Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Friday, 1st June 2018

Half of the time when companies say they need "AI" what they really need is a SELECT clause with GROUP BY.

Mat Velloso

# 2:35 pm / sql, ai

asgi-scope (via) I made a tiny (16 lines of code) web application to help understand the ASGI specification for building asynchronous Python applications. It works a little like phpinfo(): it dumps out the ASGI scope created by the incoming request.

# 2:42 pm

Side-channel attacking browsers through CSS3 features. Really clever attack. Sites like Facebook offer iframe widgets which show the user’s name, but due to the cross-origin resource policy cannot be introspected by the site on which they are embedded. By using CSS3 blend modes it’s possible to construct a timing attack where a stack of divs layered over the top of the iframe can be used to derive the embedded content, by taking advantage of blend modes that take different amounts of time depending on the colour of the underlying pixel. Patched in Firefox 60 and Chrome 63.

# 2:54 pm / timing-attack, sidechannel, css3, security

Continuous Integration with Travis CI—ZEIT Documentation. One of the neat things about Zeit Now is that since deployments are unlimited and are automatically assigned a unique URL you can set up a continuous integration system like Travis to deploy a brand new copy of every commit or every pull request. This documentation also shows how to have commits to master automatically aliased to a known URL. I have quite a few Datasette projects that are deployed automatically to Now by Travis and the pattern seems to be working great so far.

# 5:21 pm / zeit-now, continuous-deployment, continuous-integration, travis

2018 » June

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