Social Networks for the life of the world
Can we learn anything from the past few years of leaked secrets? Sure, we can learn that some big-shot executives and elected officials are lazy and feckless. We can learn that software is brittle and needs diligent patching. We can learn that a determined person trying to exfiltrate data has a HUGE advantage over the … Read more
Somebody asked whether it’s a good idea to encrypt database columns in a web application. My answer: “It probably won’t help much.” Why? Figure out your threat model Best practice: figure out your threat model before you spend time and money securing your system. If you build complex security measures without a clear idea of … Read more
On September 7th, 2017, the credit bureau Equifax announced that cybercriminals broke in to its company servers sometime in mid-May 2017 and stole copies of information like Social Security Numbers, driver’s license numbers, birth dates, and home addresses for as many as 143 million residents of the US. The total population is about 329 million, … Read more
Suppose you’re working on a web application to support users in multiple time zones. How do you handle dates and times? If your users all live in one time zone, it’s easy. Simply store important date and time data in DATETIME or TIMESTAMP columns, and be done with it. But, what application has users in just one … Read more
Bloomberg News published an article today putting the lie to Navient’s claim to helping manage student debt. In a court filing, the company (which used to be part of the Sallie Mae US federal student lending agency) said it was a conflict of interest to help students. Their primary role is collecting on loans. Dear … Read more
MySQL’s FULLTEXT search feature works best when it’s used on a large corpus of text. That is, for best results you need many rows. When the text corpus is too small, full text searching often returns strange results: the indexing process tries to work out common words. If the amount of text being indexed is … Read more
Internet security guy Troy Hunt has put out a good video to teach you about keeping yourself secure online. This is free. It’s on youTube. Troy is very reliable. This is worth an hour of your time. https://www.troyhunt.com/get-to-grips-with-internet-security-basics-courtesy-of-varonis/
You can set up your gmail account to send and receive mail using other email accounts. This is convenient, because you don’t have to remember to log in to your other accounts to get that email. You can, of course, still receive and send email with your original gmail account. This video tutorial explains how … Read more
I thought William Shakespeare was the master of insults. “In civility thou seem’st so empty,” for example, from As you like it. But now Randall Munroe, the author of XKCD, is catching up with his insults about code quality.
Lately I’ve been doing some work with Allan Jardine’s DataTables jQuery plugin. You know the SNL line saying, “if it’s not Scottish, it’s crap!” This software does nothing to disprove that saying. It’s excellent. Datatables does a great, and simple, job of transforming plain old html data tables into sortable and searchable marvels. It also supports Ajax callbacks, … Read more