Author: Joe Nord

Hurricane approaching, you live on the water with a canal behind the house, does the boat go in the water or stay on the lift? With the experience of hurricane Irma just completed, I can answer this question: Put the boat in the water. A better answer is “get the boat out of the water, […]

After writing a 3 part series on purchasing and using S/MIME certificates with Microsoft Outlook 2016, some months went by I started receiving certificate renewal emails from Entrust. The first encouragement to renew arrived at 90-day warning, then 60, 30 and finally, 10. This post reviews the Entrust renewal process and describes that it is […]

Phishing is popular activity in evil circles. Avoiding HTML and rich-text formatted email is a level of defense; one that I’ve taken on recently as a matter of security hygiene. This post describes how to configure Microsoft Office 2016 to read and send all email as text, and discusses some of the opportunities lost in […]

Setting up a secondary FTP account for GoDaddy CPanel hosting requires different configuration than I expected. The trick is that while the primary FTP account uses SFTP, the secondary accounts need to be configured for FTP over TLS. This was a large enough headache for me that I share the details here so some others may be […]

In parts 1 and 2 of this series, I reviewed the difficult process of purchasing a personal certificate to use with S/MIME and the lengthy process required to get that certificate installed where Microsoft Outlook 2016 can use it for S/MIME signed email.  This post will show how to send your public key to friends, where you and they […]

In Part-1 of this series, I described the process of purchasing and installing a personal certificate.  In my case, certificate was purchased from Entrust and I noted that once the purchase process was complete, the certificate exists for use in the Internet Explorer web browser, but that is all.  With the purchase done, Microsoft Outlook will not […]

As a big fan of crypto, it has always rather amazed me that S/MIME hasn’t had more success. We hear many accounts of users cannot handle the certificate management required to make something like PGP or S/MIME work. I have been doing some experiments and have concluded that we got it wrong; we are blaming […]

Steve Ballmer is paraphrased in this ZDNet article saying “the company needs to ensure Windows Phone handsets can run Android apps”.  For a guy who spent more than 5 years writing system code for OS/2, the parallels to WinOS2 are pretty interesting.   Here’s the lesson: The operating system must stand on its own, or your just postpone […]

Originally published Dec 24 2014 Found an unusual PHP file hiding in the root directory of my personal website, “s-g.txt”.  The file contains PHP code and last line contains “lave” which for some reason, the human brain quickly converts into “eval” and that’s suspicious, so it’s time to tear this apart.  Note: Despite my attempts to post the […]

(Originally published Oct 24 2013) At the 2013 Masters Golf Tournament, Tiger Woods nearly holed an approach shot on the 15th hole – only to have it bounce off the flag and go back into the water. Tough break!  A number of friends have asked me to explain the 3 strokes in penalty so I write […]