Tyler Oderkirk's Blog

Way back in 2004, I spied an offer in Circuit Cellar magazine for a free evaluation kit from Aladdin Knowledge Systems (AKS), manufacturer of copy protection tokens. These are the little gadgets that you often need to plug in to your computer to prove that you ”really” own the particularly expensive application you’re trying to [...]

Have you ever wanted to transform a run-of-the-mill photograph into a complete 3D scene automagically like Jack Black does in this mildly-NSFW 35MiB 2min clip from Enemy of the State? Well too bad — it’s just not possible to ascertain details that are hidden from the camera’s view! You can get pretty close, though, with [...]

After a few false starts this Winter, I finally made it to Boston this weekend. I went with Carolyn and Jumbo. It was great to take a road trip where I wasn’t in the driver’s seat `:]` We stopped at the Museum of Science as soon as we arrived. It housed an excellent “history of [...]

I’m happy to announce the first release of a credentials (e.g. “usernames and passwords”) management system that I’ve been working on for the past few weeks. It’s called Creds101 and this excerpt from the documentation gives some more detail: Creds101 has 2 parts: Software that you run on your computer (the “host”) to send commands [...]

“A5/1 [the encryption scheme used in most cellular voice calls] has operated unchanged for the last 21 years but it has now reached its cryptographic end-of-life, engulfed by the march of Moore’s Law. However, the operational end-of-life of A5/1 may still be decades away as there are approximately 2 billion GSM subscribers, commanding about 80% of [...]

Introduction I’ve often wanted to securely send a message to someone who didn’t have a serious software package like GPG installed. Rather than ask them to install software they might not use ever again, I employed the scheme described below – it only requires a web browser with Javascript support. Our friends Alice and Bob [...]

Here’s a really impressive method to provide memory safety for your favorite kernel that so desperately lacks it: the “Secure Virtual Architecture”. See… This 24MB 21min Quicktime video… and the accompanying PDF slides… and the research paper itself – Secure Virtual Architecture: A Safe Execution Environment for Commodity Operating Systems. See especially page 5 for [...]

I went to the new Brooks Landing Boulder Coffee Co. last night with Tessah and Jared to see my friend Christi play ukelele. She rocked it for at least and hour and a half seated, fittingly I think, in front of a wonderwoman painting. She played most of the material from her new album, Snakeskin, [...]

Would you like to include Flickr photos in your MoinMoin wiki pages? Here’s a MoinMoin macro that allows you to do just that. The code is a little ugly, but I was inspired by this affirmation of the “release early, release often” philosophy to make the source available. Slide on over to my wiki to [...]

good.net is a stripped-down file-hosting service (cf. drop.io/sendthisfile.com)1 that has four “new-to-me” features:2 You can earn money when people download your files via their affiliate program. Your audience can access your files via HTTPS. An honest dedication to free speech and free software. You can upload your files via FTP-over-explicit-SSL (FTPES). Their support page doesn’t list [...]