Weekly update

It's a very tired weekly update as I struggle a little bit after only a few hours' sleep but hey, at least I've got a nice haircut! In more topical news, I'm pretty happy about the experience installing Ubiquiti's AmpliFi ALIEN gear into a neighbour's house, it's Trump on top of Trump with his password commentary and then his actual password and finally, questions from the audience on AmpliFi versus UniFi which some people might find interesting. Next week, I'm hoping I'll be able to talk about the Ubiquiti doorbell as well so tune back in for that one. ReferencesI put an AmpliFi ALIEN unit into a friend's house (this is some really cool kit!)Trump had some, uh, "interesting"...

The week's update comes on the back of a very long week for me, but it's good to be "out there" speaking at events even if they are just from the comfort of my own home. There's also more adventures in IoT, Chrome's experiment with URL paths in their omnibox and Apple messing around with MAC addresses on my phone and watch. Oh - and I did manage to track down what my favourite Norwegian beer is following a question from the audience: I was asked about my favourite Norwegian beer during my live stream today and couldn’t recall the name. Because it’s my fav, @charlottelyng kindly took a pic for me back in Oslo 😊 Juicy Stuff Klokk...

It's a bit of a mega one this week running over the 1-hour mark, but there's been an awful lot happen during the last week that I reckon is of interest. There's a decidedly adult theme running across the topics not by design, but just by pure coincidence between the Grindr incident, a query I got regarding erasing one's adult website browsing history and the IoT male chastity device full of security holes and potential requiring a grinder (not Grindr!) to remove. We live in interesting times... ReferencesIt's NDC Sydney next week! (I won't "be" there this year, but the show is still going on)I'm super impressed with the quality on the new GoPro HERO9 Black (more of that...

This week there's a lot of connected things: connected shoes, connected garage camera and connected GoPro. And then there's Scott's Grindr account. Awkward. Actually, since recording this weekly update the details of the issue have now been released so I'll talk about that in more detail next week. This week there's all the above and, on a more personal note, my relationship with Charlotte. Enjoy. ReferencesMy shoes are connected! (that's the tweet thread of how to update the firmware in them - yep, updating the firmware in my shoes)My Ubiquiti G3 Micro is up and integrated with Home Assistant to raise motion events (this is super simple and I'll use it to trigger external lights once more Shellys go...

Wow, 4 years already. Regardless of where I've been in the world or the stresses that have been going on in my personal life, every single week without exception there's been a video. This makes 210 of them now, and these days they're live from a much more professional setup in a location that has absolutely no chance of changing for the foreseeable future. Not exactly the way I saw things panning out 4 years ago, but I guess we've all been a bit blindsided on that front. Anyway, on with the show and there's not a lot on the professional front this week due to downtime with the kids over their holidays, but some good audience questions I hope...

More IoT, more cyber and more Q&A so yeah, business as usual this week. More specifically, a lot of this week's update talks about VPNs and where they still make sense with so much HTTPS all over the place these days. As I say in the vid, blog posts like the VPN one I did this week are often done to help me get my thoughts on a topic straight and a lot of things became a lot clearer for me in doing that. The headline figure out of that post IMHO is that only 2.3% of websites are forcing all connections to be secure courtesy of HSTS preload and the fact that browsers still default to...

The highlight of my week was absolutely getting the Shelly 1 units behind a couple of my light switches working as I'd always dreamed. It just opens up so many automation possibilities that I'm really excited about what I might do in the future with them now. When I get the place to a standard I'm happy with, I'll definitely do a good walkthrough and show how it all works. Until then, this week's update has some general infosec stuff but chief amongst that is the Giggle app situation. So many layers on this one, so many layers... ReferencesGot the Shelly 1 working absolutely perfectly! (this is precisely what I always envisaged)Don't say your app is "highly secure" while...

I kicked off a little bit earlier on this one in order to wrap up before the Burning Minds keynote, and it's interesting to see just how much difference that little sliver of sunlight makes to the video quality. Check the very start of the video versus the very end; this is the sunset slipping through the crack in the fully drawn blinds, make a massive difference. In other news, I'm talking about how I prepare my talks and deliver them timed down to the minute (I had 20 seconds spare on this one), the dramas I'm having with the Shelly units and putting another dozen neon lights in the house, how encryption and hashing are fundamentally different and we...

Since I recorded this morning, I've had an absolute breakthrough - I CAN OPEN MY GARAGE DOOR WITH MY WATCH! I know, I know, it shouldn't be this hard and that's a lot of the point I'm making in this week's video. Having said that, some parts have been hard because I've made simple mistakes, but the nature of the IoT ecosystem as it stands today predisposes you to mistakes because there's so freakin' many moving parts that all need to be aligned. More on that in the video, plus some actual infosec content too! More on all of that next week 😊 ReferencesThe BBC is now using Pwned Passwords (hitting the k-anonymity API too, plus wrote a great description of...

Between still feeling a little groggy after hitting the water hard on an early wake boarding session then my camera overheating and shutting down towards the end of the live stream, this wasn't the smoothest of weekly updates, I still got across everything I needed to. I'm especially excited about those Shelly 1 units for cheaply IoT'ing existing lights and I'm hoping to have some of that up and running next week. Until then, here's episode 205: ReferencesI got an award! (2020 (ISC)² Global Achievement Awards: Celebrating achievements in cybersecurity)I'm going to put a bunch of Shelly 1 units behind light switches (this is a really neat way of IoT'ing your house)New lighting systems in Aus tend to...