The single most useful thing you can do to help fight the Coronavirus is to follow advice on self-isolating, social distancing and washing your hands.
But there is also a more practical thing you can do, running distributed computing programs.
Cloudflare Firewall Rules
I found a website (k6.io) which allows you to load test websites and API’s using AWS. With a free account you can test from one location with 50 virtual units for up to 12 mins. Spinning up a load test of get requests, Cloudflare served up all the traffic no problem, leaving my minimal VPS web-server alone. Then I tried again with post requests and BAM… 100% CPU load, response time over 6 seconds.
What was happening? Shouldn’t Cloudflare stop things like this?
Free Load Balancing With Cloudflare
According to my page revision history, 9 months ago I started writing a guide on using Cloudflare as a free CND for websites. I’m sure I’ll finish that eventually, but for now here is why I think it is so great. Free load balancing!
AutoHotkey Text Expansion
Being incredibly lazy, I am always on the lookout for ways to automate my life. Something I heard about a long time ago, but never got around to looking at was AutoHotKey. Now it is an essential tool I used everyday for text macros.
Why You Really Need a Password Manager
I like to sing the praises of Troy Hunt and his efforts to improve the world’s password security. I also take digital security very seriously, but I can understand why most people don’t. Even the most keen people can suffer from apathy from time to time.
Example below:
Have You Been Pwned: NTLM Hashes
Troy Hunt continues to be amazing for cyber security with the Have I Been Pwned project. All the Version 3 passwords have been released as NTLM hashes, the password hash used by Windows. This should be really useful for any sysadmins managing a Windows Enterprise deployment wanting to make sure that users aren’t using bad passwords. Hopefully as this is adopted it will also reduce the number of poor password rules that many companies still enforce.
Things like: Continue reading “Have You Been Pwned: NTLM Hashes”
Domain Move
If you are reading this, then you must be using the new URL for my website.
I moved from procrastinatingengineer.co.uk to procrastinatingengineer.uk
Mostly because it’s shorter and I think it looks nicer, but also I wanted to play around with self hosted WordPress and CND setups. More on this coming soon!
Is Netflix Better in the USA?
TL;DR – Yes, yes it is. But Japan is better!
EMF 2016 Retrospective
Naturally I procrastinated too much to write anything about EMF 2016, but since I’m going again in 2018 I though I’d write a little of what I remember for comparison later.
My friends had been to EMF 2014 and convinced me to go with them in 2016, and I’m really glad they did. It was an awesome 3 days!
Have You Been Pwned: Update 2
Troy Hunt has updated the haveibeenpwned list of pwned passwords, which now contains a staggering 517 million compromise passwords (as SHA1 hashes).