The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Security

Signs of Triviality

netmeister.org/blog

Opinions, mostly my own, on the importance of being and other things.

SecurityNetworkingLinux / Unix

’05’10’15’20’25
Posts
260 from 9 Sep 2001 to 27 Oct 2026
Posting
monthly (14 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
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https://www.netmeister.org/blog/rss.xml

2026 12

  1. This is not sustainable
  2. 'Winning AI'
  3. Everybody's Lost Their Minds
  4. Sites using PQC (September 2026)
  5. Post-Quantum Certificates
  6. AI errno(2) values
  7. Resetting Mutt's terminal after OAuth2 / GPG
  8. SSH Key Handling using the macOS keychain and 1Password
  9. The End of the Open Web
  10. Sites using PQC (February 2026)
  11. IPv6 Adoption in 2026
  12. Use of PQC in SMTP STARTTLS

2025 14

  1. Can I use HTTPS RRs?
  2. Process Memory Sharing
  3. Stacking Threads
  4. Sites using PQC (September 2025)
  5. vimrc: settings based on terminal background
  6. Yes, it's a slow coup
  7. Post-Quantum Cryptography Proof of Concept Implementations
  8. July 4th, 2025
  9. Bootstrapping HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, and HTTP/3
  10. Post-Quantum Cryptography on NetBSD
  11. How it's going...
  12. Sites using PQC (March 2025)
  13. 2025 02 21
  14. Post-Quantum Cryptography in February 2025

2024 9

  1. Does the internet really need even more TLDs?
  2. 2024-11-06
  3. TLS 1.3 Hybrid Key Exchange using X25519Kyber768 / ML-KEM
  4. Installing NetBSD on Linode
  5. Creating a NetBSD/amd64 AMI
  6. Creating NetBSD EC2 AMIs
  7. Whose CIDR is it anyway?
  8. Email DNS Records Cheatsheet
  9. Post-Quantum Cryptography in January 2024

2023 7

  1. Use of HTTPS Resource Records
  2. TLD Domain Count Stats
  3. The gTLDs' New Clothes
  4. Whose Cert Is It Anyway?
  5. Open sourcing code into a separate git repository
  6. Who reads your email?
  7. AWS IAM and Cost Explorer CLI Setup

2022 12

  1. Who controls the internet?
  2. homepage
  3. Time is an illusion, Unix time doubly so...
  4. The Sender Policy Framework (SPF)
  5. DNS Response Size
  6. If Programming Languages Were Futurama Characters
  7. Keeping Up To Date
  8. Learning By Lurking
  9. Debugging Certificate Errors
  10. Basic Network Troubleshooting
  11. Infosec Skill Sets
  12. WHOIS: Fragile, unparseable, obsolete... and universally relied upon

2021 17

  1. strlcat(3) > strncat(3)
  2. Open Source Security Process Wishlist
  3. Uninitialized Stack Variables
  4. IPC Buffer Sizes
  5. IPv4 addresses are silly, inet_aton(3) doubly so.
  6. What's in a hostname?
  7. There is no 'printf'.
  8. TLDs -- Putting the '.fun' in the top of the DNS
  9. DuckDuckGo Onion Search for Firefox
  10. (All) DNS Resource Records
  11. What's that cert?
  12. URLs: It's complicated...
  13. (Technical) Infosec Core Competencies
  14. Behavioral Economics in Information Security
  15. Sharing Secrets
  16. Your E-Mail Validation Logic is Wrong
  17. 10 Software Engineering Laws Everybody Loves to Ignore

2020 11

  1. Recommendations To Write (Slightly More) Readable And (Thus) Robust Code
  2. CPU Pinning and CPU Sets
  3. 2020-11-15
  4. Lost Infosec Battles
  5. "Zero Trust" in a Nutshell
  6. 2020-11-04
  7. Creating AWS IPv4/IPv6 Dual Stack EC2 Instances
  8. Essential Ticket Skills - Ticket Management
  9. Browser Startup Comparison
  10. A (a few) ops lessons we all learn the hard way
  11. stdarg And The Case Of The Forgotten Registers

2019 9

  1. Falsehoods CS Students (Still) Believe Upon Graduating
  2. OKR Distractions
  3. DNS Security: Threat Modeling DNSSEC, DoT, and DoH
  4. ITMFA - Just. Like. Dat.
  5. New Adventures in DNSSEC and DANE
  6. The Zen of Infosec
  7. Capturing specific SSL and TLS version packets using tcpdump(8)
  8. Writing Consistent Tools
  9. Required Reading: The Mythical Man Month and Peopleware

2018 9

  1. 'Twas the night before Christmas - SysAdmin Edition
  2. Restricting Processes
  3. Essential Ticket Skill - Filing Tickets 101
  4. Jan's Twitter Animal Threads
  5. DNS tcpdump by example
  6. Paranoid Principles
  7. The Attack Life Cycle
  8. (Some) iPhone Privacy Settings
  9. (Some) Browser Privacy Settings

2017 7

  1. The Razor's Edge - Cutting Your TLS Baggage
  2. Patching is hard. Knowing what to patch is harder still.
  3. Safely Creating And Using Temporary Files
  4. Why Companies Should Pay For Their Employees To Attend Conferences
  5. Attending and speaking at conferences
  6. Half a Book
  7. RealWorldCryptography 2017 Notes

2016 17

  1. OpSec 101 - A Choose Your Own Adventure for Devs, Ops, and other Humans
  2. Know Your Enemy - An Introduction to Threat Modeling
  3. Crazy Like A Fox
  4. It's the people, stupid.
  5. Survey - Security Organization Effectiveness and Human Motivations
  6. Betteridge's Paradox
  7. The Value of a Bug Bounty Program
  8. A few thoughts on Incident Response
  9. Infosec: How we see ourselves vs. how others see us
  10. Interviewing Delusions & Realities
  11. Root Cause: Human Errno
  12. Writing Shell Scripts
  13. Moving the Needle
  14. Semper Ubi Sub Ubi - Things They Don't Teach You In School
  15. Industry vs. Academia
  16. Everything is Awful (And You're Not Helping)
  17. Defense at Scale

2015 13

  1. An abbreviated, incomplete guide to help you decide whether or not you're plagiarizing
  2. Using the OS X Keychain to store and retrieve passwords
  3. Passing Passwords
  4. Three Simple Questions
  5. Primum non nocere - Ethical Obligations in Internet Operations
  6. Ethical Obligations in Internet Operations - Survey Results
  7. If medical jobs were like tech jobs...
  8. How to Seem Smart in Infosec Meetings
  9. Ethical Obligations in Internet Operations - Questionnaire
  10. Passwords Are Here To Stay
  11. Velocity NY 2015 - See you there!
  12. The Art of Plain Text
  13. Speak Up

2014 14

  1. Infosec Basics: Reason behind Madness
  2. Performance Review Selfies
  3. lish(1) -- a limited shell
  4. Your POODLE and You
  5. On Peter Principles and Failing to Fail
  6. Digesting Ducks like Facebook
  7. Digesting Ducks Discussing Uptime
  8. Duct Tape and WD40
  9. Heartbleed and You
  10. Privacy and Social Media
  11. Using Tor to Circumvent Country Origin Restrictions
  12. All Is Not Lost. (But We Need Your Help.)
  13. Wait, wait... Don't Pwn Me!
  14. Mehr Üs als Äs

2013 23

  1. Converting ssh(1) RSA public keys to PKCS8 format
  2. The Nest of Trust
  3. NSA infiltrates Grindr
  4. clogger(1) -- a campfire logger
  5. Ask yourself two questions...
  6. So I went to Velocity New York 2013...
  7. Online Privacy Tools - Links
  8. One City One Book - Online Privacy Tools
  9. Creating an OS X .pkg installer
  10. Security Related Interview Questions for all Engineers
  11. Syncing NIST's National Vulnerability Database with Jira
  12. less bug, more /dev/null
  13. Syncing the NIST National Vulnerability Database to Sqlite3
  14. Sharing Secrets Using SSH Keys (II)
  15. Beware the Conference Echo Chamber
  16. Yahoo!'s "Must Not Work From Home" Mistake
  17. Got logs?
  18. Kerberos v5 Status Codes
  19. Kerberos Error Codes
  20. Non-trivial command-line fu via @rtfmsh
  21. Ramblings on Remote Employment
  22. Of Users and Groups -- oh, and Trust
  23. We're Doing It Wrong -- What DevOps Needs To Learn In Order To Scale Up

2012 21

  1. iPad Apps for Kids
  2. Things I Remember
  3. Using an IPv6 tunnelbroker on NetBSD/EC2
  4. Sharing Secrets Using SSH Keys
  5. Sandy and I
  6. Defining "Operations"
  7. We get signal. What!
  8. Of Illustrations and Licenses
  9. Spectacular File System Confusion
  10. Updating Jira tickets via mail
  11. Integrating Duo 2FA with OpenVPN
  12. From Company Closed to Open Source
  13. Writing (system) tools
  14. How Systems and Software Engineers see themselves
  15. Twitter Stats
  16. GMail Annoyances
  17. Kabelsalat Be Gone
  18. This Way To Awesome
  19. Brilliant Ideas: BeerWare
  20. Writing about Writing
  21. Achtung, Deutsch!

2001 65

  1. Becoming Untumbled
  2. Down With The Fancy Pants With^WAt Velocity
  3. Unix? What Unix? This is Linux!
  4. Unpatch (!= patch -R)
  5. Just-in-time translation of user-provided LESS via NodeJS - Yikes!
  6. ...And They're Both Probably Right
  7. (Some) Recruiters are People, too!
  8. Metamatter
  9. Why I left Yahoo!
  10. All Good Things...
  11. iCal, iPhone and iCloud - iVey!
  12. Leaving Yahoo!
  13. sudo: unable to execute : success
  14. Of Headless User Accounts and Restricted Shells
  15. Parental Math
  16. No tratheroute for you!
  17. Migration is hard...
  18. It's a Book!
  19. Marbles in my Underpants
  20. Go Lisp!
  21. Learning Programming Languages for Fun and Profit
  22. Teaching "Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment"
  23. Ever wonder why they're called "asswords"?
  24. Ye Olde TLS/SSL Renegotiation Vulnerability
  25. A Tale of Two Exploits
  26. Jan's Blog Episode IV -- A New Hope
  27. Why I won't get Speakeasy DSL again
  28. Bouncing mails due to relays.ordb.org
  29. Google blocking certain User-Agents
  30. Solaris pxeboot with pxelinux
  31. Brilliant Ideas (I)
  32. Nested SSH Tunnels
  33. Of course it runs NetBSD!
  34. Migrating Quotas
  35. More on Solaris 10 ZFS vs. Apple XRaid
  36. Solaris UFS >1TB vs. inodes
  37. Solaris 10 ZFS vs. Apple XRaid
  38. Moving License Managers
  39. Ride down Williamsburg Bridge
  40. Solaris 10: libstdc++.la empty
  41. Solaris 10: svcadm rquotad
  42. Solaris 10: Serial Console
  43. Mac OS X: amanda vs. launchd
  44. Mac OS X NFS share vs. Garritan Personal Orchestra
  45. Netbooting vs. spanning tree
  46. Mailman + HTTPS
  47. So that's why they call it "rescue"...
  48. Mac OS X: Remotely installing .dmg
  49. Gigabit Cables
  50. XServe and locking drives
  51. Mac OS X: readlink(2)
  52. Mac OS X: attaching drives
  53. Save your config!
  54. Don't lock yourself out
  55. Extracting a file from a .deb
  56. New York State of Mind
  57. New York State of Mind
  58. 9 11
  59. Mit Gott im Urlaub
  60. Macht die Tagesschau zur Show des Tages!
  61. Sinnlos - oder: Ulla Kock am Brink vs. Geschlechtsverkehr
  62. Der Grottenolm
  63. Ei Eboshi! Se Mushi! No Fuji!
  64. Statistiken, die einem das Leben retten können
  65. Das ZDF, der Katalog und Ich