I just finished reading Bruce Schneier’s blog entry, titled “The Doxing Trend”. Let me start by writing that I am usually a big fan of Mr. Schneier. I look forward to his newsletter and I have tremendous respect for his technical intelligence. But as I read his doxing article I couldn’t help but wonder what…
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Why CASP Exists: A Slightly Cynical View (and no, this doesn’t mean I’m advocating the CISSP) In the world where DoD 8570.01-M (DoDD 8140) is relevant the CISSP has long been a staple for those seeking IAT Level III, IAM Level II/Level III and IASAE I and IASAE II roles. CompTIA’s CASP exam endeavors to…
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When it comes to getting your CISSP certification, I have one important word for you: STUDY. Study in the car (preferably not while driving), study at work (taking care to not get fired), study at home, study everywhere you get a free moment. Study before training, study after training. You really cannot study too much…
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I have a daughter in 3rd grade who started the year off with reviews of the addition and subtraction she learned last year. Fortunately, her school is private and doesn’t do any of the dumb Common Core math that I have seen other parents complaining about. My daughter understands the concepts of addition and subtraction…
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Very early on in high school I remember my father sitting me down and saying, “When you get to college nobody is ever going to ask you what your GPA was in high school. And after graduating from college nobody is ever going to ask you what your grades were. All they are going to…
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Mostly because of their importance in some types of asymmetric cryptography (Diffie-Hellman, RSA) I have a fascination with prime numbers. I enjoy occasionally checking on the latest discovery of ever larger prime numbers. As I write the largest known prime has more than 17, 425, 170 digits in it. That’s a big-ass number! Many…
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In my last post I offered two different examples for generating prime numbers using python. The first script in that post generated every prime (except 2) from 1 to 9,999,999 and the second script generated every prime in a user-supplied range. It’s neat to be able to generate a bunch of prime numbers but what…
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Perhaps just a step up from writing your first “Hello World” script. I wrote [yet another] prime number generator. I’m sure this can be done in a variety of ways but I used what I currently know to figure out how to determine if a number is prime. Here’s the code: #!/usr/bin/env python print “2…
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I have been teaching myself Python for more than a few years. To be clear, that means that I think about python for about a week, do a lot of reading, stay up late trying some real basic code, get distracted by other shiny things, allow weeks or months to go by, and forget almost…
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You know who has no say-so in how wireless LAN keys are shared in Microsoft’s new WiFi Sense feature? The actual owner of the wireless LAN. The decision to share credentials is in the power of the connecting user, not the WLAN owner. Stupid much? I have several thousand “friends” on Facebook and more than…
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