Pepperland

Redefining Originality

Note: I originally wrote this position paper in December 2023, so some references may (already) be a bit dated. In November 2022, OpenAI announced the immediate availability of their artificially intelligent “chatbot” ChatGPT, its latest in a series of ever-expanding Large Language Models (LLM) capable of producing novel, human-like text.

Can Computers Create Art?

Over the past five years, an explosion of research and development in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) has led to incredible breakthroughs in human-to-machine communication. Through a training process whereby AI chatbots (such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT) were fed billions of human-authored words, these massive systems are now capable

Aaron Judge at it again…

Aaron Judge of the (dreaded) New York Yankees hit home runs number 50 and 51 last night, with his own American League record in his sights. Here is an essay I wrote about Aaron Judge’s prolific 2022 season, where I argued that MLB’s indecisiveness regarding records from the

Returned (Again!)

It's not a good look when every third post on your blog is to apologize for your extended absence, but that's where I am. For the devoted Pepperland followers, you probably noticed that the blog was not just stale, but offline for a while. (Since December

128T

Investigation in Isolation: Flume Smart Home Water Monitor

Digging into the network behavior of the Flume Smart Home Water Monitor

Featured

Investigation in Isolation: Sense

Investigating the workings of the Sense Energy Monitor.

We're Back!

For all two of you that noticed, this blog has been offline since December 2020. You see, I self-host this blog on a Raspberry Pi computer in my house; in late 2020, my family started house hunting. We found a beautiful new home, and moved into it in April of

Planned Downtime

Just a quick note to say that there will be a planned lapse in blog posts for quite some time, as my family is moving. This means I'll be shutting down the system where this blog is being hosted in anticipation of the move and relocation. There'

128T Featured

Session Analysis with the 128T Router

Accelerate your understanding of your 128T-powered network using the analyzer.py Python tool.

Juniper + 128T = ?

In case you missed the news, last week Juniper Networks announced their intention to purchase 128 Technology. It's been a wild, wild six year ride at 128 Technology. I can still remember the first day the seven of us set foot in our sublet space at One Burlington

128T

Network Effect: Streaming Services

Managing scarce network resources by prioritizing applications.

networking

Investigation in Isolation: myQ Garage Door

The next in my series of investigations into some of the various home automation devices I have installed. Today's post is the myQ garage door opener by LiftMaster. My family lives in a townhouse with a massive, and massively heavy garage door. After a few underpowered openers crashed

networking

Investigation in Isolation: Silicondust HDHomeRun PRIME

Digging into the network footprint of the HDHomeRun PRIME 3 by Silicondust.

128T Featured

Folding@Home + 128T

Contributing unused computer power to help understand the behaviors of proteins that cause human disease, including COVID-19.

networking

Investigating in Isolation: WeMo

Spending more time on my LAN now that I'm working from home, I decided to do a little research into the goings on with all the IoT devices sprinkled around my network. Here's the first of a series.

networking

Homelab/Worklab

My home-away-from-home lab setup used to explore new directions in networking.

cryptocurrency

Futurebit Apollo

Hands-on experience with the flagship Scrypt miner from Futurebit

networking

Tor Bastion Hosts

Use a Tor bastion host to reach those hard-to-get places on your network!

networking

Small Packages

An OpenWRT, USB Ethernet/wifi bridge solves a longstanding problem.

networking

Summer Networking

SD-WAN in the woods, or how I took a downed telephone pole and turned it into an opportunity.

networking

Managing DNS

One of the very first things that started me down the path of taking control of my home network was my discovery of Pi-hole, the ad-blocking DNS server. As the name implies, it runs quite well on a Raspberry Pi – which I happened to have at the time – and it

cryptocurrency

If the Thunder Don't Get You...

Building a Lightning node for fun. And profit??

security

Implementing fail2ban with 128T

Distributing a dynamic blacklist ACL among all network elements.

privacy

Browser Skirmish

De-Googling your life, or: how I learned to love Firefox.

Cowrie

Combining an SSH honeypot with fail2ban in the name of research.