The largest Singaporean newspaper “The Straits Times” recently published an article on a row of car thefts in the neighboring city of Johor Bahru. I assisted the article’s author by supplying some technical knowledge. The article is attached below or available online.

I recently had a larger celebration and liked the idea of distributing disposable cameras on the tables so that everyone can take quick snapshots, which I could later collect and summarize into an album. After a bit of investigation, however, I learned that these cameras are not particularly cheap and even worse, offer horrible image quality, right down to all black photos. Basically every current smartphone today takes better pictures.

In this work, we are looking at how to analyze automotive architectures using methods from the domain of probabilistic model-checking. We assess components separately and for their exploitability and patchability and combine these assessments with a given architecture into a continuous-time Markov chain. This Markov chain can be analyzed for properties such as “How long is message m exploitable within 1 year?”. The results give us a quantifiable measure for the security of an automotive architecture and allows us to compare architectures.

In many cases it can be beneficial to run an own mail server. Although it takes a bit of effort to set up and keep it running securely, the option to store a large amount of mails in a secure location can be very interesting. This also convinced me to set up my own mail server. In the following, I will cover most of the important tools and knowledge required to set up your own mail server. And the best thing about this: You don’t need much power, a Raspberry Pi can easily handle a small private mail server!

PulseAudio is the audio framework used in many Linux distributions. It controls all audio to be played and all audio playback devices (e.g. soundcards, headphones) connected to the computer. PulseAudio also provides tools to manage these inputs and outputs (called sinks). In our electric taxi EVA we have stereo speakers on every seat. We use PulseAudio to manage the input from internet radio, as well as streams from passenger smartphones and control which output (or seat) each input is directed to. For EVA, we wanted to be able to control PulseAudio inputs and sinks from our Java framework, such that we can start playing music from different sources on different seats. The tool described here allows us to do exactly this.

On my desk at work, I am using two computers: A Windows laptop, given from our IT department and a self-administered Linux workstation. The Windows laptop is Windows 7 and the workstation is Manjaro, an Arch Linux derivate, with a KDE desktop. The workstation is crunching numbers and running most of the time. I use Synergy to use the mouse and keyboard attached to the Linux workstation also on my laptop. This setup works fine, except for the case of locking screens when leaving the desk. I always have to lock and unlock both computers separately. This is costs me a few seconds and is thus not acceptable. A script is absolutely required to make this easier.