Many webmasters decide to load JS libraries and fonts from CDNs instead of hosting them locally. The primary benefit of loading popular JS libraries from popular CDNs is that browsers can cache them. Thus user likely have those libraries cached already after loading them once.
Read more →Last night another ransomware called WCrypt hit the internet and made a big splash.
It uses an old Windows bug that has been patched two months ago to spread in local networks.
There's nothing special or interesting about it so far.
What is interesting though is that it had a built-in kill switch.
Correction: The "kill switch" was likely a sandbox detection mechanism. See this blog post by the guy who discovered it.
A security researcher accidentally activated the kill switch by registering a domain he found in the code of the malware.
I have never heard of such a kill switch before and it I got an idea.
This blog came with a default CSS file. It became obvious pretty quickly that it is not what the author of the blog software uses himself pointlessramblings.com. I used the default as a basis anyway and tweaked it to my liking. I took a fair bit of advice from the fantastic Butterick’s Practical Typography and more technical best practices from w3schools.com. There were a number of things to consider and decisions to make.
Read more →The Luapress documentation introduces environments to distinguish between development builds and production builds. Development builds are handy because you do not need to shove your files to the web server in order to see the result. However, the documentation seems to assume a locally running web server, and there is no need for that.
Read more →Privacy Badger is a nice browser extension developed by the EFF that prevents third party websites from tracking users. The EFF is also advocating a mechanism called Do Not Track (DNT) that is supposed to prevent advertisers from tracking users if the users do not wish to be tracked. DNT however is fundamentally broken because it relies on the cooperation of the advertisement industry. DNT is an opt-out mechanism where you tell the advertisers that you do not want to be tracked. The advertisers can simply ignore your wish. Similar mechanisms failed and even backfired in the offline world, they are not going to work on the web.
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