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Instructionals/Technical Posts for Today
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APNIC ☛ Latest BGP hijack targets hosting software vendor
Just days ago, a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) hijack was used as part of an attack on hosting software vendor Softaculous Ltd, the company behind the Softaculous auto-installer and the Virtualizor VM management platform.
In a blog post on the incident, the company explains that an attacker used a “technically valid TLS certificate” for their domains, in concert with a BGP hijack, to deliver a “malicious Virtualizor update package” to a “small number of installations”. They advise customers to follow a sequence of steps to check if they have been impacted.
What follows is a closer look at some of the technical details of this incident.
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Wired ☛ Justice for CSS
One paragraph in, a certain reader will already be smarting at my description of CSS. “It’s a style sheet language,” I can hear them say, “not a programming language.” (The second S indeed stands for “sheets,” and the C, if anyone cares, for “cascading.”) Or, “it’s a domain-specific language, not a general-purpose language.” Also, “it doesn’t execute” and, of course, “it’s not Turing complete” (although … ). Granted, CSS is a little different. There’s no compile step, and it doesn’t throw errors at run time like other languages. But that’s all beside the point.
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Dominick Jay ☛ Baseline Isn't a Green Light
Take a look at the MDN page for :has(). What does it show you? Well, it’s baseline, so we get a green checkmark, a short label, sometimes a date. That’s the whole signal, the green light, the good-to-go, and the “shoot for the moon kid” that we need to wildly roll this into all production sites going forward immediately. It tells you a feature crossed the finish line. Problem is, it doesn’t tell you exactly which line it crossed, and it turns out there’s two.
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Brennan ☛ Creating a Blog in Gemini://
But if you want a tl;dr, Gemini is a modern, minimal Internet protocol alternative to https://, and requires a different Internet browser to use it. It was built in 2019 by a pseudonymous developer who goes by Solderpunk, and instead of HTML, every page is written in Gemtext, which is a stripped-down format with only headings, links, and lists. Every connection runs over TLS on port 1965, and it's one request, one response, then the connection closes.