I highly recommend Nathaniel Popper’s book Digital Gold: The Untold Story of Bitcoin to any geeks. It’s a fascinating story of how Bitcoin came to be and follows the paths of the different persons around the cryptocurrency from the very beginning of it. The book covers the story, specifically, and is not a technical guide to blockchain … [Read more…]
I get many emails from multiple online shops and forums and whatnot on my birthday. Some of them include a voucher to buy something with a discount. I just had a funny thought about a different kind of birthday attack: register a bunch of accounts with different birthdays to all the online shops you find worth … [Read more…]
Data compression is a fascinating topic if you ask me. If you’re curious about it, I suggest you to read these two pieces of nice writing: The Elegance of Deflate and Smaller and faster data compression with Zstandard. The first gives you a deep-dive into the inner-workings of widely used Deflate algorithm and the second … [Read more…]
I just noticed an error that had gone unseen: this very site was serving another site’s HTTPS certificate. I started digging what had gone wrong and noticed that EFF’s Certbot had touched the Apache configurations of this site even though I deployed a cert for another site. It had overwritten the configuration and even added more lines to … [Read more…]
I don’t really know the reason, but the integrated password manager in Chrome has become awfully and absurdly slow for me. It usually takes multiple seconds to actually realize that the browser has loaded a page with a login field and that it even holds some credentials for it. And I am not exaggerating this: it really … [Read more…]
In this blog post I’m writing about something that I consider really interesting and also very fascinating from the engineering perspective. I’m a huge fan of computer security related stuff and am intrigued by the many branches (ha!) it covers top to bottom with so many different aspects that you really cannot know everything at … [Read more…]
Let’s Encrypt gives you free DV certificates via easy to use, automated process. Just install their script, or choose one from the gazillion of custom ones, and you’re good to go with a strong encryption to your website and automatic renewals. One thing that really bothers me when people say that Let’s Encrypt is the … [Read more…]
As I posted earlier, I held a Sonic Pi music programming workshop for the 9th graders of Viialan yhtenäiskoulu. It was great. I really enjoyed it. The day was split in two sessions (a couple of hours each) and the goal was to first touch Sonic Pi gently, then get to play with it, and … [Read more…]
Google has just revealed Android Instant Apps at their annual Google I/O developer conference. This struck me as something extraordinary wicked. No kidding. In the past: Your friend sends you a link to a website / you read about something interesting and head to a website The website has a dedicated app… which is compulsory … [Read more…]
I started digging into JavaScript development a little over a year ago. I built my first JS app with jQuery and Ractive. Ractive is, as they say, a template-driven UI library which gives you an easy way to build interactive applications (front-ends) very easily and quickly. I chose Ractive without any spesific reason. I checked out their … [Read more…]