Martin Thoma

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Last 30 daysDec 23, 2020 – Jan 21, 2021
Last monthDec 1, 2020 – Dec 31, 2020
Last 6 monthsJul 1, 2020 – Dec 31, 2020
Last yearJan 1, 2020 – Dec 31, 2020
Select date rangeJan 24, 2017 – Jan 21, 2021
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54 articles sorted by

Jan. 17, 2021

HTTPS, SSL, and TLS are all related to encrypted (“secure”) internet connections. The problem they solve is that a man in the middle could read the data you receive or send. It is clearly an issue when you log in to your bank or when you send…

Jan. 12, 2021

Medium

The Blockchain

Bitcoin crossed $40,000 USD for the first time recently, so it’s again in the news. Bitcoin is just the most-known cryptocurrency. It is one application using a blockchain. In this article, I will walk you through some core concepts of blockchain and…

Jan. 9, 2021

Medium

Marble Cookies

I love those simple cookies. They are not super dry like many others, they are easy to cook. Let's get started! Ingredients for 25 cookies 150g butter 100g sugar 1 package (ca. 8g) of vanilla sugar 1 egg 250g wheat 2 big spoons of chocolate powder…

Jan. 8, 2021

Medium

The ‘Literal’ Annotation in Python

Python keeps developing via Python Enhancement Proposals (PEPs). PEP 586 added a feature I love: Literal Types 😍 After reading this article you will know how to use that feature. If you happen to be new to type annotations, I recommend reading my…

Jan. 5, 2021

Medium

Decentralized vs Distributed

The terms “decentralized” and “distributed” sound extremely similar and people sometimes use them interchangeably. It might depend on the context, but I see “decentralized” mostly about decision making, control, and who is in charge. I connotate…

Jan. 3, 2021

Medium

Dependency Vendoring

Vendoring in Software Engineering is the act of including 3rd party software directly in your product. The alternative is to let a dependency management tool install it. One reason for vendoring is to avoid version conflicts when the dependencies are…

Dec. 31, 2020

Medium

New Year 2021 🎆

It’s new years eve and — as always — I try to finish some things and have some plans for next year. The year 2020 was crazy. It was mainly dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic, but also by much crazy news by Trump / from the US. There were also…

Dec. 29, 2020

Medium

What I spend money on in 2020 — Looking at my transaction records

A data scientists yearly review Many banks allow you to get a CSV dump of your transactions. I’ve downloaded my transaction data for this year and I will walk you through my analysis. I will only look at what I spend money on. I will not look at my…

Dec. 28, 2020

Medium

Full Disk Encryption 😇

Having an attacker with physical access to your device is one of the worst scenarios. If the data is not encrypted on the disk, then the attacker can simply disassemble your device, get the HDD/SDD, put it in his machine, and read the data. For this…

Dec. 26, 2020

Medium

DOS via a billion laughs 😈

How it works The following XML defines an entity ha , then an entity ha2 which contains ha twice. This pattern is repeated. This means ha5 contains ha indirectly 16 times. You can see the exponential growth, can’t you? <!DOCTYPE root [ <!ENTITY ha…

Dec. 23, 2020

Medium

How to Celebrate a Remote Christmas

Christmas is about family — here is how you make the best out of the current situation My family will not meet in person this year due to the spread of the Coronavirus. Instead, we want to celebrate remotely. Here are some ideas of what you can do if…

Dec. 23, 2020

Medium

DOS via a billion laughs 😈

Assuming that you cannot control the input directly and prevent XMLs with attacks from reaching you at all, I can think of 4 measures: Lazy evaluation of references: Instead of evaluating the whole document at once, the references are only resolved…

Dec. 11, 2020

Medium

The Cyber Security Triad

The Cyber Security Triad, also called the CIA triad, is a set of three goals: Confidentiality: Information or resources can only be accessed by authorized parties. Integrity: Information can only be added, edited, or removed by authorized…

Dec. 7, 2020

Medium

XXE attacks 😈

XML is probably the most commonly used markup language. It’s organized around tags <example>foo</example> and allows pretty complicated structures One interesting property about XML is that you can reference external entities, e.g. you can include…

Dec. 4, 2020

Medium

Software Composition Analysis (SCA)

The job as a software developer is pretty crazy: You need to learn constantly about new technologies, understand topics within the domain you’re working, estimate how long it will take to build stuff you have never built before, explain issues to…

Dec. 2, 2020

Medium

Email Spoofing 😈

Learn what it is, how it works, and how to defend against it with SPF, DKIM, DMARC Email spoofing is the creation of emails with a forged sender address. Faking the senders’ address is often a part of a phishing attack. There are different ways to…

Nov. 27, 2020

Medium

CAPTCHA 😇

Spam is a problem for websites that give people the possibility to comment. A very common approach to solve this problem are CAPTCHAs — Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Being able to tell humans from…

Oct. 28, 2020

Medium

ZIP Bombs 💣😈

A zip bomb is a zip file that is designed to take an enormous amount of space once it is unpacked. The best-known one is called 42.zip and has a size of 42kB. It contains recursively nested zip-files. On the lowest level, there is a single file which…

Oct. 26, 2020

Medium

PyCharm Professional — Python Editors in Review 👩‍💻

PyCharm is an IDE developed by JetBrains since 2010. Yes, the same company that developed IntelliJ, the de-facto default for Java. It costs $200 per year which is pretty expensive if you just get your feet wet with Python. It’s pretty cheap if you…

Oct. 23, 2020

Medium

Python Editors in Review: Sublime Text

My favorite editor 😍 — for 3 Reasons Sublime Text is an editor developed by Jon Skinner. It is available for free, but it will ask you every 15th time you save something if you would like to buy it. I bought Sublime Text because I use it on a daily…