Hanlon's Razor states, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." It would be nice to think that all mistakes and errors we encounter are just the result of bone-headedness. Sadly, that's not the case. Quite often malicious people deliberately try to trick you into taking actions you would normally have ignored. In usability, we call this a "Dark Pattern". A …
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Hey kids! Did you know that the best way to report bugs to Google is via passive-aggressive blog posts? Yup, s'true. They don't offer support for any of their products*, so your only hope is getting your complaint to the top of Reddit / HackerNews / Cool Site of the Day and hoping that particular Google Product Manager is taking note. So - here's my rant :-) Google now let you pay for apps…
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There are plenty of QR generators which will render the code in ASCII, but I wanted to try something a little different. Is it possible to hide ASCII Art into QR Codes? Errr.... yes... It's pretty damn simple! I was surprised I couldn't find anyone else doing this. (\_/) (='.'=) (")_(") Becomes: Which, when scanned, renders as: Now, there are limits as to what you can put into a QR…
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As part of BlueLightCamp '14, a group of civil servants, hackers, and emergency service workers got together for a weekend of furious creation. I decided to look at flooding data. The recent floods in the UK are a brutal remember of the realities of climate change and our poor stewardship of the nation's waterways. The UK Government has a large collection of Flooding Data online - including…
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I've written before about my love for the MS 4000 Ergonomic Keyboard. It's the only keyboard I'm comfortable typing on for extended periods of time. Sadly, one of mine has started to get a bit old and frail - the letters are rubbing off and the keys are getting a bit spongy - so I sprang for a new one. On getting the new one out of its box, I couldn't help but notice that it had undergone some…
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VWTech Co Ltd are yet another company out of Shenzen, China, selling weird and wonderful gadgets at knockdown prices. I decided to treat myself to one of their "Unique Real Handmade Natural Wood Wooden Hard Bamboo Shockproof Case For Samsung Galaxy Note 3" It promised to be a laser-cut and engraved, bamboo case for my Note 3. For £10, I thought it was worth a punt. After waiting a week for …
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A (very minor) privacy issue I found with the iTunes API - disclosed on 7th April. Apple provide an API to allow users to search the iTunes store. Let's suppose that a user wishes to search for Music Videos from The Beatles. The search itself is performed over HTTPS. https://itunes.apple.com/search?entity=musicVideo&term=beatles This means that anyone sniffing the connection won't see what…
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This is a necropost - resurrected from the now defunct blog of a previous employer. I've just come back from an amazing BlueLightCamp 2014 - held in the splendid offices of the Ordnance Survey. Themed unconferences are nothing new - but I think this was one of the first that I've been to focussed on such a vital topic - the Emergency Services. You can read a full write up of all the sessions…
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A few months ago, I was attending the National Hack The Government event. I was showing off some of the work I had been doing on "The Unsecured State" - looking at *.gov.uk website security. I was chatting to an envoy from the Food Standards Agency who was eager to hear more about what I'd discovered. "Oh," I said, "It's pretty easy. Let's take a look at your website. If I were to type some…
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Update! There's a new way to do this - read my latest post to find out how. Two or three years ago, I was contacted by a recruiter from Google. They wanted to know if I'd be interested in working for the advertising giant. We played the usual game of dancing around salary and schedules, when he dropped the bombshell - they were looking for people to work on Google+. I asked the recruiter if…
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My current ISP is Virgin Media. They get a lot of stick for being a bit useless - but I can't fault the speed of my domestic connection. They recently upgraded me for free to 152Mbps downsteam (and a less impressive 12Mbps up). As part of this upgrade, they sent me an email stating: now that your broadband has been supercharged, on the house, why not put it to the test? You've got the UK's…
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So, I've submitted my first patch to the Linux Kernel! It's trivial set of documentation improvements - mostly done so I could see if I've got everything set up correctly. This blog post is more of an aide memoire than a fool proof guide - I hope future me finds it useful! Install and Configure git I'll leave you to figure out how to install git on your system - one thing you will need to is…
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