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Apple's New Map
Four years in the making, it covers just 3% of the U.S.’s area and 4.9% of its population:
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The dots do matter: how to scam a Gmail user
Gmail's "dots don't matter" feature lets scammers create an account on, say, Netflix, with your email address but different dots. Results in convincing phishing emails.
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The Bullshit Web
My home computer in 1998 had a 56K modem connected to our telephone line; we were allowed a maximum of thirty minutes of computer usage a day, because my parents — quite reasonably — did not want to have their telephone shut off for an evening at a time. I remember webpages loading slowly: ten […]
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Let’s talk about usernames
A few weeks ago I released [django-registration](/projects/django-registration/) 2.4.1. The 2.4 series is the last in the django-registration 2.x line, and …
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Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
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Am I logged in or not? GDPR case study on the example of Chrome browser change
It is surprisingly difficult to find realistic, interesting and creative privacy case studies. It is perhaps even more difficult in the case of major software. There are no proper motivations for making this kind of work public (employees often paid to do some kind of work in-house; their compensation
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Firefox removes core product support for RSS/Atom feeds
TL;DR: from Firefox 64 onwards, RSS/Atom feed support will be handled via add-ons, rather than in-product.
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Maybe you don't need Rust and WASM to speed up your JS
Few weeks ago I noticed a blog post "Oxidizing Source Maps with Rust and WebAssembly" making rounds on Twitter - talking about performance benefits of replacing plain JavaScript in the core of source-map library with a Rust version compiled to WebAssembly.
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I discovered a browser bug
I accidentally discovered a huge browser bug a few months ago and I'm pretty excited about it. Security engineers always seem like the "cool kids" to me, so I'm hoping that now I can be part of the club, and y'know, get into the special parties or whatever.
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Zero-Width Characters: Invisibly fingerprinting text
In early 2016 I realized that it was possible to use zero-width characters, like zero-width non-joiner or other zero-width characters like the zero-width space to fingerprint text. Even with just a single type of zero-width character the presence or non-presence of the non-visible character is enough bits to…
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Legends of the Ancient Web (2017)
This is the text version of a talk I gave on May 24, 2017, at the Front Trends conference in Warsaw.
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Color: From Hex codes to Eyeballs
If you're curious about rainbows, colorimetry, gamma encoding, and experiments run in the late 1920s, then this is the post for you!
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Some notes about HTTP/3
HTTP/3 is going to be standardized. As an old protocol guy, I thought I'd write up some comments. Google (pbuh) has both the most popular ...
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I built a progressive web app and published it in three app stores
Summary : Turning a web app into a Progressive Web App (PWA) and submitting it to 3 app stores requires about a month of work, a few hundred dollars, and lots of red tape.
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HTTP-over-QUIC will officially become HTTP/3
The protocol that's been called HTTP-over-QUIC for quite some time has now changed name and will officially become HTTP/3. This was triggered by this original suggestion by Mark Nottingham. The QUIC Working Group in the IETF works on creating the QUIC transport protocol. QUIC is a TCP replacement done over UDP…
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The Fight for Patent-Unencumbered Media Codecs Is Nearly Won
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
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How not to structure database-backed web apps: performance bugs in the wild
How not to structure your database-backed web applications: a study of performance bugs in the wild Yang et al., ICSE’18 This is a fascinating study of the problems people get into when using…
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“Stylish” browser extension steals all your internet history
Before it became a covert surveillance tool disguised as an outstanding browser extension, Stylish really was an outstanding browser extension. It bestowed upon its users nothing less than the power to change the appearance of the internet. Its extensive bank of user-made skins gave bright websites a dark background…
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The Elements of UI Engineering
What makes UI engineering difficult?
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