On Watering Holes, Trust, Defensible Systems and Data Science Community Security

I’ve been threatening to do a series on “data science community security” for a while and had cause to issue this inaugural post today. It all started with this: Hey #rstats folks: don't do this. Srsly. Don't do this. Pls. Will blog why. Just don't do this. https://t.co/qkem5ruEBi — boB Rudis (@hrbrmstr) February 23, 2017… Continue reading

Clandestine DNS lookups with gdns

Google recently [announced](https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/docs/dns-over-https) their DNS-over-HTTPS API, which _”enhances privacy and security between a client and a recursive resolver, and complements DNSSEC to provide end-to-end authenticated DNS lookups”_. The REST API they provided was pretty simple to [wrap into a package](https://github.com/hrbrmstr/gdns) and I tossed in some [SPF](http://www.openspf.org/SPF_Record_Syntax) functions that I had lying around to bulk it… Continue reading

Beware of sideloading f.lux for iOS from files obtained on sharing/torrent sites

Apple made the @justgetflux folks remove their [iOS sideloaded app](https://justgetflux.com/sideload/) due to the use of private APIs (which are a violation of the Apple Developer agreement). The ZIP archive has been pulled from their site (and it really has, too). This “sideloading”—i.e. installing directly to your device after compiling it from source—_was_ an interesting way… Continue reading

π, Awareness, DataVis, VAST 2013, Moar data! & GReader Machinations

Far too many interesting bits to spam on Twitter individually but each is worth getting the word out on: – It’s [π Day](https://www.google.com/search?q=pi+day)* – Unless you’re living in a hole, you probably know that [Google Reader is on a death march](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21785378). I’m really liking self-hosting [Tiny Tiny RSS](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CDEQFjAA&url=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fgothfox%2FTiny-Tiny-RSS&ei=YtlBUfOLJvLe4AOHtoDIAQ&usg=AFQjCNGwtEr8slx-i0vNzhQi4b4evRVXFA&bvm=bv.43287494,d.dmg) so far, and will follow up with… Continue reading