Weeknotes 12

19 Sep 2021

Life

An essay on why the author stopped being accommodating to everyone. Source. It resonated with me a lot and I think it is a must read for everyone starting their careers. The reasons he gave for why he stopped being accommodating were different from anything I have seen before and also the counterintuitive fact that stopping to be accommodating will actually allow us to help people.
An article on how some new psychological research has been shown the benefit of certain religious practices. Source. Read the article in incognito mode if the website says your monthly limit has expired.

Hackers can redirect all your SMS messages without you ever knowing. Source. This is caused by the underlying architecture of the SMS system. It reminds of BGP vulnerabilities which was also caused by the implementation. All these are high impact areas which are not talked/researched about often
People have started compiling list of vulnerabilities abused by ransomware gangs. Source. This list to this can be used to more accurately predict the impact of the vulnerabilities. We can even automate the detection of such vulnerabilities. The List

A write up on how Netflix secures its applications at scale. Source. The more interesting part of the article is the reasoning behind the decisions that finalized the architecture and how they increased developer adoption.
Picturing Git: Conceptions and Misconceptions. Source. A good read for everyone who uses Git. It clears up a lot of misconceptions about Git and explains things we have not given a thought about. Another good resource would be this book.

Mozilla has found a way to make Firefox the default browser using a single click prompt. This way is only available to Microsoft Edge, to set other browsers as default you have to go into the settings and change it there. Mozilla seems to have reverse engineered how Edge does it and copied the approach. Source. This article explains stuff in a bit more detail. While this might seem like a small change/news, it reeks of anti-competitive behaviour from Microsoft. I’m surprised that Microsoft hasn’t been sued over it.