My favourite hacker community!
Another Hacker's Tribute is coming to entertain you and also taunt you a little - but on a manageable scale, so you don't have to worry. We don't want to impose ourselves, after all. This time, a veritable feast for the electronic senses awaits - dive in to appreciate solid Python code, get uncomfortably anxious about email forwards and rejoice in website analytics based on a deep red script.
And let's not forget the mind-blowing idea of a device that lets you control your house with simple thoughts. What happens when your thought slips and burns the toast? Oops. Forgive me for such trivia, because I'm not quite myself this week
Let our latest issue surprise you!
Sincerely,
Dan ‘the Man’ Kowalski
Editor-in-Chief, The Hacker’s Tribute
One Mind Control to Go, Please!
Have you ever dreamed of having the unreasonably tempting and downright lazy ability to control the appliances in your home? Yes, you already can with voice control on your smartphone. However, Chinese company Xiaomi claims that you can also achieve this by visualizing it on your phone using your brain waves. Scared yet? The creators of the device claim that by wearing an electrified headband, you can make your brainwaves do things like monitor the laundry or turn off the microwave.
We can only hope that the influential powers in China do not use this as an opportunity to finally learn how to inveigle their way into people's minds. Not that they are not already quite adept at it. Sorry, not sorry.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/03/xiaomi_brainwave_tech/
How about a little hijacking?
Those who have never eavesdropped, please raise your hand! I have undoubtedly committed this perfect crime. How about applying it for email rerouting? Thanks to this proactive Cloudflare programmer we came across, you do not have to worry about that.
Check out his report on the vulnerability that allowed anyone to read all emails sent to a hypothetical unlucky guy's domain. How? By being downright clever, that's how! All it took was overwriting the destination address with your own email address. This definitely makes me shiver.
https://albertpedersen.com/blog/hijacking-email-with-cloudflare-email-routing/
TUI framework that eats your browser's lunch
Hurray for the super-fast and super-fluid Python terminals! If you are frustrated with - that fidgeting of an animation again! - see how creating a modern TUI framework can help you freshen up some old protocols. You'll also wonder how it can help you become an artist in Unicode, and how the universal argument of using fractions works in comparison to heavy and rather clumsy floating-point numbers.
And obviously emojis are the worst. Since the dawn of time, Rich has had a problem with emoji support in terminals. Even the Unicode database cannot save the Asian versions of the smiley faces. Click to read and learn more.
https://www.textualize.io/blog/posts/7-things-about-terminals
When free doesn't mean privacy-compromised
It is time for unexpected company. We never thought there would be times when website traffic analysis could be free while respecting the privacy of visitors. It seems almost blasphemous. The simple truth is that if you combine some Apache protocols and a smart Ruby script, advertisers can take French leave and never be seen again, for all I care. Not convinced? See for yourself.
