Recently I took my annual leave and decided to visit my friend during the holidays. I stayed at a hotel for a few days but to my surprise, the hotel charged money to use their wifi. In $DEITY’s year 2000 + 18, can you imagine?

If you post a programming article to Hacker News, Reddit or Lobsters; you will notice that soon after it gets to the front page, it gets posted to Twitter automatically.

Mastodon is a federated social network that uses the ActivityPub protocol to connect separate communities into one large network. Both Mastodon and the ActivityPub protocol are increasing in usage every day. Compared to formats like RSS, which are pull-based, ActivityPub is push-based. This means rather than your followers downloading your feed regularly to check if you have shared anything, you send each follower (or each server as an optimization) the content you shared.

In the world of Bittorrent, each torrent is identified by an infohash. It is basically the SHA1 hash of the torrent metadata that tells you about the files. And people, when confronted with something that’s supposed to be random, like to control it to some degree. You can see this behaviour in lots of different places online. People try to generate special Bitcoin wallets, Tor services with their nick or 4chan tripcodes that look cool. These are all done by repeatedly generating the hash until you find a result that you like. We can do the exact same thing with torrents as well.

IPFS is a peer-to-peer protocol that allows you to access and publish content in a decentralized fashion. It uses hashes to refer to files. Short of someone posting hashes on a website, discoverability of content is pretty low. In this article, we’re going to write a very simple crawler for IPFS.

D-Bus is a message bus that Linux systems use in order to make programs communicate with each other or with the system itself. It allows applications to integrate amongst themselves using well-defined interfaces. This allows each application to provide services that can be used by others, sort of like adding API’s to your programs.

In this article, I want to talk about a really simple technique for evolving line-art from pictures. On top of being an simple example for genetic algorithms, it is also a fun programming project that can be done in short time.

Hello dear readers, welcome to another episode of “New Year, New Me”. First of all, I want to wish everyone a happy new year. Hopefully, 2018 will be full of happiness, health and success for you. For a variety of reasons some of you might have had a bad year. But worry not; because 2018 is here and whatever your goals were, you can keep trying.

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of peer-to-peer network protocols, and putting my website on a distributed network was something I’ve been meaning to do for a while. The recent increase in blog posts about IPFS finally pushed me over the tipping point. Hopefully, you can read this article on IPFS here.

If you follow programming blogs, it is not uncommon to come across articles that mention how MongoDB exposes your private information without any protection on default settings. But Mongo is not alone in this. Even with sane defaults, it is possible to find that a lot of people have misconfigured their databases for their convenience. In this list of exposed servers is our beloved Redis.