January-2018.php

It's a new year, but the tech scene doesn't show any signs of slowing down and January has been yet another fast paced interesting month.

Explainshell

We start out with a handy little tool for those of us with just enough command-line-fu to be dangerous, but not enough to be really productive without the help of StackOverflow. Explainshell.com is a nice little tool that explains what happens in every part of a command line command. This is the least you could do before pasting random commands from StackOverflow into your terminal.

17 composer tips

I've previously talked about the wonders of the PHP dependency manager Composer. Earlier this month Martin Hujer shared 17 Tips for Using Composer Efficiently to help you up your Composer game.

Harvesting credit card numbers

Everybody who works at least peripherally with security knows that security is hard. That doesn't make it any less important, though. David Gilbertson tells the (maybe true, maybe not) story of how he exploits weak website security and ubiquitous npm packages for harvesting credit card numbers and passwords from insecure websites.

Spectre & Meltdown

A new year means new security holes (YAY!). 2018 decided to not beat around the bush, and just start off with a massive security hole affecting most CPUs in use across the world. To make matters better, it even included 2 flaws. The 2 flaws was discovered by people working at Google's Project Zero in collaboration with a bunch of other security researchers has been named Spectre and Meltdown.

A faster Firefox

For the last while, the Firefox team has had a heavy focus on improving the browser's performance starting with Firefox Quantum. A new post on the Mozilla Hacks blog dives into the geeky side of how Firefox speeds up WebAssembly.