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Because I'm a massive nerd, I actually try to read specification documents. As I've ranted ad nauseam before, the current TOTP0 spec is irresponsibly obsolete. The three major implementations of the spec - Google, Apple, and Yubico - all subtly disagree on how it should be implemented. Every other MFA app has their own idiosyncratic variants. The official RFC is infuriatingly vague. That's no good

Take a look at these two QR codes. Scan them if you like, I promise there's nothing dodgy in them. Left is upper-case HTTPS://EDENT.TEL/ and right is lower-case https://edent.tel/ You can clearly see that the one on the left is a "smaller" QR as it has fewer bits of data in it. Both go to the same URl, the only difference is the casing. What's going on? Your first thought might be that there's a d

As part of my new job, I'm learning a lot more about the mysteries of the Domain Name System than any mortal should know I thought possible. The humble unix dig command allows you to query all sort of DNS information. For example, to see name server records for the BBC website, you can run: dig bbc.co.uk NS Which will get you: ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 3561

Theme Switcher: 🌒 Dark 🌞 Light 📰 eInk 💻 xterm 🥴 Drunk 👻 Nude ♻️ Reset As per the AMP AC charter, I have resigned with immediate effect. As I was a non-corporate representative, I will not be nominating a replacement. I have loved working with the AC. They are a team of brilliant individuals who are all committed to trying to make AMP better, and I'm sorry to leave them. I've been a member of

Theme Switcher: 🌒 Dark 🌞 Light 📰 eInk 💻 xterm 🥴 Drunk 👻 Nude ♻️ Reset I want to discuss a (minor) antipattern that I think is (slightly) harmful. Lots of websites use large Javascript libraries. They often include them by using a 3rd party Content Delivery Network like so: HTML<script src="https://cdn.example.com/js/library-v1.2.3.js"></script> There are, supposedly, a couple of advantages t

Theme Switcher: 🌒 Dark 🌞 Light 📰 eInk 💻 xterm 🥴 Drunk 👻 Nude ♻️ Reset I have built the most inconvenient way of playing music! It is lo-fi awfulness and cyberpunk grungy. Thanks! I hate it! Ingredients Raspberry Pi USB floppy drive Audio Cable / Headphones USB Battery WHY?!?! As I discussed yesterday, it's possible to fit half an hour of speech on a single floppy disk. The best band in the w

Theme Switcher: 🌒 Dark 🌞 Light 📰 eInk 💻 xterm 🥴 Drunk 👻 Nude ♻️ Reset tl;dr Google forgot to renew a domain used in their documentation. It was mildly embarrassing for them. And possibly a minor security concern for some new G-Suite domain administrators Background Choosing a good example domain, to use in documentation, is hard. You want something which is obviously an example, so that user

I'll be wording this post carefully as What 3 Words (W3W) have a tenacious PR team and, probably, have a lot more lawyers than I do. W3W is a closed product. It is a for-profit company masquerading as an open standard. And that annoys me. A brief primer. The world is a sphere. We can reference any point on the surface of Earth using two co-ordinates, Longitude and Latitude. Long/Lat are numbers. T

Theme Switcher: 🌒 Dark 🌞 Light 📰 eInk 💻 xterm 🥴 Drunk 👻 Nude ♻️ Reset Recently, Lea Verou asked an important question about whether HTML should have a standardised way of letting users select a country from a list. HTML Idea: <input type="country"> which would become a searchable dropdown with all countries and their flags. Wouldn't that be awesome? You can read through the conversation and

In the last couple of months, I've been seeing the ú symbol on British receipts. Why? 1963 - ASCII In the beginning* was ASCII. A standard way for computers to exchange text. ASCII was originally designed with 7 bits - that means 128 possible symbols. That ought to be enough for everyone, right? Wrong! ASCII is the American Code for Information Interchange. It contains a $ symbol, but nothing for

Theme Switcher: 🌒 Dark 🌞 Light 📰 eInk 💻 xterm 🥴 Drunk 👻 Nude ♻️ Reset The good news follow-up rarely gets as much attention as the original bad-news story. Earlier this month I accidentally kicked off a minor kerfuffle over whether BMW was respecting the GPL. Their i3 car contains a huge amount of Open Source Software and there was some confusion as to BMW's compliance with the licence terms

I like to tinker. My wife picked me up the new Raspberry Pi Zero. It's an ultra small and ridiculously cheap computer. How small and cheap? They give it away free on the cover of magazines...

Theme Switcher: 🌒 Dark 🌞 Light 📰 eInk 💻 xterm 🥴 Drunk 👻 Nude ♻️ Reset There is a new API in town! HTML5 will (soon) let you make the user's device vibrate. What fun! Obviously, it's useful for triggering alerts, improved immersivness during gameplay, and all sorts of other fun things like sending Morse Code messages via vibration. At the moment, Chrome (and other Android browsers) ask for pe

Theme Switcher: 🌒 Dark 🌞 Light 📰 eInk 💻 xterm 🥴 Drunk 👻 Nude ♻️ Reset I've been thinking a lot about APIs and their design recently. I stumbled on this fantastic quote from Greg Parker: A programming language is a user interface for developers. Language authors should learn from HCI principles. When I first started learning C++ (back in the bad old days) I was convinced that any 1st year stu

Theme Switcher: 🌒 Dark 🌞 Light 📰 eInk 💻 xterm 🥴 Drunk 👻 Nude ♻️ Reset Twitter has a gaping security hole.  Changing your password won't stop malicious users logging in as you! I received a rather worrying email from Twitter.  Apparently they thought my password had been compromised and needed to be reset. After checking to see if it was valid, I went and changed my password.  Any site which