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Security Technology and Internet

Who keeps an eye on clipboard access?

If there is any feature that “universally” describes the usage of computers, it is the copy/paste pattern. We are used to it, practically all the common graphical user interfaces have support for it, and it magically works. We copy some information from one application and paste into another, and another… How does these applications have […]

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Python Software Development

Django Friday Tips: Deal with login brute-force attacks

In the final tips post of the year, lets address a solution to a problem that most websites face once they have been online for a while. If you have a back-office or the concept of user accounts, soon you will face the security problem of attackers trying to hack into these private zones of […]

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Python

Django Friday Tips: Custom Admin Pages

One of the great builtin features of Django is the admin app. It lets you, among other things, execute the usual CRUD operations on your data, search, filter and execute bulk actions on many records. However the interface is a bit rigid, by default you have the “dashboard” with the list of models, the page […]

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Python Software Development

Django Friday Tips: Password validation

This time I’m gonna address Django’s builtin authentication system, more specifically the ways we can build custom improvements over the already very solid foundations it provides. The idea for this post came from reading an article summing up some considerations we should have when dealing with passwords. Most of those considerations are about what controls […]

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Python

Django Friday Tips: Subresource Integrity

As you might have guessed from the title, today’s tip is about how to add “Subresource integrity” (SRI) checks to your website’s static assets. First lets see what SRI is. According to the Mozilla’s Developers Network: Subresource Integrity (SRI) is a security feature that enables browsers to verify that resources they fetch (for example, from […]

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Python

Django Friday Tips: Permissions in the Admin

In this year’s first issue of my irregular Django quick tips series, lets look at the builtin tools available for managing access control. The framework offers a comprehensive authentication and authorization system that is able to handle the common requirements of most websites without even needing any external library. Most of the time, simple websites […]

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Python

Django Friday Tips: Inspecting ORM queries

Today lets look at the tools Django provides out of the box to debug the queries made to the database using the ORM. This isn’t an uncommon task. Almost everyone who works on a non-trivial Django application faces situations where the ORM does not return the correct data or a particular operation as taking too […]

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Python Software Development

Why you shouldn’t remove your package from PyPI

Nowadays most software developed using the Python language relies on external packages (dependencies) to get the job done. Correctly managing this “supply-chain” ends up being very important and having a big impact on the end product. As a developer you should be cautious about the dependencies you include on your project, as I explained in […]

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Python

Django Friday Tips: Feature Flags

This time, as you can deduce from the title, I will address the topic of how to use feature flags on Django websites and applications. This is an incredible functionality to have, specially if you need to continuously roll new code to production environments that might not be ready to be released. But first what […]

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Python

Django Friday Tips: Testing emails

I haven’t written one of these supposedly weekly posts with small Django tips for a while, but at least I always post them on Fridays. This time I gonna address how we can test emails with the tools that Django provides and more precisely how to check the attachments of those emails. The testing behavior […]