Per this Wired security news this week story, a company named Securus claims to be able to track nearly any cell phone in the United States, within seconds.
This past week I started working with the Play Framework (version 2.6), and this is a quick look at how to implement user authentication in a Play application. Specifically this blog post focuses on how to create a custom action so you can secure your Play controllers methods, where you’ll implement those methods using this new, custom action.
A long time ago — 2005, to be exact — I read this article named Making wrong code look wrong, and it was a big influence on me. These days I don’t know how many people use variable naming conventions, but when working on web applications I still like the “us” (unsafe) and “s” (safe) convention for handling user input. As Joel Spolsky discusses in that article, that convention has a good way of making wrong software code look wrong.
As of this writing on March 28, 2018, I still have two Drupal 6 websites that I haven’t taken the time to update to Drupal 7 or 8. Today there was a big Drupal security release, so I either had to update those two websites or shut them down.
Due to a potential security issue I’ve disabled new comments on this website. Hopefully they’ll be re-enabled next week.
For the last few years, Intel CPUs have included a copy of the MINIX operating system way down in “Ring -3,” which apparently has support for networking and a web server. ZDnet has one of the more detailed stories about "MINIX Inside.”
I was surprised to find out yesterday that you can change your Amazon email address without having to verify the change from your old email account. You only have to verify the new email address. That seems like a flaw.
I haven’t been blown away by MacOS (nee OS X) in quite some time, and the latest MacBook design seems to have annoyed even more developers. A good thing about this is that it got me looking into Qubes OS, “a reasonably secure operating system.”
Apple’s philosophy of “we design the hardware and software” works well when people like your work, but when people don’t like your design it’s easy to lose customers.
According to Forbes and other sources, Apple now has its own version of a “Stagefright” security flaw, and it affects all but the most recent versions of iOS and Mac OS X. Theoretically all it requires is that a hacker sends your phone one text.
Apple’s minimalist security announcements are here: iOS 9.3.3 update, OS X update.
I’ve never used a BlackBerry phone, but I know that in the days before the first iPhone (~2007), they were big in the enterprise. As they try to recover, I like their current marketing strategy of having the fastest security updates of any Android provider.
The image comes from this cio.com story.
