ckstechnologynews-blog

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My last post.... here on Wordpress

My last post…. here on WordPress

So this is it, I’m done here, closing the doors but when one door is closed it opens another one, right?! I do believe so. Hopefully, I’m able to merge all old WordPress post into the new Blog currently there some incompatible things which I need to manually edit. Yep over 1000 files.. uargh! But everything else is setup already.

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Private Internet Access again proves again that they don't log!

Private Internet Access again proves again that they don’t log!

PIA is one of my favorite provider when it comes to VPN’s, it’s reliable and one of the oldest providers I’m aware of. TorrentFreak again writes an article about the current findings based on the story back from 2017. This is now the second time PIA was inspected and it shows yet again that you can trust them.

Picture Source: vpnandusenetreviews.com

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Station-Drivers switches to Joomla and gets a facelift

Station-Drivers switches to Joomla and gets a facelift

Station-Drivers, one of my all-time favourite site when it comes to drivers – o be honest the page always looked like garbage (no offensive!) finally gets a facelift. My French neighbours updating their sites to a new Joomla version. This brings several improvements.

New Favicon and a cleaner look but still under constructions (for several days).

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nVidia released DisplayPort 1.3 & 1.4 UEFI Firmware update for Maxwell and Pascal cards

nVidia released DisplayPort 1.3 & 1.4 UEFI Firmware update for Maxwell and Pascal cards

nVidia released another Driver yesterday 398.11 WHQL, yawn nothing special I can tell, the important news is that there is also an update regarding DisplayPort (DP) which is interesting because this might also bring some improvements. Like G-Sync HDR support for Maxwell & Pascal graphics cards together with a black screen fix.

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Windows 10 Update 1803 KB4338548 (Build 17134.83) + Office June Patchday

Windows 10 Update 1803 KB4338548 (Build 17134.83) + Office June Patchday

Achievement unlocked: Survived another cumulative Update. Windows 10 just got another fresh update, which upgrades you right to Build 17134.83, okay what you really expect the title already says everything but well I had to mention it!

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The reason why LEGION is my #1 TV Series

The reason why LEGION is my #1 TV Series

Legion (David Charles Haller) is a fictional character appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. He is the mutant son of Professor Charles Xavier and Gabrielle Haller. Legion takes the role of an antihero and has a severe mental illness including a form of dissociative identity disorder in which each of his alternate personas controls one of his many superpowers.

Why is it the…

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Firefox dropped below 10% share value according to NetMarketshare

Firefox dropped below 10% share value according to NetMarketshare

NetMarketshare released their latest Browser market share analysis. It looks bad for Firefox, really bad – but what are the reasons?

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How To Start your own Git Server in less than 30 Minutes

How To Start your own Git Server in less than 30 Minutes

It’s official GitHub sold us out, so what are the alternatives? You could switch to GitLab or BitBucket and wait till Microsoft or others buying them and get in an infinite loop, or you create your own Server! A small group of members started already an own Repo, sadly it was already too late because MS is already in discussion with GitHub since 2007, but the idea was really funny.

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How To use TOTP with your PayPal account

How To use TOTP with your PayPal account

There is already a fantastic guide on Medium which shows you how you use Paypal together with Time-based One-time (short: TOTP), sadly it’s outdated so I decided to write an updated and tested guide on my own.

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Building decentralized messenger run by users instead of corporations is definitely now new but thanks to XMPP and I2P (Invisible Internet Protocol) it’s easier than ever before. XMPP needs to have a server running with a registered domain name which is compared to P2P, not the best solution you can get but we can run our server software on a local host and use virtual I2P network for connecting with other servers.  The used .i2p address comes here in handy to ‘replace’ a real domain name, plus it gives us advanced protection against illegal dragnet surveillance.

I2P logo. Picture Source: geti2p.net

What we’re trying to archive?

A messenger, which can be run both on end-user devices and on high-performance server infrastructure.

End-user applications should be connectable like eg. desktop, mobile, web.

Censorship resistance and advanced privacy protection as a bonus from using I2P.

Offline message delivery, “cloud storage” for history and contacts, using one account on multiple devices. The stuff which P2P simply can’t give us.

A free open source solution which can easier be inspected in order to find possible problems.

You can use OTR as crypto protocol in order to provide strong encryption for your instant messaging conversations. A lot of IM’s have plugins in order to use OTR or you can download a plugin for it.

Requirements

I2P, you can use I2pd (documentation)

Prosody as XMPP server (documentation)

bit32 libaries for lua >5.2

mod_darknet

A XMPP client like Pidgin with OTR

(optional) For Android Conersations or for iOS ChatSecure other messaging clients are listed here

Installing the I2P client

First, you need to install i2pd, after this is done we’re going to create a server I2P tunnel which provides us with a virtual .i2p address, this address will be used in the world to reach our XMPP server.

tunnels.conf

[prosody-s2s] type=server host=127.0.0.1 port=5269 inport=5269 keys=prosody.dat

[prosody-c2s] type=server host=127.0.0.1 port=5222 inport=5222 keys=prosody.dat

Alternative if you like to run your messenger only on a local host, set within the webconsole the address to http://127.0.0.1:7070/. After every change, you need to restart i2pd.

Example address in our webconsole. Save your xxx.b32.i2p address, it will be a domain name of your own XMPP server.

Installing our XMPP server

We will use prosody as XMPP server, it is the most lightweight and has ready to use module for I2P. Installation instructions are available at official documentation, in Ubuntu or Ubuntu you can just run apt install prosody. On Windows you have to use a fork since the download binaries are no longer provided.

We need to install the mod_darknet module, which is required so that prosody could make outgoing connections with I2P Socks5 proxy. Download this file to prosody modules directory, usually, it is /usr/lib/prosody/modules.

Edit config file /etc/prosody/prosody.cfg.lua. Replace xxx.b32.i2p with your address:

interfaces = { "127.0.0.1" }; admins = { "admin@xxx.b32.i2p" }; modules_enabled = { "roster"; "saslauth"; "tls"; "dialback"; "disco"; "posix"; "private"; "vcard"; "register"; "admin_adhoc"; "darknet"; }; modules_disabled = {}; allow_registration = false; darknet_only = true; c2s_require_encryption = true; s2s_secure_auth = false; authentication = "internal_plain";

On Debian/Ubuntu daemonize = true; pidfile = "/var/run/prosody/prosody.pid"; log = { error = "/var/log/prosody/prosody.err"; "*syslog"; } certificates = "certs";

VirtualHost "xxx.b32.i2p"; ssl = { key = "/etc/prosody/certs/xxx.b32.i2p.key"; certificate = "/etc/prosody/certs/xxx.b32.i2p.crt"; }

The last step is the certificate generation by running the following: openssl genrsa -out /etc/prosody/certs/xxx.b32.i2p.key 2048 openssl req -new -x509 -key /etc/prosody/certs/xxx.b32.i2p.key -out /etc/prosody/certs/xxx.b32.i2p.crt -days 3650 chown root:prosody /etc/prosody/certs/.b32.i2p.{key,crt} chmod 640 /etc/prosody/certs/.b32.i2p.{key,crtt}

You need to add then an admin account via prosodyctl adduser admin@xxx.b32.i2p and restart prosody.

Localhost:

Specify custom server address to: 127.0.0.1 port 5222

Via I2P:

Set your remote address to: 127.0.0.1 port 4447

If everything is configured correctly, you will be able add other users of I2P federation to your contacts and chat with them and you can test your setup with adding a contact and send it ‘hello’ (or whatever you like) hello@xmpp<yourID>.b32.i2p.

Closing Words

It’s not hard to setup your own XMPP server, the documentation is very detailed and you only need to change the configuration file, same goes for I2P it’s all about the configuration. Try and error if you’re beginner but I hope I explained the guide good enough to get a first start in to the XMPP and I2P world.

Windows users need alternative forks but the configuration is except the certificate genration exactly the same. They usually have a button to generate a certificate automatically.

Everything else is self explaining and you can now chat secure over I2P. If you have a PI I suggest you run your XMPP server on it, in order to avoid wasting much energy since you like to be available all the time.

Enjoy your secure chat!

How To use XMPP + I2P to build your own decentralized messenger Building decentralized messenger run by users instead of corporations is definitely now new but thanks to…

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Is Microsoft going to buy GitHub?

Is Microsoft going to buy GitHub?

Microsoft is said to be in serious talks about a possible acquisition of GitHub, currently the largest source-code repository in the world. A report by Business Insider suggests the Redmond giant has been in talks regarding a buyout for years now but that the discussions have heated up recently, possibly owing to the impending departure of GitHub CEO Chris Wanstrath.

GitHub SEO Chris Wanstrath.…

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CK's Technology News migration to GitHub

CK’s Technology News migration to GitHub

Here some news about my website and the current status for those who are interested what I’m doing in my ‘free’ time. Well basically reading, reading and coffee drinking. Besides my daily routine, I always try to improve my Blog and my articles however, I was never really happy with WordPress and so I decided about 2 months ago to migrate to GitHub. I’m mostly 80% of my free time anyway on GitHub…

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WireGuard already outperforms OpenVPN

WireGuard already outperforms OpenVPN

I today did a short test of running WireGuard on my ASUS RT-AC86U test router, following the instructions I found in the Smallnetbuilder forum. After 2 hours it finally worked with small changes which I made to the config. After I was finished with playing around I did some speed tests to compare it’s current state with OpenVPN. The result is already amazing, and this for something which isn’t…

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AMD's virtual machine encryption bypassed - NOPE!

AMD’s virtual machine encryption bypassed – NOPE!

AMD’s Epyc server chips utilize Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) to automatically encrypt virtual machines on the fly while stored in memory, but researchers now say that they can get around it with a technique dubbed SEVer: “miscreants at the host level can alter a guest’s physical memory mappings, using standard page tables, so that the SEV mechanism fails to properly isolate and scramble…

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ADAMANT Messenger - Claims to be the most secure and anonymous messenger on Blockchain

ADAMANT Messenger – Claims to be the most secure and anonymous messenger on Blockchain

ADAMANT (yes the good stuff is always in upper letters) is another alternative messenger with the promise to be the most secure and anonymous messenger. It’s the first blockchain based messenger and looks promising. The project was created to address the issues of data confidentiality and security provided by users and transmitted through messages within the used messenger.

ADAMANT Messenger…

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Rumor: 12-16 Core Ryzen CPUs to AM4 in 2019 possible?

Rumor: 12-16 Core Ryzen CPUs to AM4 in 2019 possible?

The latest rumor is from (yet again) coming from WCCFTech so please take it with a grain of salt, that AMD will make an AM4 socket which detects CPUs with more than 8 cores, Some voices even saying 12- and 16-core CPUs. WCCFTech mentioned “according to private conversations we’ve had with incredibly knowledgeable people in the industry the actual core count figure might be closer to 12 cores” and…

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Ad-Blocker Ghostery reveals hundreds of User Email Addresses

Ad-Blocker Ghostery reveals hundreds of User Email Addresses

Ad-blocking tool Ghostery suffered from a pretty impressive, self-inflicted screwup Friday when the privacy-minded company accidentally CCed hundreds of its users in an email, revealing their addresses to all recipients.

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