matt-wceu17

The bus factor in the WordPress project

During WordCamp Europe 2017 in Paris, there was a Q&A session with Matt Mullenweg. I wanted to ask him a question, but due to high demand and restricted time, I never got to ask him. I guess Matt is a busy person, so I don’t expect him to actually answer this question himself. But maybe someone in the WordPress community has answers, insights or ideas? A person is the CEO of one of the most important WordPress-related companies....

June 18, 2017 · 3 min · bjorn

Proper RFC 4122 UUIDs as GUIDs in WordPress

UUIDs (Universally Unique IDentifier), also known as GUIDs (Globally Unique IDentifier), is a string that identifies a piece of information in computer systems. WordPress use GUIDs to identify each individual post, but use URLs (kind of) for GUIDs, and thus does not follow the standard definition (RFC 4122) of a UUID (or GUID).

June 10, 2017 · 7 min · bjorn
secure-email

Secure email: Encrypt and sign your emails with PGP/GnuPG

Email is fundamentally insecure. There are such a plethora of issues with it, it is crazy to think about the kind of information sent with it. It is probably even crazier when you realize we’ve had a solution for sending secure email since 1991.

May 25, 2017 · 5 min · bjorn
wordcamp-berlin-note

Six reasons why I love WordCamps

This weekend I was at WordCamp Berlin, met a lot of great people, and watched a lot of interesting presentations. WordCamps are actually quite informal by themselves, but at the afterparties, people are really letting their shoulders down and it often seems like people are long-time personal friends. If you open up to it, it won’t take long until people will give you feedback on whatever you have released in public.

May 15, 2017 · 2 min · bjorn
hunter-tracker

DNS privacy: Use a DNS provider that doesn’t track you

Many ISPs and other DNS providers are slow or inject ads, track you, hijack DNS queries or do other nasty stuff. To mitigate this, you should use a fast, reliable and free service that respects your DNS privacy.

March 25, 2017 · 3 min · bjorn
self-destruction

Self-destructing cookies: Real, forced Do-Not-Track for your privacy

This is the second post in my series of posts on some of the tools I use to stay a little safer and protect my privacy online. With self-destructing cookies, you get a clean sheet even with those who don’t respect the Do-Not-Track header.

March 24, 2017 · 3 min · bjorn
forgery

How to perform and mitigate a WordPress session donation attack

WordPress doesn’t use a nonce for the login form, which opens up for you to perform a WordPress session donation attack.

March 22, 2017 · 7 min · bjorn
immutable

Immutable assets with unique URLs in WordPress for enqueued JS and CSS files

If you’re utilizing the browser cache correctly, you’ll gain huge performance benefits for your users, as well as save bandwidth and server capacity which equals to saving money. To do this right, you must create unique URLs for all versions of your resources, and tell them to never ask for the content again by telling the browsers that the assets are immutable resources.

March 21, 2017 · 6 min · bjorn
signal

Secure messaging on your phone with the Signal app

I’m running a series of posts on some of the tools I use to stay a little safer and protect my privacy online. Here’s how you can get much better secure messaging on your phone using the Signal app.

March 20, 2017 · 5 min · bjorn
stopping-emergency

How CloudFlare handled CloudBleed

Tavis Ormandy from Google’s Project Zero contacted Cloudflare to report a security problem with their service. It turned out that in some unusual circumstances, they would bleed memory that contained private information.

February 24, 2017 · 1 min · bjorn