Back when I was a network administrator, mobile phones were only just starting to spread throughout the corporate world. Blackberry ruled the industry with their Blackberry Enterprise Suite, and the privileged few employees were issued with phones. For the most part however, mobile devices remained very much personal and with minimal access to corporate resources.

The subject of gaining backdoor access to your private life isn’t a new one. In fact, before modern technology, authorities and organised criminals sought ways to listen in to places they shouldn’t – so what’s up with the latest attempt at gaining a peak into your private communications?

It’s no coincidence I stopped updating The Serpent right around the time my first child was born, that was a wild few years! Fortunately, a long weekend appeared over the horizon and allowed me time to sit down and catch up on some things. One of them being The Serpent.

There’s a lot of talk in the UK about the new “Snoopers Charter” that’s threatening to destroy the very fabric of the Internet (again). As I get older, I find myself worrying less and less about things like this, for two reasons:

Ever tried running your own Certification Authority (CA)? With OpenSSL – it’s not as complicated as you think, though thanks to the lack of decent documentation, there are a few pitfalls. This article walks you through the basics of setting up OpenSSL to run a CA that can sign other end entity certificates.

It turns out that attempting to revive old electronics from your childhood can be somewhat therapeutic. With that in mind, I decided to rescue the old NES that had been collecting dust in the garage for many years and see if it would still boot. Unfortunately… It did not.

For some reason, Microsoft decided not to make the following patch critical, or even make it easy to find – it’s the very first patch you should install before attempting to update Windows 7\2008 after a clean install – KB3102810 resolves the stupid “Checking for updates” taking a whole day.

Just when you had given up on being a kid and finally started to grow up as you’ve been told so many times before – not one but TWO roller-coaster simulation games come into your life. What an exciting time to be alive!

Despite Adobe’s best efforts to flog a dead horse, Flash still seemed to hold firm in 2015. But has lost some important allies along the way – namely YouTube and Chrome support, however some high profile sites such as the BBC still refuse to let it go.

SSL\TLS provides two lovely features we can’t get enough of these days; authentication, and encryption.