Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads
How I tracked myself down using leaked location data in the in-app ads, and what I found along the way.
How I tracked myself down using leaked location data in the in-app ads, and what I found along the way.
As it turns out they don't actually want you to do this (and have some interesting ways to stop you)
Wired reported this week that a 19-year-old working for Elon Musk ‘s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was given access to sensitive US government systems even though his past association with cybercrime communities should have precluded him from gaining the necessary security clearances to do so…
What could've been the largest data breach in the world - an attack chain on Google services to leak the email address of any YouTube channel
The very short version: it is madness to continue transferring the running of European societies and governments to American clouds. Not only is it a terrible idea given the kind of things the “King of America” keeps saying, the legal sophistry used to justify such transfers, like the nonsense letter the Dutch cabinet…
Chicago argued that answering a FOIA request with a database query means creating a new record. Matt Chapman sued, I wound up on the stand explaining SQL, and now there's a bill to fix it.
Until a few years ago, any app you installed on an Android device could see all other apps on your phone without your permission.
how to gain code execution on millions of people and hundreds of popular apps
The EU is pushing legislation that would scan all our private messages, even in encrypted apps.
The majority of the traffic on the web is from bots. For the most part, these bots are used to discover new content. These are RSS Feed readers, search engines crawling your content, or nowadays AI bo
It's just normal crime
Hello, I'm Derin!
A whistleblower at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) alleged last week that denizens of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) siphoned gigabytes of data from the agency’s sensitive case files in early March. The whistleblower said accounts created for DOGE at the NLRB downloaded three code…
This weekend I had to buy a new dishwasher because our old GE died. I bought a Bosch 500 series because that's what Consumer Reports recommended, and more importantly, I could find one in stock. After my dad and I got it installed, I went to run a rinse cycle, only to find that that, along with features like delayed…
The payment card giant MasterCard just fixed a glaring error in its domain name server settings that could have allowed anyone to intercept or divert Internet traffic for the company by registering an unused domain name. The misconfiguration persisted for nearly five years until a security researcher spent $300 to…
where my words occasionally escape /dev/null
How I wrote filter rules for YouTube
I was 30 seconds away from running malware, Here's how a sophisticated scam operation almost got me, and why every developer needs to read this.
This has been a very long time coming, but finally, after a marathon effort, the brand new Have I Been Pwned website is now live! Feb last year is when I made the first commit to the public repo for the rebranded service, and we soft-launched the new brand
In this project, I started to reverse engineer payment card terminals because they seemed to be an interesting target for security research, given the high stakes involved. Although I initially didn’t know much about this industry, I did expect a ton of security features and a very security-hardened device. And to…
Hey… quick question, why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?
Update: This post received a large amount of attention on Hacker News — see the discussion thread.
A security architect with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) alleges that employees from Elon Musk ‘s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) transferred gigabytes of sensitive data from agency case files in early March, using short-lived accounts configured to leave few traces of network activity. The NLRB…
One of Germany's biggest ISPs changed how their DNS works, right after I exposed an organization that they’re part of.
💡Update May 3, 2025: I have posted a follow-up, Here's the source code for the unofficial Signal app used by Trump officials. Update May 4, 2025: Another followup, and a big one: The Signal Clone the Trump Admin Uses Was Hacked Update May 6, 2025: I've written
With ZWJ (Zero Width Joiner) sequences you could in theory encode an unlimited amount of data in a single emoji.
If you were worried about tracking cookies, you really don’t want to know about browser fingerprinting.
Spoiler: it doesn’t. But it should.
Making web crawlers eat shit since 2023
Am I now committing civil disobedience... just by keeping my personal literary website up as is?