Notices by April King (april@macaw.social)

Handling Cookies is a Minefield:

inconsistencies in the HTTP cookie specification and its implementations have caused a situation where countless websites (including Facebook, Netflix, Okta, WhatsApp, Apple, etc.) are one small mistake away from locking their users out.

https://grayduck.mn/2024/11/21/handling-cookies-is-a-minefield/

got laid off in the big dropbox layoffs today.

if anybody is looking for a staff-level engineer who loves mentoring and who is an expert in web security, email security, TLS/PKI, key and secrets management, and general defense security stuff, please feel free to hit me up.

TIL of the bad.horse traceroute

on the perils of being named after a month

kudos to google for offering a free option to keep AI out of search results

computers used to yell at us when we connected to the internet, but in our hubris we ignored them.

I finally did it! Today I used a cable (TB2→DVI) that had been sitting in storage for an entire decade.

All of you tech people who have bins and bins of obsolete cables, know now that your hoarding is completely justified.

TIL that the US government runs an official dad joke database 👀

https://fatherhood.gov/for-dads/dad-jokes

people rag on amazon for throwing around their monopolistic weight in the retail industry and for turning a blind eye to rampant counterfeits, but then they turn around and bless us with ads at absolutely no cost to us.

I love how browser manufacturers have elaborate and complicated systems designed to get the latest versions out ASAP given their complexity and how frequently they are targeted for extremely scary vulnerabilities.

And then the rest of the industry embeds them into almost every piece of modern desktop software and only updates them when they can be bothered to get around to it.

i have broken the internet (finally)

tech companies be like, “why bother with an expensive team of experienced engineers and fact-checkers when we could instead replace them with an AI chatbot that thinks Australia doesn’t exist?”

me: hey big companies, can I download all of your copyrighted movies and music and images in case one inspires me to make something someday?

big companies: lol no get rekt

also big companies: btw we're downloading and using all of your copyrighted works to stuff into our machine learning models

can I please just pay to not have windows be user-hostile? forcing polls on people who download chrome, good grief that is some weak sauce early-2000s anti-trust bullshit.

looking increasingly likely I move to linux for my gaming pc once windows 10 dies.

https://www.theverge.com/23930960/microsoft-edge-google-chrome-poll-why-try-another-browser

If you're on macOS and want to see what versions of Electron your apps are running, I made this handy gist:

https://gist.github.com/april/3da7c3720b0d9f3ee7dc9a95f623578d

my favorite new iOS 17 feature is one nobody has mentioned anywhere. under:

Accessibility > Touch > Haptic Touch > Touch Duration

you can set the Touch Duration to fast, to make it recognize long presses in less time. huge improvement.

this is the greatest tool that humankind has ever created, change my view

just read someone on reddit describe a zip drive as a “thick save icon,” so if you need me i’ll be crying under my bedsheets

big middle finger to the universe, but especially to the colleague who made my bones hurt by pointing out that the `z` in `tar -xvzf` hasn’t been needed since version tar 1.15, released in 2004.

taking a brief moment to note how puritanical it is that “menstruation” won’t spellcheck or autocomplete on iOS.