As a long-time iPhone user, I am really sorry to say it but I think Apple has completed their transition to being a company that is incompetent when it comes to software development and software development processes.

I’ve grown tired of hearing some developers tell me about Apple’s scale and how software development is hard and how bugs should be expected. All of those are true, but like most rules of law, incompetence and gross negligence trumps all of that.

I’m writing this because of the telugu “bug”/massive, massive security issue in iOS 11.2.5. I personally think it’s one of the worst security issues in the history of modern devices/software in terms of its ease of exploitation, vast reach, and devastating impact if used strategically. But, as a software developer, I would have been able to see past all of that, but Apple has shown their true incompetence on this issue and this isn’t about a bug.

It’s about a company that has a catastrophic bug in their desktop and mobile platforms and haven’t been able to, or cared to, patch it in the 3 or so days it’s been known about. It’s about a company, who as of a view days ago, hasn’t followed the basic software development process of removing an update (11.2.5) that was found to be flawed and broken. Bugs happen, but that kind of incompetence is cultural and isn’t a mistake and it certainly isn’t something that people should try to justify.

This has also shown Apple’s gross incompetence in terms of software QA. This isn’t the first time a non-standard character has crashed iOS. Why would a competent software company implement a step in their QA, after the previous incident(s), to specifically test for issues like this? While Android has its issues too and I know some here don’t like Google, no one can deny that Google at least has a solid and far superior QA process compared to Apple.

Why am I writing this? Because I’m fed up. Apple has completely lost its way. devRant was inaccessible to iOS users a couple of times because of this bug and I know many, many other apps and websites that feature user-generated content experienced the same thing. It’s catastrophic. Many times we get sidetracked and really into security issues, like meltdown/spectre that are exponentially harder to take advantage of than this one. This issue can be exploited by a 3 year old. I bet no one can produce a case where a security issue was this exploitable yet this ignored on a whole.

Alas, here we are, days later, and the incompetent leadership at Apple has still not patched one of the worst security bugs the world has ever seen.

Consultant: "you should deploy a website. Use wordpress and have a draft ready in a few days. It's easy."

Me: "It's a static website, a one-pager even. I think we would be better served with something light-weight without a database."

Consultant: "99% of the websites in the entire internet are powered by wordpress. It's state of the art, you should use it"

Me: 😢 "Nooo, it needs mainentance and stuff. Look, XY is much simpler. You can even version the static site with git"

Consultant: 😤

We ended up with wordpress for our static website now. I am so proud. I absolutely love wordpress. It is amazing. Now my static one-pager can have plugins, multiple users, security issues and all that. The future is now!

So I got the job. Here's a story, never let anyone stop you from accomplishing your dreams!

It all started in 2010. Windows just crashed unrecoverably for the 3rd time in two years. Back then I wasn't good with computers yet so we got our tech guy to look at it and he said: "either pay for a windows license again (we nearly spend 1K on licenses already) or try another operating system which is free: Ubuntu. If you don't like it anyways, we can always switch back to Windows!"

Oh well, fair enough, not much to lose, right! So we went with Ubuntu. Within about 2 hours I could find everything. From the software installer to OpenOffice, browsers, email things and so on. Also I already got the basics of the Linux terminal (bash in this case) like ls, cd, mkdir and a few more.

My parents found it very easy to work with as well so we decided to stick with it.

I already started to experiment with some html/css code because the thought of being able to write my own websites was awesome! Within about a week or so I figured out a simple html site.

Then I started to experiment more and more.

After about a year of trial and error (repeat about 1000+ times) I finally got my first Apache server setup on a VirtualBox running Ubuntu server. Damn, it felt awesome to see my own shit working!

From that moment on I continued to try everything I could with Linux because I found the principle that I basically could do everything I wanted (possible with software solutions) without any limitations (like with Windows/Mac) very fucking awesome. I owned the fucking system.

Then, after some years, I got my first shared hosting plan! It was awesome to see my own (with subdomain) website online, functioning very well!

I started to learn stuff like FTP, SSH and so on.

Went on with trial and error for a while and then the thought occured to me: what if I'd have a little server ONLINE which I could use myself to experiment around?

First rented VPS was there! Couldn't get enough of it and kept experimenting with server thingies, linux in general aaand so on.

Started learning about rsa key based login, firewalls (iptables), brute force prevention (fail2ban), vhosts (apache2 still), SSL (damn this was an interesting one, how the fuck do you do this yourself?!), PHP and many other things.

Then, after a while, the thought came to mind: what if I'd have a dedicated server!?!?!?!

I ordered my first fucking dedicated server. Damn, this was awesome! Already knew some stuff about defending myself from brute force bots and so on so it went pretty well.

Finally made the jump to NginX and CentOS!

Made multiple VPS's for shitloads of purposes and just to learn. Started working with reverse proxies (nginx), proxy servers, SSL for everything (because fuck basic http WITHOUT SSL), vhosts and so on.

Started with simple, one screen linux setup with ubuntu 10.04.

Running a five monitor setup now with many distro's, running about 20 servers with proxies/nginx/apache2/multiple db engines, as much security as I can integrate and this fucking passion just got me my first Linux job!

It's not just an operating system for me, it's a way of life. And with that I don't just mean the operating system, but also the idea behind it :).

Lads, I will be real with you: some of you show absolute contempt to the actual academic study of the field.

In a previous rant from another ranter it was thrown up and about the question for finding a binary search implementation.

Asking a senior in the field of software engineering and computer science such question should be a simple answer, specifically depending on the type of job application in question. Specially if you are applying as a SENIOR.

I am tired of this strange self-learner mentality that those that have a degree or a deep grasp of these fundamental concepts are somewhat beneath you because you learned to push out a website using the New Boston tutorials on youtube. FOR every field THAT MATTERS a license or degree is hold in high regards.
"Oh I didn't go to school, shit is for suckers, but I learned how to chop people up and kinda fix it from some tutorials on youtube" <---- try that for a medical position.

"Nah it's cool, I can fix your breaks, learned how to do it by reading blogs on the internet" <--- maintenance shop

"Sure can write the controller processing code for that boing plane! Just got done with a low level tutorial on some websites! what can go wrong!"

(The same goes for military devices which in the past have actually killed mfkers in the U.S)

Just recently a series of people were sent to jail because of a bug in software. Industries NEED to make sure a mfker has aaaall of the bells and whistles needed for running and creating software.

During my masters degree, it fucking FASCINATED me how many mfkers were absolutely completely NEW to the concept of testing code, some of them with years in the field.

And I know what you are thinking "fuck you, I am fucking awesome" <--- I AM SURE YOU BLOODY WELL ARE but we live in a planet with billions of people and millions of them have fallen through the cracks into software related positions as well as complete degrees, the degree at LEAST has a SPECTACULAR barrier of entry during that intro to Algos and DS that a lot of bitches fail.

NOTE: NOT knowing the ABSTRACTIONS over the tools that we use WILL eventually bite you in the ASS because you do not fucking KNOW how these are implemented internally.

Why do you think compiler designers, kernel designers and embedded developers make the BANK they made? Because they don't know memory efficient ways of deploying a product with minimal overhead without proper data structures and algorithmic thinking? NOT EVERYTHING IS SHITTY WEB DEVELOPMENT

SO, if a mfker talks shit about a so called SENIOR for not knowing that the first mamase mamasa bloody simple as shit algorithm THROWN at you in the first 10 pages of an algo and ds book, then y'all should be offended at the mkfer saying that he is a SENIOR, because these SENIORS are the same mfkers that try to at one point in time teach other people.
These SENIORS are the same mfkers that left me a FUCKING HORRIBLE AND USELESS MESS OF SPAGHETTI CODE

Specially to most PHP developers (my main area) y'all would have been well motherfucking served in learning how not to forLoop the fuck out of tables consisting of over 50k interconnected records, WHAT THE FUCK

"LeaRniNG tHiS iS noT neeDed!!" yes IT fucking IS

being able to code a binary search (in that example) from scratch lets me know fucking EXACTLY how well your thought process is when facing a hard challenge, knowing the basemotherfucking case of a LinkedList will damn well make you understand WHAT is going on with your abstractions as to not fucking violate memory constraints, this-shit-is-important.

So, will your royal majesties at least for the sake of completeness look into a couple of very well made youtube or book tutorials concerning the topic?

You can code an entire website, fine as shit, you will get tested by my ass in terms of security and best practices, run these questions now, and it very motherfucking well be as efficient as I think it should be(I HIRE, NOT YOU, or your fucking blog posts concerning how much MY degree was not needed, oh and btw, MY degree is what made sure I was able to make SUCH decissions)

This will make a loooooooot of mfkers salty, don't worry, I will still accept you as an interview candidate, but if you think you are good enough without a degree, or better than me (has happened, told that to my face by a candidate) then get fucking ready to receive a question concerning: BASIC FUCKING COMPUTER SCIENCE TOPICS

* gays away into the night

Years ago we had a visit from a startup company developing a firewall and I got the chance to talk with one of their devs.

He explained the subtleties of security holes in websites and after I said something about our site being secure thanks to being behind a firewall he gently asked what would happen if he entered a specially crafted test into one of the text fields ... and he gave an example ...

I got a chill, went back to my seat and traced what it would do ...

That was when I learned about sql injection and his example would have killed the DB :/

Before going home I designed a way to secure the input which I then refined over a few days.

We still use that today after 17 years.

That one single sentence really showed to never be to proud of our security and I realized how vulnerable our site was.

This rant is a confession I had to make, for all of you out there having a bad time (or year), this story is for you.

Last year, I joined devRant and after a month, I was hired at a local company as an IT god (just joking but not far from what they expected from me), developer, web admin, printer configurator (of course) and all that in my country it's just called "the tech guy", as some of you may know.

I wasn't in immediate need for a full-time job, I had already started to work as a freelancer then and I was doing pretty good. But, you know how it goes, you can always aim for more and that's what I did.

The workspace was the usual, two rooms, one for us employees and one for the bosses (there were two bosses).

Let me tell you right now. I don't hate people, even if I get mad or irritated, I never feel hatred inside me or the need to think bad of someone. But, one of the two bosses made me discover that feeling of hate.

He had a snake-shaped face (I don't think that was random), and he always laughed at his jokes. He was always shouting at me because he was a nervous person, more than normal. He had a tone in his voice like he knew everything. Early on, after being yelled for no reason a dozen of times, I decided that this was not a place for me.

After just two months of doing everything, from tech support to Photoshop and to building websites with WordPress, I gave my one month's notice, or so I thought. I was confronted by the bosses, one of which was a cousin of mine and he was really ok with me leaving and said that I just had to find a person to replace me which was an easy task. Now, the other boss, the evil one, looked me on the eye and said "you're not going anywhere".

I was frozen like, "I can't stay here". He smiled like a snake he was and said "come on, you got this we are counting on you and we are really satisfied with how you are performing till now". I couldn't shake him, I was already sweating. He was rolling his eyes constantly like saying "ok, you are wasting my time now" and left to go to some basketball practice or something.

So, I was stuck there, I could have caused a scene but as I told you, one of the bosses was a cousin of mine, I couldn't do anything crazy. So, I went along with it. Until the next downfall.

I decided to focus on the job and not mind for the bad boss situation but things went really wrong. After a month, I realised that the previous "tech guy" had left me with around 20 ancient Joomla - version 1.0 websites, bursting with security holes and infested with malware like a swamp. I had never seen anything like it. Everyday the websites would become defaced or the server (VPN) would start sending tons of spam cause of the malware, and going offline at the end. I was feeling hopeless.

And then the personal destruction began. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat. I was having panick attacks at the office's bathroom. My girlfriend almost broke up with me because I was acting like an asshole due to my anxiety issues (but in the end she was the one to "bring me back"(man, she is a keeper)) and I hadn't put a smile on my face for months. I was on the brink of depression, if not already there. Everyday I would anxiously check if the server is running because I would be the one to blame, even though I was trying to talk to the boss (the bad one was in charge of the IT department) and tell him about the problem.

And then I snapped. I finally realised that I had hit rock bottom. I said "I can't let this happen to me" and I took a deep breath. I still remember that morning, it was a life-changing moment for me. I decided to bite the bullet and stay for one more month, dealing with the stupid old server and the low intelligence business environment. So, I woke up, kissed my girlfriend (now wife), took the bus and went straight to work, and I went into the boss's office. I lied that I had found another job on another city and I had one month in order to be there on time. He was like, "so you are leaving? Is it that good a job the one you found? And when are you going? And are you sure?", and with no hesitation I just said "yup". He didn't expect it and just said "ok then", just find your replacement and you're good to go. I found the guy that would replace me, informing him of every little detail of what's going on (and I recently found out, that he is currently working for some big company nowadays, I'm really glad for him!).

I was surprised that it went so smoothly, one month later I felt the taste of freedom again, away from all the bullshit. Totally one of the best feelings out there.

I don't want to be cliche, but do believe in yourself people! Things are not what the seem.

With all that said, I want to give my special thanks to devRant for making this platform. I was inactive for some time but I was reading rants and jokes. It helped me to get through all that. I'm back now! Bless you devRant!

I'm glad that I shared this story with all of you, have an awesome day!

Hello!
I'm a member of an international hacker group.

As you could probably have guessed, your account [cozyplanes@tuta.io] was hacked, because I sent message you from it.

Now I have access to you accounts!
For example, your password for [cozyplanes@tuta.io] is [RANDOM_ALPHABET_HERE]

Within a period from July 7, 2018 to September 23, 2018, you were infected by the virus we've created, through an adult website you've visited.
So far, we have access to your messages, social media accounts, and messengers.
Moreover, we've gotten full damps of these data.

We are aware of your little and big secrets...yeah, you do have them. We saw and recorded your doings on porn websites. Your tastes are so weird, you know..

But the key thing is that sometimes we recorded you with your webcam, syncing the recordings with what you watched!
I think you are not interested show this video to your friends, relatives, and your intimate one...

Transfer $700 to our Bitcoin wallet: 13DAd45ARMJW6th1cBuY1FwB9beVSzW77R
If you don't know about Bitcoin please input in Google "buy BTC". It's really easy.

I guarantee that after that, we'll erase all your "data" :)

A timer will start once you read this message. You have 48 hours to pay the above-mentioned amount.

Your data will be erased once the money are transferred.
If they are not, all your messages and videos recorded will be automatically sent to all your contacts found on your devices at the moment of infection.

You should always think about your security.
We hope this case will teach you to keep secrets.
Take care of yourself.

>> RE >>
Well f### you, thanks for telling my password which is obviously fake. I have sent your details to the local police department, shall rest in peace. Don't earn money by this kind of action. STUPID!

So just recently my school blocked the following for unknown reasons websites
Github
Gitlab
Amazons aws
stack exchange
Bitbucket
Heroku
The hacker news
DuckDuckGo
The Debian package repositories yea all of em
And all domains that end in .io
Now some of you out there are probably just saying "well just use a vpn" the answer to that is I can't the only device I have a locked down school iPad can't install apps cannot delete apps cannot change vpn or proxy setting's I cannot use Safari private tab they have google safe search restricted to "on" they even have "safari restricted mode which lets safari choose what it wants to block" and even when I'm on my home wifi it's s still blocked as they use Cisco security connector THIS IS HELL

Also this is my first post :)

I wonder why banks are always so terribly insecure, given how much money there's for grabs in there for hackers.

Just a while ago I got a new prepaid credit card from bpost, our local postal service that for some reason also does banking. The reason for that being that - thank you 'Murica! - a lot of websites out there don't accept anything but credit cards and PayPal. Because who in their right mind wouldn't use credit cards, right?! As it turns out, it's pretty much every European I've spoken to so far.

That aside, I got that card, all fine and dandy, it's part of the Mastercard network so at least I can get my purchases from those shitty American sites that don't accept anything else now. Looked into the manual of it because bpost's FAQ isn't very clear about what my login data for their online customer area now actually is. Not that their instruction manual was either.

I noticed in that manual that apparently the PIN code can't be changed (for "security reasons", totally not the alternative that probably they didn't want to implement it), and that requesting a forgotten PIN code can be done with as little as calling them up, and they'll then send the password - not a reset form, the password itself! IN THE FUCKING MAIL.

Because that's apparently how financial institutions manage their passwords. The fact that they know your password means that they're storing it in plain text, probably in a database with all the card numbers and CVC's next to it. Wouldn't that be a treasure trove for cybercriminals, I wonder? But YOU the customer can't change your password, because obviously YOU wouldn't be able to maintain a secure password, yet THEY are obviously the ones with all the security and should be the ones to take out of YOUR hands the responsibility to maintain YOUR OWN password.

Banking logic. I fucking love it.

As for their database.. I reckon that that's probably written in COBOL too. Because why wouldn't you.

Me: So what you are doing in the IT field?
Him: I am hacking bank websites.
Me: OK, that's cool. It is good in free time. What is your actual job?
Him: I am seriously hacking the bank Web site!
Me: Trust me, if you seriously doing that you will never ever mentioned it...
Him: No, I am doing it legally... The bank hiring me to try to hack the website...
Me: OK, you mean that you are cyber security tester?
Him: That is almost the same...
Me: So you are tester?
Him: I am hacking bank's websites...
Me:....

I was offered to work for a startup in August last year. It required building an online platform with video calling capabilities.
I told them it would be on learn and implement basis as I didn't know a lot of the web tech. Learnt all of it and kept implementing side by side.
I was promised a share in the company at formation, but wasn't given the same at the time of formation because of some issues in documents.
Yes, I did delay at times on the delivery date of features on the product. It was my first web app, with no prior experience. I did the entire stack myself from handling servers, domains to the entire front end. All of it was done alone by me.
Later, I also did install a proxy server to expand the platform to a forum on a new server.
And yesterday after a month of no communication from their side, I was told they are scraping the old site for a new one. As I had all the credentials of the servers except the domain registration control, they transferred the domain to a new registrar and pointed it to a new server. I have a last meeting with them. I have decided to never work with them and I know they aren't going to provide me my share as promised.
I'm still in the 3rd year of my college here in India. I flunked two subjects last semester, for the first time in my life. And for 8 months of work, this is the end result of it by being scammed. I love fitness, but my love for this is more and so I did leave all fitness activities for the time. All that work day and night got me nothing of what I expected.
Though, they don't have any of my code or credentials to the server or their user base, they got the new website up very fast.
I had no contract with them. Just did work on the basis of trust. A lesson learnt for sure.
Although, I did learn to create websites completely all alone and I can do that for anyone. I'm happy that I have those skills now.
Since, they are still in the start up phase and they don't have a lot of clients, I'm planning to partner with a trusted person and release my code with a different design and branding. The same idea basically. How does that sound to you guys?

I learned that:
. No matter what happens, never ignore your health for anybody or any reason.
. Never trust in business without a solid security.
. Web is fun.
. Self-learning is the best form of learning.
. Take business as business, don't let anyone cheat you.

I have bank accounts with 5 different banks.
I HAVE TO use 4-5 different government websites.

Every fucking place: you cannot use these "~-/;^"(some others too) symbols in your password.

Are you freaking fucking kidding me!! And all of them have a limit of 12or15 characters.

If this wasn't mind numbingly stupid enough, they fucking go ahead and force you to change password every fucking month or two.

THIS IS NOT SECURITY. YOU SHOULDN'T FORCE SOMEONE TO LIMIT THERE PASSWORDS TO:
- CERTAIN CHARACTERS
- A 15 CHARACTER SIZE LIMIT
- THRN OVERTHAT, FORCE TO CHANGE PASSWPRDS PERIODICALLY.

ALL THE 5 MAJOR FUCKING BANKS IN INDIA.

FUUUUUCCCCKKKKK YOUU 🖕

Warning: long read....

I got a call this morning from a client who was panicking about not being able to login to his web panel.

So I went to the web panel and tried to login and was just redirected back to the login page. No errors or anything (at least visible on the page). Went looking for an error_log file and found it.

It turns out there was an error was showing: Disk quota exceeded.

So I went into the cPanel and checked, he used about 16GB out of 100GB and that got me confused. So I looked around and found out he was using about 510000/500000 inodes.

Went looking trough FTP to see where he has so many files and try and remove some.

Well it turns out that there were about 7 injected websites (warez, online casino, affiliate one etc) and a full hacking web panel on his FTP. After detailed analysis some who actually built the site (I just maintain some parts) made an upload form available to public with any checks on it. Meaning anyone could upload whatever they wanted and the form would allow it.

The worst part is that the client is not allowing us to secure the form with some sort of login or remove it completely (the best option) as it is not really needed but he uses it to upload some pdf catalogs or something.

TL; DR;
Old programmer created an upload form that was accessible to anyone on the web without adding any security or check as to see what kind of files was getting uploaded. Which lead to having maximum number on inodes used on server and client being unable to login.

Side note:
And ofc I had to go and fix the mess behind him again, even though he stopped working a long time ago and I started just recently and have been having nightmares of this project.

Getting real fucking sick of shitty websites excessive security measures!

1. Username
2. Password
3. Captcha
4. Mandatory 2FA

We don't recognize your IP, please log into your email, click the link, get redirected and complete steps 1-4 again! Also the site will time out in 10 minutes if you aren't actively using it. Have a nice day!

Go fuck yourself.

First company I worked for, built around 40 websites with Drupal 7...in only a year (don't know if it's a lot for today's standards, but I was one guy doing everything). Of course I didn't have the time to keep updating everything and I continually insisted to the boss that we need more people if we are going to expand. Of course he kept telling me to keep working harder and that I "got this". Well, after a year a couple of websites got defaced, you know the usual stuff if you've been around for some time. Felt pretty bad at the time, it was a similar feeling to having your car stolen or something.

Anyways, fast forward about 2 years, started working on another company, and well...this one was on another level. They had a total of around 40 websites, with about 10 of them being Joomla 1.5 installations (Dear Lord have mercy on my soul(the security vulnerabilities from these websites only, were greater than Spiderman's responsibilities)) and the others where WordPress websites, all that ON A SINGLE VPS, I mean, come on... Websites being defaced on the daily, pharma-hacks everywhere, server exploding from malware queing about 90k of spam emails on the outbox, server downtime for maintenance happening almost weekly, hosting company mailing me on the daily about the next malware detection adventure etc. Other than that, the guy that I was replacing, was not giving a single fuck. He was like, "dude it's all good here, everything works just fine and all you have to do is keep the clients happy and shit". Sometimes, I hate myself for being too caring and responsible back then.

I'm still having nightmares of that place. Both that office and that VPS.

My school just tried to hinder my revision for finals now. They've denied me access just today of SSHing into my home computer. Vim & a filesystem is soo much better than pen and paper.

So I went up to the sysadmin about this. His response: "We're not allowing it any more". That's it - no reason. Now let's just hope that the sysadmin was dumb enough to only block port 22, not my IP address, so I can just pick another port to expose at home. To be honest, I was surprised that he even knew what SSH was. I mean, sure, they're hired as sysadmins, so they should probably know that stuff, but the sysadmins in my school are fucking brain dead.

For one, they used to block Google, and every other HTTPS site on their WiFi network because of an invalid certificate. Now it's even more difficult to access google as you need to know the proxy settings.

They switched over to forcing me to remote desktop to access my files at home, instead of the old, faster, better shared web folder (Windows server 2012 please help).

But the worst of it includes apparently having no password on their SQL server, STORING FUCKING PASSWORDS IN PLAIN TEXT allowing someone to hijack my session, and just leaving a file unprotected with a shit load of people's names, parents, and home addresses. That's some super sketchy illegal shit.

So if you sysadmins happen to be reading this on devRant, INSTEAD OF WASTING YOUR FUCKING TIME BLOCKING MORE WEBSITES THAN THEIR ARE LIVING HUMANS, HOW ABOUT TRY UPPING YOUR SECURITY, PASSWORDS LIKE "", "", and "gryph0n" ARE SHIT - MAKE IT BETTER SO US STUDENTS CAN ACTUALLY BROWSE MORE FREELY - I THINK I WANT TO PASS, NOT HAVE EVERY OTHER THING BLOCKED.

Thankfully I'm leaving this school in 3 weeks after my last exam. Sure, I could stay on with this "highly reputable" school, but I don't want to be fucking lied to about computer studies, I don't want to have to workaround your shitty methods of blocking. As far as I can tell, half of the reputation is from cheating. The students and sysadmins shouldn't have to have an arms race between circumventing restrictions and blocking those circumventions. Just make your shit work for once.

**On second thought, actually keep it like that. Most of the people I see in the school are c***s anyway - they deserve to have half of everything they try to do censored. I won't be around to care soon.**

1. Being the only single wringable neck to keep 40+ websites afloat, plus 3-5 new ones coming in or being built each month all with an overseas team that uses Google Translate to communicate and who are also in an active war zone.
2. Being fired for being “too old” in my mindset about how to do things. I had just turned 40 and my boss was 24 and distracted by all the shiny frameworks when all the marketing person needed was a simple off-the-shelf CMS-based site to publish company offers.
3. Jumping into the middle of a HUGE clusterfuck of thousands of Slack channels, wikis, and Jiras and an outmoded content management system while trying to learn the ropes from a guy who has no time to teach properly and then who abruptly leaves the company with scant documentation on everything that he held mainly in his own head. And there was no way I.T. was going to allow him to have the ability in Zoom to make a video of his training sessions, for no discernibly good security reason at all.
4. Working for only 9 months at two separate companies for two separate frat dudes who could have been clones of each other and whose egos made them into seagull managers* in every sense.
5. Being told by a new employer that they’re hiring me to be the head of their new web team only to find myself shuttled off to obscure contractor roles at MegaCorp Inc and AcmeCorp Inc.

I have 17 more years of this shit ahead of me before I can retire.

*If you haven’t heard of this: Someone who flies in, makes a lot of noise, shits all over everything, and flies out leaving everyone else to clean up the mess.

Watch out for these fucking bug bounty idiots.

Some time back I got an email from one shortly after making a website live. Didn't find anything major and just ran a simple tool that can suggest security improvements simply loading the landing page for the site.

Might be useful for some people but not so much for me.

It's the same kind of security tool you can search for, run it and it mostly just checks things like HTTP headers. A harmless surface test. Was nice, polite and didn't demand anything but linked to their profile where you can give them some rep on a system that gamifies security bug hunting.

It's rendering services without being asked like when someone washes your windscreen while stopped at traffic but no demands and no real harm done. Spammed.

I had another one recently though that was a total disgrace.

"I'm a web security Analyst. My Job is to do penetration testing in websites to make them secure."
"While testing your site I found some critical vulnerabilities (bugs) in your site which need to be mitigated."
"If you have a bug bounty program, kindly let me know where I should report those issues."
"Waiting for response."

It immediately stands out that this person is asking for pay before disclosing vulnerabilities but this ends up being stupid on so many other levels.

The second thing that stands out is that he says he's doing a penetration test. This is illegal in most major countries. Even attempting to penetrate a system without consent is illegal.

In many cases if it's trivial or safe no harm no foul but in this case I take a look at what he's sending and he's really trying to hack the site. Sending all kinds of junk data and sending things to try to inject that if they did get through could cause damage or provide sensitive data such as trying SQL injects to get user data.

It doesn't matter the intent it's breaking criminal law and when there's the potential for damages that's serious.

It cannot be understated how unprofessional this is. Irrespective of intent, being a self proclaimed "whitehat" or "ethical hacker" if they test this on a site and some of the commands they sent my way had worked then that would have been a data breach.

These weren't commands to see if something was possible, they were commands to extract data. If some random person from Pakistan extracts sensitive data then that's a breach that has to be reported and disclosed to users with the potential for fines and other consequences.

The sad thing is looking at the logs he's doing it all manually. Copying and pasting extremely specific snippets into all the input boxes of hacked with nothing to do with the stack in use. He can't get that many hits that way.

THE FUCK WHY did the company which made the website I'm maintaining now ADD CUSTOM FACEBOOK LIKES AND TWITTER FOLLOWER WIDGETS - IN A SUBDIRECTORY OF THE THEME?

Guess what, you motherfuckers: One year after you made that damn page the Facebook API changed and your stinking widget is broken REQUIRING ME TO REWRITE MOST OF IT!

Also WHO THE FUCK LEFT HIS BRAIN ON HIS BEDSIDE TABLE the day he decided to HARDCODE ASSETS WITH AN http:// (no tls) URL? YES, browsers will block that shift if the website itself is delivered over tls, because it's a GAPING SECURITY HOLE!

People who sells websites that have user management and thus request authentication without AT LEAST OFFERING FUCKING STANDARD TLS SHOUD BE TARRED AND FEATHERED AND THEN PUT IN A PILLORY IN FRONT OF @ALEXDELARGE'S HOUSE!

Maybe I should be a bit more thankful - I mean I get payed to fix their incompetence. But what kind of doctor is thankful for the broken bones of his patient?

I hate websites that dont have security but pretend like they do.

I think I want to quit.

I know it’s a bit of an inconvenient time with there being corona around but everything was okay up till January. I’m a junior even though I shouldn’t be. Since my manager told me and my team leader senior in my review “maybe you two should switch jobs” things have been going downhill. I think the team lead had it out for me and didn’t put me on a new project, I’ve been left with doing stupid basic shit like updating text on websites in a cms and doing fuck all and then there’s also another guy that was basically harassing me trying to put me in my place any time I was doing better than him and literally both of them been like that ... and now that I’m working from home it’s even worse. I don’t have any kind of assurance that everything okay and actually I think I’m being framed as welll since I found keyloggers on my work laptop and deleted cleaned shit up the past two weeks and changed my WiFi security as there were like 5 unknown devices on our network so yeah .. I’ve been framed and they made it out like I put a powershell script on one of the servers and it crashed a Porsche website for 8 h and all kinds of bullshit - this was yday. On Tuesday they logged me out of everything like changed the password for work vpn and kicked me out of slack and Microsoft teams for over 2 hours till the end of shift and two managers weren’t answering their phone and then next day my manager called and apologised that saying that he “accidentally” did that to me along with 15 people they let go from the company....

I’m seriously thinking of quitting being removed from team group for a moment , not being on a project and people literally trying to put me down after I know I’m genuinely smarter than them and if I had over 10 years experience like those on my team (I have 1) I’d be far higher up and better

They can genuinely just go fuck themseves !!!! And here I was going to work over weekend on something! No fucking way I just wanna quit or give in my notice but because of corona I’m divided

This is the last part of the series
(3 of 3) Credentials everywhere; like literally.

I worked for a company that made an authentication system. In a way it was ahead of it's time as it was an attempt at single sign on before we had industry standards but it was not something that had not been done before.

This security system targeted 3rd party websites. Here is where it went wrong. There was a "save" implementation where users where redirected to the authentication system and back.

However for fear of being to hard to implement they made a second method that simply required the third party site to put up a login form on their site and push the input on to the endpoint of the authentication system. This method was provided with sample code and the only solution that was ever pushed.

So users where trained to leave their credentials wherever they saw the products logo; awesome candidates for phishing. Most of the sites didn't have TLS/SSL. And the system stored the password as pain text right next to the email and birth date making the incompetence complete.

The reason for plain text password was so people could recover there password. Like just call the company convincingly frustrated and you can get them to send you the password.

Indian outsourcing web companies on their websites be like:
"We provide services in IOT, Machine Learning, Data Analysis, Web security analysis, blah blah"

Me excitingly joins the company and finds out, they all are PHP developers developing unsecured websites.

We are required to use corporate SSO for any authenticated internal websites, and one of the features they require you to implement is a "logout" button.

They provide a whole slew of specifications, including size and placement/visibility, etc. They provide an SSO logout URL you must redirect to after you take care of your own application logout tasks.

Makes sense... except the logout URL they provide to serve the actual SSO logout function broke over 3 months ago, and remains non-functional to this day.

Apparently I'm the first person (and perhaps one of the only people) who reported it, and was told "just not to worry about it".

So, we have a standing feature request to provide a button... that doesn't actually work.

Corporate Security - Making your corporation _appear_ more secure every day...

Apple: this AppleID has been locked for security reasons.
User: Sign Out
Apple: Enter the Apple ID password to turn off Find My iPhone.
User: Turn Off
Apple: You must enter both your Apple ID and password.
User: OK

Apple, please stop bugging me, all I need is to test my websites on Safari occasionally because some customers prefer to use iPhone. Just don't bother me with your Apple ID crap

I don't understand privacy advocators.

Am I the only one who wouldn't give up practicality in exchange for "potentially more secure"?

I don't understand so much what the deal is with people who avoid Facebook, or don't trust Google or Microsoft, just in the basis of "privacy" or "security".

Websites tracking you to serve ads? Well, it's pointless because I very rarely buy something from the internet or let myself be influenced, ads are waste of time, just use an adblocker.

I can pretty much upload my whole life or documents on Google drive, even if I made it public no one would really care or read it all. It's like that GitHub project you uploaded but never documented, so no one cares. I usually use alternative software not because of "privacy" but because it has features other software doesn't have.

In reality you realize people aren't that interested in your life more than their own life.

"we have add a lot of cost partly due to currency exchange rate, but we also added some services and servers, we'll have a meeting and see what we can cancel or re-arrange."

So now....
- JIRA is gone
- SEO tools are gone
- budget for site security & SSL undecided
- Servers are too expensive.
$800 for twelve 2-24gb ram servers with backup, I call that bargain

Can't wait to see the websites falling apart. Now where are my popcorns?

Wow so much hate for WordPress. Le me to the rescue 💀

Yes WP is bloated and crappy and full of security issues etc etc. Agreed. That doesn't mean it is useless though.

It is alright to use for someone who is not really good with web, someone who just needs a blog, someone who just needs a home page, about page and contact form with a possibility of updating photo and text once or two times a month.

It is not suitable for e-commerce nor lots of transactions/forms involving websites.

As long as you know what kind of horse/vehicle you are on, you won't end up in the dirt.

In a universe where JavaScript was never invented, the world of programming might look vastly different. Perhaps another programming language would have taken its place, or multiple languages would have coexisted in a more harmonious ecosystem.

Without the challenges posed by JavaScript, web development may have been smoother and more streamlined. Websites could have been faster and more responsive, without the need for complex optimization techniques. There might have been fewer security vulnerabilities to worry about, and the web could have been a safer place for users.

In this utopian world, developers would have had more time to focus on building great user experiences and innovative features, rather than battling with cross-browser compatibility issues and JavaScript quirks. The internet would have been a more accessible and inclusive place, with fewer barriers to entry for those who want to build and create.

Overall, a world without the horrors of JavaScript would have been a world with less frustration and more possibilities.

(Fooling around with ChatGPT)

Mozilla will update the browser to DNS-over-HTTPS security feature to all Firefox users in the U.S. by default in the coming weeks.

According to the report of TechCrunch : Whenever you visit a website ; even if it's HTTPS enabled, the DNS query that converts the web address into an IP address that computers can read is usually unencrypted. DNS-over-HTTPS or DoH encrypts the request so that it can not be intercepted or hijacked in order to send a user to a malicious site. These unencrypted DNS queries can also be used to snoop on which websites a user visits. The feature relies on sending DNS queries to third-party providers such as Cloudflare and NextDNS which will have their DoH offering into Firefox and will process DoH queries. Mozilla also said it plans to expand to other DoH providers and regions.

Providing hosting and site management services to clients was the best decision Ive ever made. Now they don't get access to their websites until I get paid.

Getting a managed dedicated server was an even better decision. Allowing me to focus on the development while a professional team takes care of my clients security.

Because I am very interested in cyber security and plan on doing my masters in it security I always try to stay up to date with the latest news and tools. However sometimes its a good idea to ask similar-minded people on how they approach these things, - and maybe I can learn a couple of things. So maybe people like @linuxxx have some advice :D Let's discuss :D

1) What's your goto OS? I currently use Antergos x64 and a Win10 Dualboot. Most likely you guys will recommend Linux, but if so what ditro, and why? I know that people like Snowden use QubesOS. What makes it much better then other distro? Would you use it for everyday tasks or is it overkill? What about Kali or Parrot-OS?

2) Your go-to privacy/security tools? Personally, I am always conencted to a VPN with openvpn (Killswitch on). In my browser (Firefox) I use UBlock and HttpsEverywhere. Used NoScript for a while but had more trouble then actual use with it (blocked too much). Search engine is DDG. All of my data is stored in VeraCrypt containers, so even if the system is compromised nobody is able to access any private data. Passwords are stored in KeePass. What other tools would you recommend?

3) What websites are you browsing for competent news reports in the it security scene? What websites can you recommend to find academic writeups/white papers about certain topics?

4) Google. Yeah a hate-love relationship, but its hard to completely avoid it. I do actually have a Google-Home device (dont kill me), which I use for calender entries, timers, alarms, reminders, and weather updates as well as IOT stuff such as turning my LED lights on and off. I wouldn"t mind switching to an open source solution which is equally good, however so far I couldnt find anything that would a good option. Suggestions?

5) What actions do you take to secure your phone and prevent things such as being tracked/spyed? Personally so far I havent really done much except for installing AdAway on my rooted device aswell as the same Firefox plugins I use on my desktop PC.

6) Are there ways to create mirror images of my entire linux system? Every now and then stuff breaks, that is tedious to fix and reinstalling the system takes a couple of hours. I remember from Windows that software such as Acronis or Paragon can create a full image of your system that you can backup and restore at any point to get a stable, healthy system back (without the need to install everything by hand).

7) Would you encrypt the boot partition of your system, even tho all data is already stored in encrypted containers?

8) Any other advice you can give :P ?

Nothing makes me not want to take a full-time job at your company more than having to go through IT tickets every quarter year when my password expires to actually change my password. Why have a fucking self-service portal for employees if logging in with an expired password doesn't work and the reset password link tells me that I need to log in to enroll with security questions (???). It feels like these websites are glued together with sticks and spit and there's a million of them each sporting one specific purpose! I have to go through this shit multiple times since I'm an intern and I didn't have access to my account through the course of the semester. Get your fucking shit together!

Guys, please use caddyserver as your webserver! It creates official tls certs for you without you having to do anything. Help making the web secure. There are too many websites that do not have any security.

TL:DR linux newbie, looking for advice/links (skip to bottom for questions)

!rant
After i had been looking for a job for quite some time, a couple of months ago i got hired by "smaller" company doing web stuff. So far it have been a great place, good colleagues, and overall just having a great time!.
They seem to value me alot, so that's great!.

Anyway, yesterday i got called into a meeting - and got told they wanted me to start learning "Server stuff (linux)". That got me quite excited, because it always was something i wanted to learn - but never really got around to doing.

But i never touched a linux installation before, so i'm really on ground zero - but im not afraid, i'm a quick learner and quite efficient at googling :)

I figured i would ask here, since other people here always seems to be happy to help other people out.

So far i have manage to setup a server, install various stuff (php, mysql and so on) and done setup a couple of domains/subdomains on my server. Also got a vestacpinstallation working - so overall im quite happy so far.

I figured maybe somebody had some good links/advice for a linux newbie :).

* Performance/Security, will obviously be a big focus - anything i should look at? - any must look at?
* Monitoring tools, how do i monitor various websites running on my server? Here i'm thinking bandwitch, cpu/ram usage and so on pr site basis.
* Any other stuff i should be looking at?

Little about what the server will/should be running :)

* Centos
* vestacp
* WordPress installations only (e-commerce mainly)
* PHP 7 / MySQL / phpmyadmin

I'm thinking about creating a central login system for all my websites, where you get redirected to and then login/sign up and then be redirect back. A bit like oAuth.

I have a few websites (and more in development) that use a login system, so that could be really useful to have... Especially because all of them are built from scratch and have their pros and cons. And security wise it's easier to concentrate on one system instead of all of them.

Another benefit is that you save some DB space, if you have lots of users!
And of course the users benefit from it as they'll be able to use all my websites with a single account.

What do you think about it?
I'll still need to do a bit of research on security but other than that, I only see benefits!

Area of focus: security and automation
Why: before I turned 18 i was a hacker for 5 years and i saw the kind of crap security most websites and programs had and even if the site was secure you could usually email somebody with a spoofed email and get in. And when i say hacker i mean i wrote my own stuff not skiddy.

I remember back when I was in pre calculus I decided to take a class online. So my teacher's website was made by him and run on go Daddy, he taught precalculus, calculus, algebra, algebra ii, and computer science. I decided to penetration test his website and use a web crawler. His directory that had the tests, test answers, exams, exam answers, and homework answer's as well as all the books he's written in PDFs, was unprotected, I could access and download them all. He also had a database directory that contained all the students' phone numbers, email addresses, home addresses, and their full names.

I alerted him to this and didn't get anything in turn :P

I have a small NUC-like machine in my home with an old external hdd connected to it. I use it to run my local gitlab, nextcloud and to test a few websites I build for the lolz.
If you too have a homelab, whether it's a single raspberry or an entire room full or racks, you know damn well that everything you have running locally as a web service keeps going until it doesn't, for whatever fucking reason. This time, it was the turn of my nextcloud.
The machine has arch linux running, I chose it since I already use it on my coding laptop and being a rolling release means I don't have to manually upgrade to a newer version, risking various fuck-ups and consequent screaming of profanity.
The downside is that arch is a bleeding-edge distro, so, despite being pretty good for what concerns security, as updates are pushed out some packages may still require legacy software to work as intended, since obviously not all developers for all packages can release simultaneously.
The problem was that php reached 8.2.x but nextcloud couldn't use anything beyond 8.1, so the highlighted solution was to download php-legacy, a package with a set of utilities which the cloud could use instead of mainline php.

Pretty easy, right? fuck my life, here we go.

I edited apache-httpd's configurations to link the new libraries, updated every reference in every virtual host that could possibly screw up the web server.

Done.

Then I went on and disabled the php-fpm mainline, creating a new systemd unit that would instead run the legacy executable and afterwards I edited nextcloud's additional configs so they use that instead.

Done, getting a bit dizzy, but I reboot everything and breathe.

At this point the migration should be complete, but wait, the server returns an error saying that the application is still trying to use php 8.2+...wait, what in the sysadmin Christ?

Back to nextcloud config, everything is set, everything else in every other fucking php-legacy and web server is fine, the old fpm service is disabled, I am confused, and why in the FUCKING FUCK is the new php-fpm unit failing to start at boot with "error 78/config - directory not found"? Hello? Am I being trolled by a shitty dual-core amazon fake NUC?
Maybe yes, cause it turns out that the unit was referencing a directory in the external hdd, which gets mounted at boot time after the unit itself starts, so nothing much, just a matter of tinkering with cron jobs, a reboot and at least this one is off my balls.

But why still isn't the server responding correctly? why? WHY?

After slamming my cock on the keyboard here and there scrolling back through all the config files I think to myself, hmmm, my gitlab is working flawlessly, well yeah, I didn't need to install the whole web stack, everything was nice and easy wrapped in a docker container...so why am I even here, why the fuck am I bothering with all this layered web-app bullshit, why don't I just run the up-to-date docker image that someone else has already set up for me, back up all the data and reupload them on the application?

Oh joy, you can't imagine, after 3...almost 4 hours of pure computer-touching the relief I had from seeing the blue web page with the "welcome to nextcloud" title.

Right now it's copying back all the files, and the external hdd is now linked to include the data folder.
Like really, everything was solved in two lines of bash.

I am still fuming, but at least I learned a valuable lesson, if you want a service up for yourself, implement it and deploy it as fucking easy straight-forward as you can, giving MAXIMUM priority to already fully-working options that are out there just waiting to be downloaded and used. I swing my scrotal sack on web-apps elegance as long as it's MY homelab in MY place.

Eat a fat dick php.

sudo pacman -Rns nextcloud
sudo systemctl disable --now php-fpm-legacy
sudo pacman -Rns php-legacy
sudo pacman -Rns $(sudo pacman -Qdtq)

The it manager said that the site on my private vps where we are using a small tool as reference, is a security issue and what if it may be hacked... Well, from this point of perspective all the websites shall be switched off. The tool lovered the problem resolution from 30 to 2 minutes.. I have asked for on premise server before but noone gave a shit so I hosted on my private vps. I wont give it back for free, its a sure thing. Soon they will start to get the complains that its offline because the customer is using it for debugging too. I feel like IT and dev is really moving appart. They act as bunch of pathetic jelous guys who couldn't learn programming and ended up in installing windows on machines...

I've been wondering about renting a new VPS to get all my websites sorted out again. I am tired of shared hosting and I am able to manage it as I've been in the past.

With so many great people here, I was trying to put together some of the best practices and resources on how to handle the setup and configuration of a new machine, and I hope this post may help someone while trying to gather the best know-how in the comments. Don't be scared by the lengthy post, please.

The following tips are mainly from @Condor, @Noob, @Linuxxx and some other were gathered in the webz. Thanks for @Linux for recommending me Vultr VPS. I would appreciate further feedback from the community on how to improve this and/or change anything that may seem incorrect or should be done in better way.

1. Clean install CentOS 7 or Ubuntu (I am used to both, do you recommend more? Why?)
2. Install existing updates
3. Disable root login
4. Disable password for ssh
5. RSA key login with strong passwords/passphrases
6. Set correct locale and correct timezone (if different from default)
7. Close all ports
8. Disable and delete unneeded services
9. Install CSF
10. Install knockd (is it worth it at all? Isn't it security through obscurity?)
11. Install Fail2Ban (worth to install side by side with CSF? If not, why?)
12. Install ufw firewall (or keep with CSF/Fail2Ban? Why?)
13. Install rkhunter
14. Install anti-rootkit software (side by side with rkhunter?) (SELinux or AppArmor? Why?)
15. Enable Nginx/CSF rate limiting against SYN attacks
16. For a server to be public, is an IDS / IPS recommended? If so, which and why?
17. Log Injection Attacks in Application Layer - I should keep an eye on them. Is there any tool to help scanning?

If I want to have a server that serves multiple websites, would you add/change anything to the following?
18. Install Docker and manage separate instances with a Dockerfile powered base image with the following? Or should I keep all the servers in one main installation?
19. Install Nginx
20. Install PHP-FPM
21. Install PHP7
22. Install Memcached
23. Install MariaDB
24. Install phpMyAdmin (On specific port? Any recommendations here?)

I am sorry if this is somewhat lengthy, but I hope it may get better and be a good starting guide for a new server setup (eventually become a repo). Feel free to contribute in the comments.

Since I started my routine of checking bug logs every morning, I've had 2 instances where a website vulnerability scanner was run against a production website and generated over 2,000 Coldfusion errors.

At the time, I was super nervous about the apparent hack attempt, and hyped that the attackers never actually got in. It's nice to know that despite the various errors indicating vulnerable / breakable code, they were ultimately unsuccessful. I know now that a determined attacker could probably have wrecked our production websites. Since then I've made a ton of security-related updates and I'm actually thankful for the script kiddie getting my attention with that scan.

PS. We're now building a website for a local security company who is going to work with us to pen test the site when it's finished! Gulp.

Things that annoy me about my current place:

1 - Only 3 people out of a team of 12 developers are allowed to purge akamai, or merge pull requests to master on any of our 200+ websites. Apparently this is because us contractors are not allowed because the permanent employees have to be accountable for the code.

Despite this, no-one actually reads the code. You just throw up a request in the slack channel and boom, instantly 30 seconds later someone approves it, even if its 500+ lines of code.

2 - I've pushed for us to move to agile instead of waterfall, and got declined (which is fine), but the reasoning was that the dev team are not 'mature enough' to work that way. Half the devs here have 5+ years of experience so I don't get the problem here.

3 - There is zero code reviewing process in place. I just watched as a developer's 300 line merge request was approved within 8 seconds of it going live. No-one is allowed to comment on the code review or suggest changes as this would 'slow down development'. Within that 300 line merge request were tons of css being aimlessly commented out, and invalid javascript (introducing both bugs and security issues) that were totally ignored.

What is your thoughts on these above points?

Am I too narrow minded or is the development manager clueless?

Why does #Devrant (idk if #'s are a thing here) not have a confirm password field?

Come on... I doubt it annoys users and it saves people a lot of hassle, especially when we are logging in on multiple devices :/ I know lots of people who type their password wrong the first time and later on they can't login and get frustrated and confused then end up resetting via email.

Also why no login with Google etc~ that's kinda annoying too...

The NPC has stated that the personal data of atleast 2000 people was leaked after the attacks on the websites of the philippinian goverment on april 1, the data contains; names,adresses,passwords and school data.

Over 7 administrators of schools, universities and other goverment structures have been called out for not reporting on the leakage of personal info on public facebook groups and violaton of the NPC in under 72 hours.

The representatives of the next structures stood before the comission on the 23 and 24 of april

- Taguig City University

- Department of Education offices in Bacoor City and Calamba City

- the Province of Bulacan

- Philippine Carabao Center

- Republic Central Colleges in Angeles City

- Laguna State Polytechnic University

The agency has reported that none of the organisations had notified about the personal info leakage yet.

This is a good reminder that you should inform about security/personal info breaches everyone that might be related to it as soon as possible, even if it seems unecessary.

Security experts have discovered hundreds of fake websites which are being used to spread dangerous malware for Android and Windows devices. A "vast" network of over 200 internet pages, which impersonate 27 brands such as household names like TikTok, PayPal and Snapchat, are being used to spread a vicious bug which can empty out bank accounts. These bogus websites feature the notorious ERMAC banking trojan which is capable of stealing sensitive login details for 467 online banking and cryptocurrency apps.

Anyone have any info about unconventional ways to inject JavaScript into an external website? I'm trying to become more knowledgeable about security vulnerabilities in the web apps I build and I've been having a lot of fun trying this stuff out in other live sites haha. I've tried adding js code to text boxes, input fields, and the uri but nothing has been successful. I read something about modifying cookies I think...

(how) is it possible to run a shell command from a websites javascript? i am aware of the well known security issue but have a use case where i can assume it less critical. currently using ie11 activex which is fine but not supported on other browsers and hell i want not to be dependent on ie! tried to find it myself of course but without success.
in detail i want to print several pdf files with one click based on a javascript array using plain vanilla js.
am i missing something or am i out of luck?

So, watching this video on Youtube about security. He mentions how SSL was designed back when Yahoo was a website with 30 links... And basically for passive websites.... Why do we still use this again??