chuso.net

Category: Software

  • Trusting invalid SSL certificates is wrong
    So let me put it clear from the first line: trusting invalid certificates is wrong. And now I will explain why it’s wrong and why there are few excuses for it. We are talking here about certificates for SSL encryption, which serves basically two purposes: Privacy — data is transferred encrypted and can only be decrypted by the intended recipient and not a third party wiretapping the line. Authentication — making sure the receiving end that will be able to decrypt the data is who they claim to be and data is not diverted to a different receiver by a third party with access to manipulating our transfers.
  • Casim.ir URL shortener returns
    Let's start with a bit of history. Casim.ir is a URL shortener developed by Nicolas Hoizey in PHP eleven years ago (stylized by then as Cas.im/ir) with the intention of creating a light and simple URL shortener. About seven years ago, I installed it to create my own private URL shortener at chu.so and some other open and public ones with some modifications on Nicolas's project. Shortly after, I started contributing to the project with improvements and bugfixes and almost instantly Nicolas gave me direct write permission.
  • How Android managed to scare me
    Precedent 1 Two years ago, I went to Poland to visit a friend who was there for his Erasmus program and there he met a Slovenian girl. English level in Poland is quite low and, in addition, we were in Bielsko-Biała, which is not exactly the capital, so we managed to get understood primarily via the Slovenian girl and the similarities that apparently exist between Polish and Slovenian languages. One day, we were waiting for the bus to go to Auschwitz and it was quite rainy, so we went into a bar in the deepest Poland that had one of those machines that you put coins so you can choose which song you want to hear.
  • No, don't blame the user
    It is unusual to see a computer engineer defending users. Even more if the engineer is a system administrator. It is known that the relationship between system administrators and users is tense. But when somebody tries to fool me, I get even more tense. Let's go over the facts. The registrar I'm updating the administrative contact of some domain names registered with a well-known Spanish registrar. The company listed as the administrative contact no longer exists and now the domain names belong to another company, so I have to update all the data, but that's another story.
  • Why there are no good video editing free software
    It's something that I ever asked myself and recently I have somebody asked it to me again: what free (as in free beer or as in free speech) video editors are there? A video editor is a very complex piece of software to develop, so there are not many free solutions, the few ones that we can find are not very good and the ones you have to pay for are quite expensive.
  • Adding links to MLDonkey from Opera
    I envied Firefox extension for MLDonkey which allows you to add elinks and torrents to MLDonkey from the browser with a single click, even if MLDonkey is running in other PC. It's a luxury I want to have in Opera, is quite easy. It should be even easier using -remote openURL() Opera parameter, but I got problems doing it this way (it seems to ignore %U parameter), so I finally did it this way:
  • New contribution from Sony to virii scene
    Do you remember? The infamous case of Sony slipping us a rootkit with some of their audio CDs that includes the issue that hides files and registry entries beginning with $sys$, even with registry editors and some antivirus, giving the work done to virii, trojans and other malware. The scandal was immediate and the story spread widely, this is why now sounds so surprising that Sony tried the same again, this time with its USB memory sticks.
  • How to fix flash player to work on any browser
    Update: Opera 9.50 seems to solve this problem. Check your version and update if needed. After a serious vulnerability had been discovered in Acrobat Reader for PDF, one of the leading products from Adobe now becoming a standard, which affected all browsers now the online video format they are also trying to introduce as a standard doesn't work with some browsers. You can check that Flash plugin for Linux (it seems that also affects Windows) doesn't play FLV video with Opera (you can also find cases with Firefox or Konqueror).
  • Opera web browser with usage report tool for Gentoo
    Opera has just announced through its desktop team the releasing of a new developing version for betatesting that includes a tool that makes reports about browser usage and configuration and without private information to send it anonymously to the company to improve the browser. Someone named this Opera 'Spyware', though it's a feature not present in official releases, which can be deactivated, you can read reports before sending it and the browser warns you about this the first time it's run.