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?

So, what will 2018 be the year of?

They say that life is what you make it so time to make some resolutions …… yes?

Well, if John Sonmez from Simple Programmer is to be believed – maybe not!

I receive regular email updates from the Simple Programmer website and the one I received on 27th December caused me to stop and think.

Online Tool of the Month – BuiltWith

Have you ever looked at a website and thought ‘I wonder what that’s written in’? Well, even if you haven’t I certainly have which is why I was interested to hear about BuiltWith.

Simply put, BuiltWith puts websites under the microscope and produces a detailed report about what it sees.

From Webservers and SSL Certificate providers through programming languages, Javascript libraries, content management systems and advertising platforms it sees it all. The produced report contains links to allow you to see technology trends across the Internet which may well assist with infrastructure decisions for your next project.