image/jpeg

This Old Laptop

My backup laptop is a Teclast F5. It has an 11.6″ touchscreen display, a Celeron N4100 CPU, 8GB of RAM, and a soldered 128GB SSD (not NVMe). I’ve owned it since at least 2018, though it’s not my daily driver. For everyday use, I rely on a newer ASUS laptop with an i9 CPU, 32GB of RAM, and 2TB of disk space. However, despite the superior specs, I often face issues with video and other drivers, particularly on Linux, and occasionally even on Windows.
Read more →

Working with Torsocks

Torsocks acts as a network wrapper around linux applications. This allows them to work on the Tor network where that might not normally be possible. If the application that you are working with already has functionality that allows it to take advantage of a SOCKS5 proxy, then you can use Tor’s built in proxy to do that. However if the application doesn’t have that functionality, you can try to use Torsocks instead.
Read more →

Email2.0

For those who may not know, email is not owned by any one company. There are no copyrights or patents associated with email itself. It’s an open standard that evolves over time through RFCs. While individuals and companies are free to develop software—whether open or closed source—using this standard, the core of email remains unchanged. My Suggestion: Make Metadata-Minimized Email the New Standard Currently, email consists of headers and a body.
Read more →

Use Tor Without Tor Browser

This post originally came from a reply that I made to a question that was asked on the r/tor subreddit. So, you want to run the tor service on in Linux but not just with the Tor Browser. Let’s assume that you’re running a Debian-based Linux distro. sudo apt update && sudo apt install tor torsocks sudo systemctl enable --now tor This will install the tor service and run it as a server as the “tor” user.
Read more →

Space Oddity

I’m not a David Bowie fan, but in the song Space Oddity, there’s this amazing line: This is Ground Control to Major Tom You’ve really made the grade And the papers want to know whose shirts you wear Now it’s time to leave the capsule if you dare Sandwiched between congratuations to Major Tom and telling him that he has to progress to the next step of his mission, we find out what actually matters to the press (and the regular people): “And the papers want to know whose shirts you wear”.
Read more →

Quick Comment About OSINT Investigation

A few months ago, I wanted to try to practice my OSINT skills by looking up missing people by checking out the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children website. One of the people that I was checking on was a 14 year old girl who had been missing for about a week. I started by looking her up on Facebook and found 2-3 Facebook and Instagram accounts a piece. Nothing of them showed much activity.
Read more →

OSINT Review: I-Intelligence OSINT Handbook 2020

The 2020 OSINT Handbook published by i-intelligence is the latest edition that is currently on their website. i-intelligence is a training and intelligence advisory firm. The 2020 OSINT Handbook is a 509-page list of web links in PDF format. If you were expecting anything more, then you would be mistaken. It covers topics including social media, message boards, people search sites, and government and real estate sites. Are these links useful?
Read more →

Rebooting OSINT

I want to get back into OSINT now that I’ve had a chance to step away for a while and gather my thoughts a bit. I guess I should start by saying that I’ve never worked in OSINT. What I did do is read and dabble in OSINT and I also took a couple of courses and then worked through about 50% of another (very long) course before stopping. Before I talk about how I’m going to get back into it, I should talk about why I stopped.
Read more →

The Magic of Recluse: A Review

The Magic of Recluse is a 1991 Epic Fantasy novel by L.E. Modesitt Jr. It was recently for sale as a Humble Bundle. I picked up the bundle because I recognized the author’s name, but I hadn’t read any of his works. The Magic of Recluse centers around the story of Lerris from the land of Recluse who is often bored with the demanding perfectionism of his land. Every craft and trade must live up to the level of “perfection”.
Read more →

The Computer Chronicles

Yesterday, I was watching some old episodes of The Computer Chronicles. I noticed that the earlier seasons had a lot more levity during the roundtable discussions, with a stronger focus on business and industry topics. This contrasts with the later seasons, which shifted almost entirely to personal computing.

My guess is that sometime in the late ’80s, the producers realized that viewers were more interested in what they could actually buy and use themselves, rather than what was happening in boardrooms and high-tech labs.

I also watched the special episode dedicated to Gary Kildall. It was exceptionally well done, and Gary came across as a genuinely awesome person. RIP Gary.