getdavidhiggins

Is the blog run from the raw IP address? I wrote an article about why you should proxy a blog through a CDN: http://blog.higg.im/2015/02/10/why-i-run-this-blog-on-maxcdn...

I since moved away from roll-you-own WP solutions as it's a devops nightmare, and tricky to get right, unless you pay someone to do it for you.

You should probably try to get your domain off the apex too:

http://blog.higg.im/2014/03/10/getting-jque-re-off-the-apex/

It's a misnomer, but is someone's attempt to define any tech company which is so far apart from the rest of the pack in terms of business practices and reach that they don't warrant being called 'yet another tech company'.

This usually involves under handedness, tax loopholes, and secret handshakes that 'normal' startups are too scared to execute on. 'Normal' startups have a market safety net to fall back on and can pivit anytime they want without much fanfare caused. Unicorns are not afforded this luxury because they are, well, unicorns.

No need for an algorithm when using Steganography and Deniable Cryptography. A lot of the quantum-breakable debate pretty much ends with those two. They are in-fact bulletproof and resistant to all attempts to uncover the message, if done right, of course.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deniable_encryption

Good for mindset, but bad for soulset. A lot of people live in their heads with Modafinil, and don't take guidance from the subtle cues in nature, which they're going to have to at some point. Michael Tsarion brings this up in his talks: The War on Conciousness https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knwyZawRse8 We have a deep fear of Nature because it's the 'final boss' we have to deal with at some point. Be this death, grief, or getting old. Any number of things are competing for your attention in Nature. Rushkoff talks about how our minds increasingly live inside a computer program and are out of sync with Nature. The internal clock is ignored and we live in a constant state of panic when checking our email and trying to game the stock market: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQHubIMP-as Alongside time being out of whack, we experience different hormones and endorphins at different times of the year. So summer might be dopamine, winter might be adrenalin filled, and autumn is some sort of smart drug like Modafinil which allows for high performance.

Again this is about choice. With things like Soundcloud, you don't even have to register to download music, and I've downloaded my fair share of 1-2 hour long DJ sets from there. Basically enough music to last my entire lifetime and I will never be bored. DJ sets are great because there's no skipping through tracks, and you can have them playing in the background when doing coding, and you can discover music accidentally that way. Also there seems to be no limits on Soundcloud with regards to how much you can download. It's all you can eat, which is refreshing. I'm curious how they can achieve this though. I know they have a paid / pro plan there, but still it screams of too much upfront value and I do worry about their viability into the future. But for now Soundcloud is exponentially better than any other service out there.

Now to get a Slack account. How much do they cost a month?

That's why I wrote ‘Twitter Should Be A Public Utility’ http://blog.higg.im/2015/06/12/on-twitter/ For me the disconnect was that Twitter failed and partially succeeded in making Twitter what I call 'plumbing', or a sort of duct tape for the web. If microblogging had a stack similar to TCP/IP that could be fundamental to how the web operates, then they missed that boat repeatedly.

Yeah it seems the SHA256 is preferred here and archives are being checked, not individual files. Thanks, it all checked out

I just enabled SHA256 checking and it matches. Thanks

798B821E553B00AFDEF5FDD32E462A8599A057C5BF98665648448743EB38245E

Oh I see, thanks. It's just odd that nobody has posted the SHA1 somewhere.

It would be interesting to see the A/B results for video. If it's not obvious that video appeals to our senses more abruptly, then they could be late to this one.

The web's becoming more TV-like as time goes on, and it pains me that text is being forced to become a second class citizen of the web.

Yeah but programming languages are an abstraction layer on top of already existing architectures which are not going away any time soon. X86, ARM, etc. So as long as code can talk to low level hardware and get executed, it doesn't really matter what you language you're using.

I can understand the need to have others pick up from where you left off, but that's introducing politics into programming, and more oft than not, it confuses what you're trying to achieve (which is converting some form of input to output I hope)

As a first port of call, it would be preferable to know one low level language like C, and a scripting / CRUD language like PHP/JS, as a lot of application development now is web based. Bonus points for learning ASM as that's as low level as we can get. (Unless you work in an Intel chip facility and are not allowed tell people what you're working on).

I am using this site Hamburger Menu as a sort of browser 'acid test' and trying to get it displaying correctly on as many devices as I can. It turned out to be hard getting this to display in different browsers. I tried using a polyfill for the emoji like Twemoji and Emojify, but they break under different conditions. The site is more or less a browser acid test right now and a learning experience if anything. I will be importing what I learned about this site into future projects for sure. It originally started out as a bit of fun, but mushroomed a bit as more time was allocated to it. https://www.hamburgermenu.xyz/

Working on this at the moment: http://pimpanalytics.ga/ Make your Google Analytics stand out with Pimp Analytics. Put any 7 letter isogram in the input boxes below and create your own custom GA snippet. From Wikipedia's article on isograms: "An isogram (also known as a 'nonpattern word') is a logological term for a word or phrase without a repeating letter". Enter non-repeating alphabet [a-z] letters. Note: uppercase letters will be automatically transformed to lowercase. Note: Entering numbers will break your code as per the JS syntax. Inspired by this blogpost:

http://blog.higg.im/2015/03/17/tinkering-with-the-google-ana...

I even dogfood the service in the source code:

	 (function (m,a,c,k,i,n,g) {
     m['GoogleAnalyticsObject'] = i;
     m[i] = m[i] || function () {
         (m[i].q = m[i].q || []).push(arguments)
     }, m[i].l = 1 * new Date();
     n = a.createElement(c),
     g = a.getElementsByTagName(c)[0];
     n.async = 1;
     n.src = k;
     g.parentNode.insertBefore(n, g)
     })(window, document, 'script', '//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js', 'ga');
     ga('create', 'UA-66070213-3', 'auto');
     ga('send', 'pageview');

hiring is a factor to consider when choosing the stack

Personally I would not let hiring determine what stack you use. In the end if it gets the job done, is tested, commented, and can be proudly passed on to other engineers, then it is suitable.

One more thing I found with 'stacks' is they are not as solid as they seem, and can be swapped out with other ones, but only as needed. It is common to switch between multiple stacks throught the day. "Doing everything one step at a time, in parallel" as they say.

Some of Maciej Ceglowski's comments on this are quite funny:

https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/634105719139143680

https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/634104940089049089

https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/634104022127915009

I'm a bit tired of the AD blocking debate. There will always be two camps in this; the tech savvy, and the web consumers who think Facebook is the Internet. Lumping people into these two categories only ever worked for computers and the web, because remember; a computer is unforgiving, the programs that execute on it are unforgiving, and a computer is only as smart as its user. With very fine grained precision I can allow what traffic I want to see on my network, and I do not apologize for that. In the end AD blocking is about control structures trickling down into the consumer web. If it is the case where I am paid better than stupid people because I know how to serve them ADs better, then I suppose I win on a hermetic level; I have recast the purpose of a computer; which is something to do my bidding, and made it a mere device and gimmick for my users.

If on the other hand users are in control and I try to seize back that control, then I am in a silly game of cat and mouse, and this becomes a game of who can devise the smartest way to outsmart smart people. Not the game I want to play. Money is about keeping the channels open to receive an exchange, and if there are hangups by web publishers about whether they should disband AD networks because of AD blockers, then the game is lost.

Just open up more channels. Seek out other ways to monetize: https://gist.github.com/ndarville/4295324

Also similar: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4924647

Wow can't knock your hustle: "Life is short, protect your marriage by sending a 5$ payment [to remove]"

You can find more here: https://www.exploit-db.com/google-hacking-database/ These are called "Google Dorks" for some reason, even though there's nothing dorky about them. Some of these are honeypots / tarpits monitoring inbound traffic, others are actual servers which are running old versions of PHP. Frankly though if it's public like that it often is a red flag that the webmaster has made other bad choices with their servers...

Yes - and hackers are still stereotyped as wearing hoodies and speaking street. Sort of annoying really, as I know plenty of hackers who never fitted that stereotype and yet could own everything on sight in a few keystrokes.

Will be interesting to see if Tomato works on this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomato_(firmware)

Worth watching the CCC talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oCOdGpXvZY Personally, finding 'holes' in GSM/3G is a fruitless task, because they are SIGINT enabled as the default. Finding holes in deliberately weakened systems makes you look clever, but you're only part of the wider problem of legacy systems that are deliberately kept online because of arcane lawful interception 'laws' (they're not really laws, they're just one law for the police, and none for you).

Another reason not to trust these services. Next week this could be dropbox.

Well a Wordpress production site is a rare and precious thing to find on Github. There are some that exist, but then even if I do find it:

1.) Password will be changed

2.) Possible honeypot

3.) Boring site is boring. No need to hack it. Not popular enough

Same goes for other databases on there. An enormous amount of cruft to wade through to get anything remotely juicy/interesting. And the same heuristics apply above: is it really so great that I logged into a boring MYSQL database that is probably being monitored and has nothing interesting in there in the first place?

"Passwords" in the title is a bit misleading. Most of these are staging files with little or no sensitive information there. However there is the odd bit of interesting data there if you look hard enough.

Github search is an untapped resource just like Algolia Search is on Hackernews. Infact I have largely replaced my Google searches with these ones for more refined and curated results.

There's a more recent book out titled "The 7 Qualities of Highly Secure Software" (2012) http://amazon.decenturl.com/secure-software Worth a read

There's also "Threat Modeling: Designing for Security" http://amazon.decenturl.com/threat-modeling (2014)

A personal favorite of mine is this book "Fuzzing: Brute Force Vulnerability Discovery", by Michael Sutton

http://amazon.decenturl.com/fuzzing

Best looking at how hackers are getting in, as-well as programming defensively. Tobias Klein's "A Bug Hunter's Diary" is a good read too:

http://amazon.decenturl.com/bug-hunter

Eat. Sleep. Rave. Repeat

Seriously though if you ask a millenial these days, they have largely transcended that narrative. All they want to do is drink coffee, create stuff, and sleep. If all else fails, it's Elon Musk for president of the world, and we can finally do panspermia.

For a more real time experience, I made this bookmarklet:

http://blog.higg.im/2015/06/20/open-all-secure-https-hackern...

I wrote a post in response to Costolo stepping down. Since the trendy thing is to post punditry about Twitter, I couldn't help but chime in.

"On Twitter" - http://blog.higg.im/2015/06/12/on-twitter/

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Also, you can make up your own mind about this:

http://www.vox.com/2015/6/11/8761731/twitter-trouble-faceboo...

http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/06/03/what-twitter-can-be-2...

https://medium.com/@michaeledwards/re-imaging-twitter-ea4e11...

http://www.novaspivack.com/uncategorized/why-twitters-engage...

https://alexgaynor.net/2014/oct/30/i-hope-twitter-goes-away/

http://blog.higg.im/twitters-self-immolation/

http://john.do/twitter-quit/

http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/22/twitters-dilemma/

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/04/a-eulo...

http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2015/04/30/twitters-multi-b...