Alireza Gharib Blog

Two weeks. That’s how long your organization will have to prepare if you face a NIS 2 compliance audit. In those two weeks (just 10 working days), you’ll need to collate a huge amount of evidence to show you’re meeting minimum security standards. We’re talking about risk assessment records, an overview of all your security…

At the time of writing, there are hundreds of thousands of publicly known vulnerabilities. These range from critical flaws that could cause irreparable damage if exploited to low-severity issues that might seem barely even worth bothering with. With vulnerability management, the challenge is knowing which is which.  With so many vulnerabilities across operating systems, networks, software,…

The LM3914 LED bar graph driver was an amazing chip back in the day. Along with the LM3915, its logarithmic cousin, these chips gave a modern look to projects, allowing dancing LEDs to stand in for a moving coil meter. But time wore on and the chips got harder to find and even harder to…

Bluetooth is a good way to connect devices that are near each other. However, it can drain batteries which is one reason Bluetooth Low Energy — BLE — exists. [Drmph] shows how easy it is to deploy BLE to make, in this case, a doorbell. He even shows how you can refit an existing doorbell…

At the recent 38C3 conference in Germany, someone gave a talk about sending TOSLINK digital audio over fiber optic networks rather than the very low-end short distance fibre you’ll find behind hour CD player. This gave [Manawyrm] some ideas, so of course the IP-over TOSLINK network was born. TOSLINK is in effect I2S digital audio…

Every engineer is going to have a bad day, but only an unlucky few will have a day so bad that it registers on a seismometer. We’ve always had a morbid fascination with engineering mega-failures, few of which escape our attention. But we’d never heard of the Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector implosion until stumbling upon [Alexander…

Sheet metal is very easy to form, including the pressing in of intricate shapes with dies and a hydraulic press, but the dies themselves are slightly harder to come by. What if we could 3D print custom dies to stamp logos and more into sheet metal? This is the premise of a recent video by…

It is old news that you can print PCB artwork on glossy paper and use a clothes iron to transfer the toner to a copper board, which will resist etchant. But [Squalius] shows us how to do a similar trick with 3D prints in a recent video, which you can see below. The example used…

For a lot of us, soldering just seems to come naturally. But if we’re being honest, none of us was born with a soldering iron in our hand — ouch! — and if we’re good at soldering now, it’s only thanks to good habits and long practice. But what if you’re a company that lives…

Martin Wendiggensen reveals how disinformation shaped Taiwan’s election, and how AI-powered research uncovered hidden influences on voter behavior.  AI disinformation, deep fakes, armies of lying bots, and automated deception is the biggest threat to our elections, or so we’ve been told. But looking at Taiwan’s 2024 election, none of these nightmare scenarios materialized. The deafening…