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WordPress Profiling with XHProf (Debugging & Optimizing Speed)
Crowdfunding on Crowd Supply (Review of my experience)
Trusted Boot (Anti-Evil-Maid, Heads, and PureBoot)
WordPress Multisite on the Darknet (Mercator .onion alias)
Nightmare on Lemmy Street (A Fediverse GDPR Horror Story)
Detecting (Malicious) Unicode in GitHub PRs
Continuous Documentation: Hosting Read the Docs on GitHub Pages (2/2)
Hardening Guide for phpList
Introducing BusKill: A Kill Cord for your Laptop
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Detecting (Malicious) Unicode in GitHub PRs

Detecting Malicious Unicode in GitHub Pull Requests

This article will describe how you can utilize GitHub Actions to scan user-contributed PRs for unicode and automatically warn you if such commits contain (potentially invisible & malicious) unicode characters.

Why

Last month Trojan Source was published — which described how malicious unicode characters could make source code appear benign, yet compile to something quite malicious.

Michael Altfield

Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡

About Michael


. . . → Read More: Detecting (Malicious) Unicode in GitHub PRs

Continuous Documentation: Hosting Read the Docs on GitHub Pages (2/2)

Continuous Documentation with Read the Docs (2/2)

This post will describe how add translations (i18n), pdf/epub builds, and branch-specific versioned documentation to a Read-the-Docs-themed sphinx site hosted with GitHub Pages and built with GitHub’s free CI/CD tools.

This is part two of a two-part series. Before reading this, you should already be familiar with Continuous Documentation: Hosting Read the Docs on GitHub Pages (1/2).

ⓘ Note: If you don’t care about how this works and you just want to make a functional repo, you can just fork my ‘rtd-github-pages’ GitHub repo.

Michael Altfield

Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡

About Michael


. . . → Read More: Continuous Documentation: Hosting Read the Docs on GitHub Pages (2/2)

Continuous Documentation: Hosting Read the Docs on GitHub Pages (1/2)

Continuous Documentation with Read the Docs (1/2)

This post will describe how to host a sphinx-powered site (using the Read the Docs theme) on your own GitHub Pages site, built with GitHub’s free CI/CD tools.

ⓘ Note: If you don’t care about how this works and you just want to make a functional repo, you can just fork my ‘rtd-github-pages’ GitHub repo.

Michael Altfield

Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡

About Michael


. . . → Read More: Continuous Documentation: Hosting Read the Docs on GitHub Pages (1/2)

Introducing Coviz

Projected Future Spread of COVID-10 on Earth (e2a Apr 07)

I woke up on April 2nd to discover that over 1 million people on earth had tested positive for coronavirus. “I couldn’t find a website that was extrapolating the COVID-19 dataset, so I decided to build one”

It took over 4 months for COVID-19 to hit 1 million world-wide, and the graph was showing a horrifying exponential growth of cases. When I saw this, a question popped-into my head: when will it hit 2 million? (spoiler: it took only 13 days to go from 1 million to 2 million)

When will it infect 4 million? 8 million? 100 million? 1 billion? 50% of the population on Earth?

I searched-and-searched, but I couldn’t find a website that was extrapolating the COVID-19 dataset daily to predict the future spread of the virus, so I decided to build one myself.

Michael Altfield

Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡

About Michael


. . . → Read More: Introducing Coviz

RegEx 2 DFA in Python

For my Discrete Mathematics II course at UCF (COT4210), I had to do some implementation with Finite State Machines. My favorite of our tasks (though the most difficult) was to convert a Regular Expression (RE) to an equivalent Deterministic Finite Automata (DFA). And since our professor let us use any language, I tried to branch out from Java & C (which are annoyingly overused in Academia). I decided to teach myself Python. And it turns out, it was a good choice too–considering it’s wonderful built-in functionality for Lists, and the heart of this program is a huge 2D array defining the automata’s transition function. Also, I miss scripting languages–especially when I’m writing a program as a learning experiment as opposed to trying to make it as efficient as possible.

So, without further Ado: here’s my code. It reads a RE in postfix notation from input.txt. Two cautions about postfix REs:

You must explicitly state concatenation The Kleen Star is already a postfix operator in REs, so it doesn’t really work to use a mathematical infix2postfix library, as it treats the kleen star like an infix multiplicative operator. I treat it as an operand and throw it directly into the
. . . → Read More: RegEx 2 DFA in Python