digital self defense and everything IT

  • Do we even need SSL?

    “Do we even need SSL?” — In almost every project where hosting of some kind is involved this question comes up. While SSL clearly can be improved it is the most easy way of secure transfer between web servers and web surfers. In which cases is SSL expendable? IMHO, encrypted data transfer via SSL is…

  • Randomly select a MySQL record

    This is a reminder to myself as I have this problem every now and then. I thought I share this with you. Ok the problem is to random(ish)ly select a record from a MySQL database in an efficient way without any scripting or programming. There are several more or less simple ways described everywhere on…

  • How to access Xing profiles via API and PHP

    Note 2018-03-19: This post is deprecated as AFAIK Xing does not provide this API anymore. Yesterday I have dabbled in accessing Xing profiles via API. For years people were asking Xing to finally provide an API but they were hesitant because of the strict privacy laws in Germany. Xing has lost users in the last…

  • The keys to running a successful WordPress blog — technically speaking

    Heise online reports WordPress is going to clean up the plugins dir because plugins “suck” and that — despite this fact — WordPress has become a constant in the web because large blogs such as Smashing Magazine are using it. How do large WordPress blogs like Smashing Magazine accomplish this when plugins suck so much?…

  • Quick tip for Java/Netbeans users on Linux

    If you are using Linux (Ubuntu and Debian in my case) and are being haunted by unresponsive, CPU and memory hogging Java applications you might find this piece of information useful: Check if you are using OpenJDK by issuing “java -version” in a terminal. If something with “OpenJDK” comes up, follow instructions (in german, but…

  • Setting fake user agent in Polipo

    I use Polipo as a caching web proxy for my VPN and for some simple anonymizing. It’s a great software. One thing bugs me though: when censoring User-Agent, as intended, it does not send a User-Agent header. But: Sometimes poorly written web scripts break on a missing user agent string or web scripts take a…