Category Archives: General

A default category for posts that don’t seem to fit into a more specific area.

Security and Using Artificial Intelligence

Over the past year or so, we have had a bit of an upsurge in the use of “artificial intelligence” with things like ChatGPT, etc. An interesting development – particularly amusing when I started my career with a summer job … Continue reading

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Encrypting Apple Devices

So to begin with, why encrypt? To keep your data private in the event of other people obtaining access to your device. In some cases that is in your own interest (such as for personal devices not used for work) … Continue reading

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Locating Java Installs

In some cases vulnerability scanners will tell you that there is a vulnerable version of Java installed but not tell you where it is. This is a short post on solving that problem – for Linux machines. Run the following … Continue reading

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The “Secret” BCC Email Header

You want to send an email to a long list of people; perhaps that list should remain private, or perhaps you just want to avoid the inconvenience of people seeing a huge “To” field with tons of other addresses in. … Continue reading

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What Are “Homoglyph” Attacks?

As the phrase has started becoming more widely used, it seems worthwhile to explain just what exactly “homoglyph attacks” are. It is perhaps a bit extreme to call them “attacks” as they are effectively used to deceive … especially in … Continue reading

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Twitter: The Trustworthiness of The Blue Tick

If you have not heard, Twitter suffered some sort of incident recently (yesterday at the time of writing) where a number of high profile accounts were used to send out “tweets” suggesting that if you pay them some money (in … Continue reading

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VPN or GlobalProtect Performance Issues

On occasions over the last few months, IS has been contacted with regard to network performance issues in relation to the VPN (the GlobalProtect VPN). As a result we have built up some recommendations that may be helpful to others … Continue reading

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Working From Home

For some reason there seems to be a bit of an increase in interest in working from home and so it seems rather timely to produce some advice. Not so much the technical side of things, but general advice from … Continue reading

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Let’s Encrypt Certificates – Are They Broken?

Short answer: No. There is a news story going around about an issue with certificates issued by Let’s Encrypt. The certificates themselves are in fact perfectly fine, but they were issued when they should not have been. If the owners … Continue reading

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German University Forced To Reset All Passwords

According to this story in The Register (the source material is reasonably enough in German), one of our German competitors has recently been forced to reset every single account password causing significant queues for service. Plus a significant amount of … Continue reading

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