Technical on Tibo Laperre

On Virtual Environments

Tue, 02 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In a previous post I talked a bit about shells. I explained that a shell is a proces that launches other programs. That got me wondering… When I activate a virtual environment, such as a Python or Anaconda venv, is that also launching a program?

The answer is NO

Some commands will launch a new process, some won’t. Things that launch new processes are for example .exe files like python.exe, notepad.exe and ping.exe. What doesn’t launch a new process, are most built-in commands like cd, mkdir and echo, Powershell cmdlets such as Get-Location, and - as you can see in red - the commands to activate Python virtual environments.

Terminal, CLI, shell

Tue, 25 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Terminal, command line interface (CLI), shell…

They are commonly known terms used interchangeably to mean “the nerdy box where you type in commands”.

However these words all have slightly different meanings.

Terminal

A computer needs some way for the users to be able to interact with it. Years ago they used a seperate physical ’terminal’ to do that. It was a screen with a keyboard attached to it. That way you could type in commands to control another more powerfull pc.

Unveiling iOS Keychain: Simplified Understanding of Automatic Logins

Sat, 30 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In my quest to bolster my digital privacy, I’ve found myself uninstalling spyware apps like Reddit and YouTube from my phone, only to reinstall them a few days later (don’t judge me 😉) and discovering that I’m seamlessly logged back in. In this blog post, I’ll delve into the mechanisms responsible for this phenomenon.

Since HTTP is stateless, every time my device interacts with Reddit, it needs to include a piece of information with its requests to identify me. This crucial piece of data usually comes in the form of an access token appended to the HTTP request via a header:

What ACTUALLY Happens When You Click Random Links

Tue, 27 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We all know better than to click on random links. Malware and scams frequently hide behind a mysterious looking url, yet a part of me – driven by curiosity – wonders what lies beyond that click. However I never satisfy that desire because I am uncertain of the mechanisms of how malware could end up on my device. In this post I take away my ignorance on the topic by diving into the nitty gritty technical details of a drive-by download attack.

DNS Over Https for My Whole Family With OpenWRT

Tue, 20 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I am currently working as a part time student ICT support engineer for a financial company. In said company we obviousely use a firewall. Before working there ‘firewall’ was kind off a fancy IT buzzword to me – Something I didn’t know nor cared about. Now at the time I had just started my masters thesis in the field of privacy preserving data publishing (PPDP). That really sparked my interest in online privacy, leading me deep into the rabit hole of privacy centered blogs, books and youtube channels (yes…Google, sadly these content creators have to reach an audience somehow). And I remembered watching a video of Mental Outlaw on OpenWRT, a FOSS router/firewall firmware that runs well on low specced devices.

Encodings Confuse Me

Tue, 13 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Context

Recently I was learning about the bittorrent protocol from this excellent video series on youtube. The creator of the series Arpit Bhayani explaines all about the protocol, the seeders, the leechers, decentralized (the usual). Then he explained what a .torrent file was. A .torrent file has a bunch of fields to get the file names, file lenghts, the url to find the tracker where your torrent is listed. These files are bencoded (or the files are bencoded encoded? idk). He suggested that it was a good idea to write your own decoder for bencoded files.