Ten years ago, after it became clear to almost everyone that all our online activity was being tracked and stored, I wrote a blog post about simple steps a person could take to improve their privacy online. Essentially, it contains a few recommendations that everyone could follow to reduce their fingerprint without much effort. It […]
Author: Gonçalo Valério
Software developer and owner of this blog. More in the "about" page.
Two years ago, I made a small tool on top of Cloudflare’s Workers to generate a single feed by taking input from multiple RSS sources, a kind of aggregator or planet software as it was usually known a few years ago. You can read more about it here and here. This is a basic tool […]
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Playing with maps
I’ve always been astonished about how well mapping apps work. Sure, when Google Maps was first released the sense of wonder was much greater than it is nowadays, nevertheless it is still impressive. The number of situations when/where this kind of software becomes handy is huge, from the well-known GPS guides to even games (remember […]
At the start of last week, we received great news regarding new improvements to a very popular security app, “Google Authenticator”. A feature it was lacking for a long time was finally implemented, “cloud backups”. However, after a few days, the security community realized the new feature wasn’t as good as everybody was assuming. It […]
Last year, I built a small tool to detect inline styles and scripts in a given webpage/document and then calculate their hashes. It can be useful for someone trying to write a strict “Content-Security-Policy” (CSP) for pre-built websites. I described the reasoning at the time in this blog post. Today, I’m writing to announce that […]
Last year we saw the rise of the Fediverse. Mostly because of a series of external events, that ended up pushing many people to try other alternatives to their centralized platform of choice. Mastodon was clearly the software component that got most attention and has been under the spotlight in the last few months. It […]
Last week, an article was published with some interesting numbers about the security of PostgreSQL servers publicly exposed to the internet (You can find it here). But more than the numbers, what really caught my attention was the fact that most clients and libraries used to access and interact with the databases have insecure defaults: […]
It already starts tomorrow… the next edition of “Hacktoberfest”. For those who don’t know, it basically is an initiative that incentivizes participants to contribute to open-source software. During the month of October, those who do 4 contributions or more, can either receive a t-shirt or opt for a tree to be planted in their name. […]
A few years ago I built a small application to test Django’s websocket support through django-channels. It basically displayed on a web page in real time all the requests made to a given endpoint (you could generate multiple of them) without storing anything. It was fun and it was very useful to quickly debug stuff […]
In a previous blog post published earlier this year I explored some security considerations of the well known “clipboard” functionality that most operating systems provide. Long story short, in my opinion there is a lot more that could be done to protect the users (and their sensitive data) from many attacks that use of clipboard […]