Interesting articles

• EICAR test file | Wikipedia

  • Anti-virus test file, harmless but included in a few AV databases for testing purposes

• Making Sense of Acquire-Release Semantics

  • Great overview of memory synchronisation

• Emulating Diagnostic Services

  • Useful uses of ncat

• Learning socat in terms of netcat

  • Good overview of socat’s features in terms of ncat

• How I accidentally became PureGym’s unofficial Apple Wallet developer

  • Vadim Drobinin reverse-engineers PureGym’s API in a weekend and comes up with a much better app

• TLS overhead

  • Great overview of how much data TLS uses over a non-TLS connection

• systemd for Developers I and systemd for Administrators, Part XI

  • Overview of socket activation, and then a run-through of how to create an inetd-style service

Web services

• Odesli - create/retrieve universal music links

  • Copy in a Spotify link, it’ll generate a page with links to other services

  • For example, Beautiful Things on Spotify becomes Beautiful Things on song.link.

• Listen.fm - support bookshops while buying audiobooks

Useful tools / projects

• vnstat - track and display network usage over day/week/month

  • I’ve just started running this on a Raspberry Pi I manage remotely to see how much 4G data it consumes

• caddy-l4 - Caddy plugin implementing TCP-level directives

  • Can be used to terminate TLS and forward on a TCP socket

  • Combined with systemd for Administrators, Part XI, makes for a really simple way to implement SSL-encrypted TCP connections

  • Doing this with automatic certificates requires a small amount of boilerplate, see How to corectly redirect a domain/subdomain and generate a certificate? #271

• iodine - tunnel ipv4 traffic over DNS

  • Could be useful if you’re somewhere with internet access firewalled off but DNS still open