A man looking through binoculars

Privacy in the European Union and the World

Lately there has been an increase in discussions about the use of end-to-end encryption for consumers. The most blatant attack on privacy I have read about is the so-called EU Chat Control. But there are other regulations as well, such as the UK Online Safety Bill. Chat Control (EU) Let’s begin with the European Union, and what is usually called Chat Control. This regulation aims to protect children from abuse by forcing both hosting and communications services to reduce the risk of the service being used for Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) by ...

March 27, 2023 · 4 min · Oskar Edbro
"Together we change the world" written with chalk on a road

Governments Influencing Wikipedia?

It has recently been reported by The Guardian that Saudi Arabia has taken serious steps to influence the information available at Wikipedia. The investigations began after two volunteers at Wikipedia were put in jail for “swaying public opinion” and “violating public morals.” Since then Saudi Arabia seems to have stepped up their efforts to influence the public view. An internal investigation at Wikimedia showed that all of their administrators in the country were government agents. Since Wikipedia relies on their volunteers to maintain the information on the site, they have had to create a structure of trust to ensure the quality of the information. The Saudi Arabian agents had managed to raise to the level of administrators, whom are authorized to edit or delete contents, as well as blocking lower level users edits from being published. ...

January 6, 2023 · 2 min · Oskar Edbro
The head of a mammoth against a blank background

Thoughts on Mastodon

Over the holidays I finally took my time to dig into Masodon. It has been a bit of a journey, both to understand how it works, and how to use it. From the start it feels like twitter, but as you use it you see the differences and realise how different they are. Regardless I do now feel at home on Mastodon, and the lack of an algorithm feeding posts it thinks I will like is most refreshing. ...

January 3, 2023 · 4 min · Oskar Edbro

Connecting a MikroTik AccessPoint to RouterOS via CapsMAN

After getting tiered of the shortcomings of commercial network equipment I decided to invest in some professional devices. However, investigating the different brands are even more difficult than for commercial products. In the end I decided to go for MikroTik, due to their small office offerings. The devices are great and when first connecting to them you realise their potential through the sheer volume of configuration. As expected you need to design and configure you network to get it to work at all. This made me realise that I have not touched professional network equipment since university, and that was Cisco equipment. To my dread I could not find a good guide on how to configure a simple network with my equipment, so after finishing this is my guide. ...

November 13, 2022 · 6 min · Oskar Edbro
A businessman playing chess

Vulnerability Categories for Business

There are endless ways to divide vulnerabilities into different classifications. Each more granular than the other. However, there is also a need to for a simple divide, targeted to the business. That is the problem this post will solve. By using the same categories as in the post Security for Any Development Team I will break down security vulnerabilities into three categories. After reading this post, you will get an insight into why vulnerabilities may arise, and what can be done to minimise the risk. ...

November 5, 2022 · 5 min · Oskar Edbro