Spam is everywhere. If you have an email account, a mailbox, a website with comments, a cellphone, a social media account, a public form, etc. We all know it, it is a plague. Over the years, there have been multiple attempts to fight spam, with various degrees of success, some more effective than others, some […]
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Hawkpost enters “maintenance only” mode
In practice this already happened a couple of years ago, now we are just making it official. For those who don’t know, Hawkpost is a side project that I started while at Whitesmith back in 2016 (8+ years ago). I’ve written about it here in the blog on several occasions. To sum it up, it […]
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Is it “/.well-known/”?
Ironically, according to my experience, the .well-known directory doesn’t do justice to its name. Even in use cases that would fit nicely in its original purpose. But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. Let’s first start with what it is, then move to discuss where it’s used. But we’ll do this rapidly, otherwise this […]
PyCon US happened in May, this month, the 154 videos gradually started being published on YouTube. Between now and then many other interesting conferences took place. That’s a lot of talks, presentations, and content to be digested. The truth is, I and most people, won’t watch it all since our time is limited. One option, […]
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Ways to have an atomic counter in Django
This week, I’m back at my tremendously irregular Django tips series, where I share small pieces of code and approaches to common themes that developers face when working on their web applications. The topic of today’s post is how to implement a counter that isn’t vulnerable to race conditions. Counting is everywhere, when handling money, […]
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Are Redis ACL password protections weak?
Earlier this year, I decided to explore Redis functionality a bit more deeply than my typical use-cases would require. Mostly due to curiosity, but also to have better knowledge of this tool in my “tool belt”. Curiously, a few months later, the whole ecosystem started boiling. Now we have Redis, Valkey, Redict, Garnet, and perhaps […]
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Local AI to the rescue
The last couple of years have been dominated by the advancements in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) field. Many of us witnessed and are currently experiencing some sort of renaissance of AI. It started with generated images from prompts, then it was all types of written content, and in the last few weeks we’ve seen astonishing […]
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Security.txt in the wild
A few years ago, I covered here in the blog the “security.txt spec”. A standard place with the security related contacts, designed to help researchers, and other people, find the right contacts to report vulnerabilities and other problems. At the time, I added it to my personal domain, as an example. When I wrote the […]
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New Nostr and Lightning Addresses
Bitcoin Atlantis is just around the corner. This conference, happening here in Madeira, is something unusual for us locals. The common pattern is that we have to fly to attend such conferences. I plan to attend the event, and I will be there with an open mindset, since there are always new things to learn. […]
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My setup to keep up with podcasts
To be sincere, I have a strong preference for written content. There is something with audio and video (podcasts and streams) that doesn’t fit very well with me or how I consume content when I’m at the computer. Nevertheless, there is a lot a great content that is only available through podcasts. So sometimes I […]