Tag Archives: encryption

Stanford Cryptography and #CryptoParty

posted on 23 August, 2012 also tagged , , ,

I recently finished the free online Stanford cryptography course offered through Coursera and taught by Dan Boneh. It’s a challenging class, with at least four hours of lectures a week, and it actually took me two attempts to get all the way through it. I’m really glad I did though: cryptography is a tremendously empowering [...]

The crypto triple threat club

posted on 11 June, 2012 also tagged , , , ,

My written one-to-one communication patterns can be grouped into three major categories: longform, synchronous shortform, and asynchronous shortform. For the most part I use email, IMs, and SMS, respectively, for those purposes. Each of those technologies has its own end-to-end encryption protocol.1 Email has the venerable OpenPGP protocol and the GnuPG suite of programs; IM [...]

A modest defense of QR codes

posted on 19 March, 2012 also tagged

I’m sort of a QR code anti-hipster: I was into them before they were uncool. I actually think they’re a really nifty encoding that’s easy to read and write with the right tools, and useful for a handful of situations. But they’re so widely misused in marketing that most people never get to see one [...]

HOWTO: Transfer OTR private keys between Adium and Pidgin

posted on 30 January, 2012 also tagged , , , , ,

I recently re-installed Ubuntu on my home computer, and wanted to move my office Mac’s Adium OTR key and collected fingerprints over to the new install. I had some trouble, but got it eventually, so I wanted to document the process. The first step is to make sure you’ve got Pidgin and Pidgin-OTR installed on [...]