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Python Software Development

So you need to upgrade Django

No matter how much you try to delay and how many reasons you find to postpone, eventually the time comes. You need to update and upgrade your software, your system components, your apps, your dependencies, etc. This happens to all computer users. On some systems, this is an enjoyable experience, on other systems as painful […]

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Technology and Internet

Improving your online privacy: An update

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 […]

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Technology and Internet

New release of worker-planet

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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Security Technology and Internet

What to use for “TOTP” in 2023?

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 […]

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Technology and Internet

New release of “inlinehashes”

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 […]

Categories
Software Development

Secure PostgreSQL connections on your Django project

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: […]

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Technology and Internet

Preparing for Hacktoberfest

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. […]

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Personal Python

Shutting Down Webhook-logger

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 […]

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Security Technology and Internet

Controlling the access to the clipboard contents

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 […]

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Python

Django Friday Tips: Less known builtin commands

Django management commands can be very helpful while developing your application or website, we are very used to runserver, makemigrations, migrate, shell and others. Third party packages often provide extra commands and you can easily add new commands to your own apps. Today lets take a look at some less known and yet very useful […]