Category Archives: Uncategorized
Should Australia join ASEAN?
Former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating believes that Australia should join ASEAN. This is a call that he has repeated since the surprise victory of Donald Trump. There are concerns about whether or not Australia could join ASEAN – certainly … Continue reading
A high-level evaluation of the OpenBSM audit system in OS X
One of the BSD legacy security mechanisms included with OS X is OpenBSM. This is an audit mechanism. In contrast, TrustedBSD (also included with OS X) is a mandatory access control mechanism which can block system calls based on some … Continue reading
Disabling revoked cert checking for malware research on OS X
Malware research involves running malware samples, typically in VMs. Because developer codesigning certificates are trivial to acquire in the Apple ecosystem, OS X malware samples are very often code signed. When malware is discovered, Apple can and often does revoke … Continue reading
httrack for downloading websites
Scraping web pages for offline hosting can be handy for testing. I’m a long-time wget fan, but for pulling down entire web pages, CSS/JS bits and all, it just trips up too easily, so I needed something better. Some quick … Continue reading
Do you really need a blockchain?
There’s a scene in Angels and Demons where the Camerlengo asks Robert Langdon if he believes in God. Professor Langdon replies “faith is a gift I have yet to receive“. I found this interesting because, despite not being part of … Continue reading
libproc for process listing on OSX
On OSX if you need to manage other processes, a sensible place to start is NSRunningApplication class. You can instantiate one of these with a pid: An NSRunningApplication object has amongst other things, the following properties: executableURL bundleURL bundleIdentifier That … Continue reading
The data-dev-ops triangle
For a while now I’ve sensed the emergence of a new species of software engineer, adding a third node to the DevOps dichotomy (though from a skills/capabilities perspective it’s actually more of a continuum). The third vertex joining the Dev … Continue reading
