The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML
I've told this story at conferences - but due to the general situation I thought I'd retell it here. A few years ago I was doing policy research in a housing benefits office in London. They are singularly unlovely places. The walls are brightened up with posters offering helpful services for people fleeing domestic…
NYT journalist hacked with Pegasus after reporting on previous hacking attempts
Our forensic analysis of two iPhones belonging to Hubbard found evidence of Pegasus infections in July 2020 and June 2021. Notably, these infections occurred after Hubbard reported in January 2020 that we found that he was targeted in 2018 by the Saudi Arabia-linked Pegasus operator that we call KINGDOM.
How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler
In the last three months, tech giants have censored political speech and journalism to manipulate U.S. politics, while liberals, with virtual unanimity, have cheered.
Amazon Prime inflates prices, using the false promise of ‘free shipping’
A new antitrust case shows that Prime inflates prices across the board, using the false promise of 'free shipping' that is anything but free.
QOI: Lossless Image Compression in O(n) Time
Introducing QOI — the Quite OK Image Format . It losslessly compresses RGB and RGBA images to a similar size of PNG, while offering a 20x-50x speedup in compression and 3x-4x speedup in decompression. All single-threaded, no SIMD. It's also stupidly simple .
Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors
Apple today announced M1 Pro and M1 Max, the next breakthrough chips for the Mac.
Google can ban your Android app if they think you’ve clicked on your own ads
Google can and will permanently ban your Android app if Google thinks you’ve clicked on your own ads
Thank you, GitHub
This morning, I sent the following post to the GitHub team. TL;DR: I’m moving on to my next adventure, and Thomas Dohmke (currently Chief Product Officer) will be GitHub’s next CEO.
30k U.S. organizations newly hacked via holes in Microsoft Exchange Server
At least 30,000 organizations across the United States — including a significant number of small businesses, towns, cities and local governments — have over the past few days been hacked by an unusually aggressive Chinese cyber espionage unit that’s focused on stealing email from victim organizations, multiple sources…
I Still Use RSS
Usable Security, Human-Computer Interaction & AI, from a UNIX perspective.
Screw it, I’ll host it myself
It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye. Likewise, it’s all fun and games until someone loses access to their private and/or business data because they trusted it to someone else.
Getting better at Linux with mini-projects
The first thing I wanted to learn more about was UNIX since Linux is a UNIX-like operating system. I also never really felt that I fully understood what exactly UNIX was, besides being a family of fairly similar operating systems.
A deep dive into an NSO zero-click iMessage exploit: Remote Code Execution
Posted by Ian Beer & Samuel Groß of Google Project Zero We want to thank Citizen Lab ...
SQLite is not a toy database
Here is why SQLite is a perfect tool for you - whether you are a developer, data analyst, or geek.
Man who thought opening a TXT file is fine thought wrong
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Apple broke up with me
Do not get too attached to your Apple account; it belongs to Apple, NOT YOU!
Extreme HTTP Performance Tuning
This post will walk you through the performance tuning steps that I took to serve 1.2 million JSON 'API' requests per second from a 4 vCPU AWS EC2 instance.
Firefox 87 trims HTTP Referrers by default to protect user privacy
We are pleased to announce that Firefox 87 will introduce a stricter, more privacy-preserving default Referrer Policy. From now on, by default, Firefox will trim path and query string ...
Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful
30 underrated reasons to be thankful, starting with the fact that atomic bombs don’t ignite the atmosphere
A visual guide to SSH tunnels
This page explains use cases and examples of SSH tunnels while visually presenting the traffic flows. For example, here's a reverse tunnel that allows only users from IP address 1.2.3.4 access to port 80 on the SSH client through an SSH server.
Google Chrome to remove detailed cookie and site data controls
A month ago I ran into an obscure Google Chrome bug on macOS that caused the "All cookies and site data" page in Chrome settings ( chrome://settings/siteData ) to load very slowly. You can see this page if you open Preferences, select "Privacy and security", "Cookies and other site data", and then "See all cookies and…