Twitter has a nifty new feature which allows you to schedule the publication of a Tweet. But, crucially, it doesn't let the reader know when the message was originally written. How can you, as a publisher, prove that you wrote a scheduled Tweet at a specific time? Here's one method. Write a Tweet which contains a timestamp - "This is my message 2020-08-17" Generate a hash of the message -…
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It would be easy for the modern reader to conclude that women had no place in the world of early modern espionage, with a few seventeenth-century women spies identified and then relegated to the footnotes of history. If even the espionage carried out by Susan Hyde, sister of Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, during the turbulent decades of civil strife in Britain can escape the historiographer's…
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My mate Dom was moaning to his ISP on Twitter. They sent him a private message so they could look into his account. Blimey! Thankfully, that was a pretty brazen and inept attempt at phishing. Anyone asking for all your card details like that should set the alarm bells ringing. Of course, phishers often target credulous people who don't understand that they're being scammed. By sending an…
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I've been sent a Flyland USB-C hub to review. It's a small but versatile unit - perfect for people who need to connect legacy equipment to something with USB-C ports. For £21, you get 7 ports: 3x USB 3.0 1x HDMI 4K 1x Micro SD 1x SD 1x USB Power Delivery It worked perfectly on Linux (more below) and Windows. No drivers required. It also worked on Android. Simple plug and play. Exactly the …
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December 1897, Paris. Edmond Rostand is not yet thirty but already two children and a lot of anxieties. He has not written anything for two years. In desperation, he offers the great Constant Coquelin a new play, a heroic comedy, in verse, for the holidays. Only concern: it is not written yet. Ignoring the whims of actresses, the demands of his Corsican producers, the jealousy of his wife, the…
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A decade ago, I was invited to the UK launch of Windows Phone 7. It was Microsoft's attempt to compete with Apple's iPhone and Google's Android. Sure, Microsoft could make a brilliant OS and had excellent hardware partners - but could they convince developers to use yet another system? At the time, I wrote: The revenue share is 70/30. I really think MS have missed a trick here. It’s an “…
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Lud-in-the-Mist - a prosperous country town situated where two rivers meet: the Dawl and the Dapple. The latter, which has its source in the land of Faerie, is a great trial to Lud, which had long rejected anything 'other', preferring to believe only in what is known, what is solid. Nathaniel Chanticleer is a somewhat dreamy, slightly melancholy man, not one for making waves, who is…
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A young autistic woman runs away from her caregiver in an attempt to submit her 500-page manuscript to a "Star Trek" writing competition in Hollywood. How do we navigate confusing and unfamiliar spaces? What is it like to know that you're out of place and cannot understand the world around you? These thoughts haunt me. In my nightmares, I am confused because I can't make sense of what's going…
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Short domains are useful for security testing. If you only have a limited number of characters, you need to be able to reference code on a remote server in as few characters as possible. A few years ago, I tried to find a Minimum Viable XSS. The conclusion that I (and others) came to is that 20 characters is the bare minimum. But it requires you have a 2 character domain name on a 2-character…
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You’re British. Your parents are British. Your partner, your children and most of your friends are British. So why do people keep asking where you’re from? We are a nation in denial about our imperial past and the racism that plagues our present. Brit(ish) is Afua Hirsch’s personal and provocative exploration of how this came to be – and an urgent call for change. Yes! This is the book I've bee…
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Many text based conversations threads can be visualised as a tree. This is a follow-up to yesterday's blog post about Twitter conversation trees. Mailing list archives often use nested <ul> to show a conversation. That's fine, but has the major drawback of not being interactive. There's no way to collapse a branch of a tree if you're not interested in that strand of the conversation. Older…
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One of the most requested Twitter API features is now available - the ability to get replies to a Tweet as a thread. Long time readers know that I've long been a fan of Visualising Twitter Conversations in 2D Space. But up until now you had to use horrible hacks to get the data. As trailed in their recent blogpost - conversation threading is now part of the official API! This allows you to…
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