in a nice spot, just seeing the sights, meeting up with random Twitter followers and taking some time out in nice spots to get a bit of work done. Which brings me to the Lenovo angle. I've always been of the mindset that a ser...

Data from connected CloudPets teddy bears leaked and ransomed, exposing kids' voice messages

Only a couple of weeks ago, there were a lot of news headlines about how Germany had banned an internet-connected doll called "Cayla" over fears hackers could target children [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/02/17/germany-bans-internet-connected-dolls-fears-hackers-could-target/] . One of their primary concerns was the potential risk to the privacy of children: > conversations between the child and others can be recorded and forwarded The Germans had a good point: kids' toys which record...

Pragmatic thoughts on #CloudBleed

It has a cool name and a logo - this must be serious! Since Heartbleed [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbleed], bug branding has become a bit of a thing and more than anything, it points to the way vulnerabilities like these are represented by the press. It helps with headlines and I'm sure it does wonderful things for bug (brand?) recognition, but it also has a way of drumming up excitement and sensationalism in a way that isn't always commensurate with the actual risk. That said, the Cloud...

Weekly update 23

I started out doing this weekly update with not much news to share due to being away running a workshop for a couple of days then sitting on planes and in airports for another day. It was only as I finished recording I saw both shattered.io [http://shattered.io/] and CloudBleed [https://blog.cloudflare.com/incident-report-on-memory-leak-caused-by-cloudflare-parser-bug/] , both of which you know are serious because they have cool bug names and even logos. But in all seriousness, these are both m...

My 2017 European summer tour: talks, workshops and more!

These days, I find myself spending more and more time in Europe. Four trips last year and one already this year versus only a single trip to the US each year (which I'm still on). There just tends to be more demand for events and workshops and if I'm honest, I particularly like the place. I've got a lot of history there having lived in the UK and Netherlands before and I love spending time back there sitting the sun at historic locations with a decent coffee or sampling the local breweries. Fun...

Weekly update 22 (Golden Gate Bridge edition)

What an awesome spot for a weekly update! Just one of the sensational views I saw today, the first day I've completed a full marathon: Ok, bit more than a marathon, 51.19km in total according to Runkeeper [https://runkeeper.com/user/troyhunt/activity/935895934]. Now frankly, I'm not overly keen on running (I just get bored), so I walked all over San Francisco, looked at interesting things, took plenty of photos and had some nice breaks instead. I took my Lenovo Yoga 900 in the backpack (I'll...

Weekly update 21

I got up this morning thinking "I need to do my weekly update today because it's Friday". Except it's not, and due to the joy that is international travel, I really had no idea what day it was! So bottom line, I'm a day late, but with me heading off to the US for the RSA conference on Wednesday, I'm not even sure there's a lot of point me trying to acclimatise to home before I go. Regardless, this week I talk about some of that travel, how I'm now handling "fabricated" data breaches in HIBP (an...

One million subscribers later, here's the state of Have I been pwned

I hit a bit of a milestone last week with HIBP which I thought deserved a little celebration: > Sometime today, @haveibeenpwned [https://twitter.com/haveibeenpwned] broke through the 1M verified subscriber mark. Having a quiet champagne alone before flying home ?? pic.twitter.com/whIss3OXeO [https://t.co/whIss3OXeO] — Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) February 2, 2017 [https://twitter.com/troyhunt/status/827214872119226368] A million verified subscribers (that is they've received a welcome email and click...