Compressing A Trivial File
2023-04-07 software
Input: a 10GB file containing 10^10 "a" characters. Your task is to compress it as much as you can. How hard can it be? How do the well-known (and mostly-known) generic compression utilities perform? What's the minimum you can do? What's the best we can do with the a-priori knowledge? What does this tell us? Read on for a small analysis.

A review Of The Contents Of My Twitter Archive
2022-11-15 privacy
Nowadays, while watching Twitter die because of recent events, it's recommended to save your data ("archive") just in case. But what is in that archive? What can one infer from it about the Twitter internals? I took a look at what's in there, and tried to guess why, what the platform knows about me, what it stored in the archive.

Introducing: A Goat (API And CLI Version)
2022-07-17 software
I just announced a small side-project of mine: a RIPE Atlas API wrapper and CLI tool written in #golang. Read on if you ever wondered why this exist and what it can do.

A Small Example Of Port Knocking
2022-01-07 security
Port knocking is a cool way of hiding services on your server until a secret "knock pattern" is sent. Let me present a practical example of how this can be used in real life.

Highlighting Some SSH Features
2021-12-31 security software
SSH - the secure shell - is a client/server software that lets a user log in securely log in to a remote UNIX server and "get a shell" to get some work done there. It has many features, some of which can come quite handy. Let me present some interesting use cases - from simple to more advanced ones.

Date Of Birth Generator
2021-12-13 privacy software
Does a website need your date of birth? Or your mother's name? We can do that!

Is It Hard To Migrate To A New Phone?
2021-11-15 security software
Recently I upgraded my phone - iPhone 8 to iPhone 13. Even though the experience is not bad, there are some gotchas you sould keep in mind when you prepare for such a thing.

10 Years of RIPE Atlas - Tales From The Dev Team [RIPE Labs]
2020-11-19 software
RIPE Atlas is 10 years old! To help mark the occasion, alongside the virtual events we have planned over the next two weeks, we'll be posting a series of stories surrounding the development of RIPE Atlas. Check here for daily instalments!

Adventures in Changing an Email Address
2020-04-30 privacy software
One does not change primary email address too often. When that happens, you likely want to change it in the various services and subscriptions you use. This can be a challenging task in itself - partially because the services have wildly different policies on how this happens. I'll categorise some of the ones I went through.

RIPE Atlas Architecture - How We Manage Our Probes [RIPE Labs]
2017-12-19 software
In this article we will give some insights into the overall architecture of the RIPE Atlas network and how we manage secure communication with our probe flock.

RIPE Atlas Probes as IoT Devices [RIPE Labs]
2017-10-20 software
It's possible to look at RIPE Atlas probes from the perspective of IoT - a key element of the service is the physical devices deployed all over the world. Read on to find some interesting insights from this perspective.

On User Interfaces of Alarm Clocks
2015-08-21 design ui
UIs are not only for software. A good user interface just the right amount and type of displays, knobs and switches, and it behaves just so that you need minimum effort to operate and to reach maximum satisfaction. When it comes to alarm clocks, one in particular wins the race, hands down.

The AMS-IX Outage as Seen with RIPE Atlas [RIPE Labs]
2015-05-14 software
During the RIPE 70 Meeting in Amsterdam this week (on 13 May around 10:00 UTC), we experienced a network outage at AMS-IX. Let's see how this was monitored by various tools.

A Guide to Making Movies [RIPE Labs]
2009-10-06 software
While walking around the hallways at RIPE59, a couple of people asked me how the movies were made, what tools did I use and such. So here's a short summary on what I did to produce these movies.


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