Categories
Technology and Internet

Securing IoT Devices

During the first couple of months of the year 2015 I’ve worked a “little” on the subject of security in the Internet of things world. Even though there is a lot of information about this topic and its crucial role on this new era of the IoT. So today I will share a small document […]

Categories
Python

Django friday tips: Switch the user model

In the most recent versions of django, you’re no longer attached to the default user model. So unlike what happened some time ago, when you had two models (User and Profile) “linked” together through an one-to-one relationship, nowadays you can extend or substitute the base user model. It is as simples as adding the following […]

Categories
Technology and Internet

An heavy chat application

Following up the quote I pointed some time ago in an entry entitled “Bloat”, I will let here one good example. I know Slack it is a great application and it has some complex features, yet I don’t see any reason for any chat program to steal almost 900 Megabytes of my computer’s memory. Note: […]

Categories
Technology and Internet

Newsletters for Python web developers

The amount of new information that is added each day to the web is overwhelming, trying to keep up daily with everything about a given topic can be a time consuming process. One good way I found to tackle this problem and to avoid wasting a good chunk of my day searching and filtering through […]

Categories
Technology and Internet

Getting started with GPG

Last week I gave a small workshop during the lunch hour (the famous Whitesmith’s “Lunch’n Learn”) about openPGP. It only covered the most basic aspects so that non-technical people could be introduced to this tool, something that can be very useful when someone is sharing or working with sensitive information (either personal or work related). […]

Categories
Technology and Internet

Integrating security tests into web applications

Today I published a blog post about how to easily run and automate security tests while developing your websites and web applications using Zed Attack Proxy. The example uses Ruby on Rails framework but it is independent of any stack. I’m planning to write a follow up article on the same theme, so any feedback on […]

Categories
Technology and Internet

“Bloat”

Last week I’ve read a great post entitled “Web Design: The First 100 Years“, it is a long one but definitely worth reading. I will just leave here a quote (3 short paragraphs) because it puts into words something that already crossed my mind multiple times. “A further symptom of our exponential hangover is bloat. […]

Categories
Technology and Internet

Disable Firefox’s pocket integration

Firefox has been my browser of choice for quite some time now. However recent decisions made by Mozilla are increasing my desire to change soon. They added “ads” on the “new tab page”, changed the UI to just look like chrome, decided to include DRM directly into the browser (more on that), etc. The last […]

Categories
Technology and Internet

Plasma 5

Upon the release of the new version of Kubuntu, I decided to update my Ubuntu machine and move from the rock solid KDE4 to the new Plasma 5 desktop environment. In this post I do a small overview of my experience with it until now. I first started with the version 5.2 since it is […]

Categories
Technology and Internet

Please do not let your SSL certificate expire

Please avoid what is happening right now with the student’s platform of my university, that is, letting your SSL certificate expire over the weekend. Initially it will raise suspicion and distrust based on the alert showed by the browser and if the issue lasts too long it will expose lots of users to phishing attacks, […]