Taking control of my Domain

Some time ago I was watching a Pluralsight course called ‘Master Your Domain’ where Rob Conery explained how to break your reliance on the major service providers for email, source code, blogs and file-sharing and create your own domain to host your data.

Following the course I started hosting my own Git server, Blog and File Sharing service but Email …. well that was too big a step for me to take at that time. However, times change and when I started experiencing issues with my email that was the trigger for me to take the plunge.

Online Tool of the Month – unixtimestamp.com

As developers we know that one of the biggest problems when working with data is handling dates. It’s such a simple thing surely yet many of us fall foul of formatting issues and time zone offsets – and that’s when the date is actually human readable!

I remember when I first encountered a Unix Timestamp in the ‘LastUpdated’ column of a database table and thinking, ‘what the hell is that?!’.

Bear in mind that this was back in the days before the internet and before I had any real experience with Unix/Linux systems – every Windows application I had seen prior to this had it’s dates stored in the DD/MM/YYYY hh:mm:ss format.

Being faced with something like 1519571567 was a bit confusing to say the least – unless you know that this represents ‘the number of seconds since midnight (UTC) 1st January 1970‘ where would you even start to know what this meant?

The Personal Encryptor 1.0 Released

Following on from my post about the UK Governments campaign to erode our privacy by demanding that tech companies put back doors in their encrypted products, I have created a simple utility to demonstrate how easy it is for a reasonably competent developer to create their own using standard development tools and libraries.

Now, I’m not expecting the UK Government to take a blind bit of notice but the fact is that encryption is out there, it’s only mathematics after all, and it’s not going away. You cannot feasibly make maths illegal – although the US did classify encryption as a weapon until 2000 (and to some degree still does).

Anyway, following my commitment to watch at least one Pluralsight course a month during 2018 I opted for Practical Cryptography in .NET by Stephen Haunts to give myself some suitable background.

Parsing Console Application Arguments using CommandLineParser

When we open Visual Studio and click File > New we are greeted with a huge list of project templates to choose from. Now and then we may opt for a simple Console Application for a quick one off utility, e.g. post processing some .csv files or images.

Similarly we have all used command line utilities which require numerous arguments and switches to ‘tune’ exactly what we want it to do, e.g. git or tar.

Well I’m looking to create a Command Line utility that will allow users to encrypt and decrypt textual messages.

Why? I hear you ask – well check out my thoughts on the UK Governments attempts to get WhatsApp to create a backdoor.

The utility will allow users to

• Generate Public/Private Key Pairs
• Encrypt textual messages, packaging them for sending to the intended recipient
• Decrypt packaged messages

WhatsApp – a Haven for Paedophiles and Terrorists?

Yep – thought that would get your attention!

It’s headlines like this that the UK Government (and the press) are throwing around in order to drum up support for one of the most intrusive and privacy damaging campaigns to date.

The premise is that bad people use these services, which make heavy use of encryption to keep messages private, and by doing so hamper the security services who can no longer access private information in order to monitor them and stop them from doing bad things.

Now I’m not denying that these bad people do use WhatsApp (and similar applications) to enable them to communicate without their messages being intercepted. But I use WhatsApp and so do my wife and kids and we are not bad people. If WhatsApp are expected to put a backdoor into their systems to allow access to the content by so-called ‘authorised agencies’ then what about our privacy?