“Oh yeah, I can see that she read my email at 3.42PM today.” That was probably what my roommate told me about two years ago.
“Wait what? How did you know that?” I queried. Having a read receipt is not the norm when it comes to emails.
“My email client tells me that,” he said. What? Have I been doing emails wrongly this entire time?
Continue reading Email Read Receipts: Brilliant or Privacy-Invading?Recently I have been looking for Mac OS 9 icons for a separate project, but they are getting rarer by the days. Luckily, NazoraioiSkadinaujo on DeviantArt1 had ran into the same issue and decided to extract the icons themselves back in 2008. The problem is that the files are in the rsrc format and I really need them in png. Thus, this is my journey in further extracting the icon files!
“Well the last time you went to see the porn material websites, my spyware ended up being activated inside your computer which ended up documenting a eye-catching video of your masturbation act simply by activating your web camera,” the letter reads. “I have got the whole recording. If perhaps you think I’m messing around, simply reply proof and I will be forwarding the particular recording randomly to 10 people you know.”
It’s the unthinkable for many, and unbearable for majority. What ended up as a 5 minutes bedroom fun has turned into a disaster. “You got a incredibly unusual taste by the way haha,” jeered the email. Wait, they couldn’t have possibly known what I clicked on… right? What did I click on..?
I recently realised that one of my very old email accounts from about 10 years ago is still working. Fancying a little nostalgia, I logged into the account –– to various spam mails. A blackmail letter caught my eye, so I thought I will dig deeper into it!
Continue reading Email Dumpster DivingLet’s say you have to repeatedly prepare some reports with the same structure. Wouldn’t it be great if you can automatically generate them once you have the data? Well, actually you can!
Microsoft changed the underlying structure of their Office documents (Word, Powerpoint, Excel, etc.) from binary to Open-XML with the release of Microsoft Office 20071. Take a guess what the x in the new extensions .docx,.pptx and .xlsx stands for. This offers a few advantages, including the most notable one of making the format open and accessible for anyone. We will be taking advantage of this to generate Word reports from templates with Python.
WordPress is one of the most popular content-management system in the world. Powering 33% of the top sites according to Wikipedia1, it therefore shouldn’t be surprising that WordPress is commonly targeted by hackers and script-kiddies alike. Plugins and themes are what make WordPress great and well-loved, but they are also a common entry point for hackers –– a 2016 Wordfence survey2 found that compromised plugins contributes to more than 55% of the hacks.
While many sources online offer WordPress security hardening tips and techniques3, an unprivileged Linux container will complement these techniques to offer greater security and isolation.
This post will show you how to install WordPress on an existing website in an unprivileged Linux container, so it gets harder for malicious actor to gain root of your entire system, and set up Apache2 reverse proxy to expose the WordPress to the Internet.
Continue reading Securing WordPress: Unprivileged LXC Container on Ubuntu
