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.

In Android, most functionality of your phone is provided by apps. And this includes making phone calls as well. Android lets you replace the dialer app on your phone with a custom one. This can be amazing and horrifying at the same time. It is amazing because it allows programmers to create interesting ways to call people. But it also allows the creators of malicious apps to secretly send your private data to their servers.

I am a really lazy person, there, I said it. I also get distracted really often. These two things combined might be the worst thing that can happen to one’s productivity. After trying many methods of creating todo lists, I have settled on two. Markdown files for detailed note-taking, and todo.txt for the list of things to do. On my phone, the Simpletask Cloudless app did an amazing job of bringing some order into my chaotic schedule.

I recently noticed that numbers are used a lot in China for email addresses and user names. I also found out that a number of popular websites, such as Alibaba and Baidu, had official domain names that are entirely numbers. It seemed that people had a preference for numbers instead of latin letters, and even big websites wanted to accommodate for this.

You may have heard of DDoS attacks with huge amounts of bandwidth and compromised devices. But there is another, simpler, attack that only needs one computer and a really small amount of bandwidth. It’s called Slowloris. Even though the original script for the attack came out in 2009, that is seven years ago, it still affects a significant amount of servers.

If you are a web developer, chances are you have used whois before. WHOIS allows you to retrieve basic information about a domain such as when it was registered, when it will expire and the contact information of the owner. There are lots of websites and command line tools that allow you to query this information, but they all use the same protocol in the background.

Let’s say you have a blog and you just published an article. Ideally, that article will be shared on the web, linked from other people’s blog posts and mentioned in social media comments. These links that point back to your article are fittingly called LinkBacks.

Hello everyone. I’ve wanted to use async i/o in Rust for some time but the verbosity of Mio, the generally accepted Rust async library was holding me back. With the recent release of Tokio I wanted to give it another go. In case you don’t know, Tokio is a library that is built on top of Mio and it aims to make writing clients and servers as easy as possible.

I am sure everyone has tried to use ed at least once. And I’m also sure some people have read Ed, the standard text editor. Its cryptic error messages (just ? actually) and the lack of any user interface probably turns most people away from it. I have to admit, I tried to use it before without any success. I spent probably 15 seconds in it before kill -9‘ing the process. But the truth is, ed is actually really easy to use after doing about 3 minutes of reading.

Hey there! In this post, I will be coding a clone of the lolcat program. Lolcat is basically cat with colors. It copies its standard input to its standard output, but modifies the content so that it’s colorful. Here’s a screenshot of lolcat.