Last update on August 4, 2023
Don't complain about lack of content; the primary purpose of this website is to provide information on how to contact me. My Master's thesis is coming soon,™ I swear!
My name is Simon ‘sinic’ Nicolussi. I'm currently
working as a software engineer at
Barracuda Networks
studying computer science at the
University of Innsbruck.
At least one other Simon Nicolussi appears to be living in Switzerland,
so please don't blame him for something I did or the other way around.
April 17, 2014: Revoked my certificate on April 7 (because of Heartbleed). A new certificate is in use since a few days.
May 22, 2013: This site is now also available over HTTPS. Furthermore my PGP key has been updated, but that has become a yearly ritual by now and will no longer be announced. Yes, that was quite the underwhelming update considering that it took five months.
August 27, 2012: Huh, I just found out that EOF aborts the password prompt in vanilla cryptsetup. A new mkinitrd package incorporating the (now trivial) patch has been uploaded to my Slackware page.
April 14, 2012: A new package for Python 2.6.8 has been uploaded to my Slackware page. It fixes a number of security issues, including the hash collision attack presented at 28C3. Everyone is recommended to upgrade.
February 25, 2012: I was not fully satisfied with the results of my Bachelor's thesis about human-readable names for hidden services in Tor, so I didn't bother to publish it back then. Similar ideas seem to come up every few months on Tor's mailing lists, however, so maybe my work is still useful to someone else.
January 27, 2012: I've uploaded packages for UUDeview (including the static library) and a version of slrn that links against it to my Slackware page. Binary articles in newsgroups can now be decoded from within slrn.
January 16, 2012:
In hopes that people searching for a BIOS update for their Thinkpad X201,
X201i, X201s or X201 Tablet will end up here: There is a bootable update
CD for version 1.38, despite 1.37 being listed as the current release at
Lenovo's site.
They seemingly forgot to link the ISO (the Windows utility, on
the other hand, is at 1.38) and haven't reacted in a week,
so there you go
until January 19.
December 23, 2011: I've written a patch for vlock, now it's possible to unlock the screen using your fingerprint. A Slackware package is available, as always, at my Slackware page. My login(1) patch has also been updated along with the accompanying package.
December 14, 2011: Since Slackware doesn't support PAM, I had to throw together some code to make the shadow tool suite's login(1) ask for my fingerprint instead of my password. You will also need libfprint for this to work. I've compiled and packaged 64-bit binaries for your comfort, they are available at my Slackware page.
December 13, 2011: The patches for Slackware are getting unwieldy. Now I've built some packages and decided to offer them on a separate page. More to follow soon.
November 24, 2011: The patch you all waited for: vi keys for lilo. I really don't like inconsistent user interfaces :)
October 27, 2011: I finally got my BSc from the University of Innsbruck, so I guess my old homepage will have to move too. Stay tuned.
This section contains some of the old stuff from my university homepage.
August 22, 2011: Here's a trivial patch for DHEX to make the color of the header specifiable in the configuration file and another one to permit using the default color of the terminal. Now it is possible to have a transparent background.
August 20, 2011: This patch for Slackware's mkinitrd allows for infinite retries when entering the password for an encrypted LUKS device after the default 3 attempts. Useful for full-disk-encrypted systems and fat-fingered people. Note that you have to regenerate your initrd-tree after installing the patched mkinitrd, for example by executing the output of mkinitrd_command_generator.sh.
March 12, 2011: Time to revive this section… I'll start slowly with a patch that makes the in-game help of hack(6) (the predecessor of NetHack) work again.
January 29, 2010: Here's a port of sslstrip for OpenBSD. I'll send this to ports@ as soon as I'm able to deal with arising problems in a timely manner.
September 11, 2009: I've written a small patch for cwm(1) in OpenBSD. It makes colors for the menu and its font specifiable in the cwmrc(5).
Feel free to contact me. I speak German, English and a little Italian. Encrypted correspondence gets priority handling.
| LEGAL NAME | Simon Nicolussi |
|---|---|
| PHONE NUMBER | +43-680-1146091 |
| EMAIL ADDRESS | sinic@sinic.name (OpenPGP) |
| WEBSITE | http{s,}://{www.,}sinic.name/ |
You can also meet me in person at the IT-Syndikat in Innsbruck or at events like the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin/Hamburg/Leipzig.
Last update on August 4, 2023