riyad – Page 4

Mu = 0

It seems uMatrix development has stopped. 😢

I was mildly asleep as around 6am in the morning “someone” turned on a very bright light. There was a weird hissing sound. I woke up quite annoyed after around 10 seconds. But what I saw was beyond belief.

There was a roughly 30cm flame burning on my wife’s nightstand. I immediately went over and saw her iPhone on fire. I tried slapping it a few times which made the flames smaller so that I could disconnect the charging cable. I tried picking up the phone, but the case around was melting which burned my fingers. I then knocked it onto the ground (maybe not the smartest move), but I wanted to get the flames away from the lamp shade, plants and wall paper.

It seems the combination of disconnecting the charger and hitting the floor temporarily extinguished the flames. I immediately grabbed the phone at a point that seemed like it was not melted, ran to the kitchen and threw it into the sink. I let the water run over the phone for around a minute. I then filled a bowl with water and put the phone into it to make sure it doesn’t flare up again.

ٱلْحَمْدُ لِلَّٰهِ رَبِّ ٱلْعَالَمِينَ we got off lightly 😅 … the whole situation could have turned into a huge disaster. ☠

Tony Abbott and Tap Water

What could go wrong if-as a joke-your being asked if you could hack the former prime minister of Australia Tony Abbott? Well Alex Hope has documented it. Finding pictures of boarding pass he could log into the booking system of the airline (without additional authentication). Then he found out that the systems leaked sensitive information (passport number, telephone number, airline-internal comments about the passenger). He then went through the whole charade of finding someone in government responsible for concrete data security issues. 😵

There’s even an interesting section on when he finally gets through to Tony Abbot and they talk on a very personal level. Given the reason they were talking in the first place it also revolved about how complicated technology seems to be and how you learn how it works.

This lead Alex to reflect about how he started learning things and how you have to change your thinking when you are “hacking.” He gives a great example which he summarizes with:

In conclusion, to be a hacker u ask for tap water.

😂

spyPod

An Apple engineer who helped launch the iPod said he helped the US government build a secret version of the device that could covertly collect data.
— Arstechnica

The UX of LEGO Interface Panels

George from Designed by Cave has a beautiful piece on the UX of LEGO interface panels (those sloped 2×2 bricks with stuff printed on them). He even utilizes them to illustrate principles of UI design. 😀

We Really Are Engineers 🎉

Hillel Wayne interviewed people who have worked professionally both as a software and a traditional engineer (from a diverse set of engineering disciplines) to determine if “software engineers” are really engineers … and, yes we are.

He also analyzes myths from and about software engineering and tries to find out if there’s actually something that makes software engineering unique among the other engineering disciplines.

Abspielen

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Scaffolding for fetching and parsing emails from IMAP with Python

A friend asked me if I could help him write a Python script for fetching and processing data from emails in his mailbox … Well, the thing with emails is that they’re a pain to work with (in any form). So, I tried to help him out with a little scaffolding (also available as a Gist).

	#!/usr/bin/python3
	#
	# Author: Riyad Preukschas <riyad@informatik.uni-bremen.de>
	# License: Mozilla Public License 2.0
	#
	# Scaffolding for fetching and parsing emails from IMAP

	import imaplib
	import email.parser
	import email.policy


	IMAP_HOST = ''
	IMAP_USER = ''
	IMAP_PASSWORD = ''


	# connect to server
	with imaplib.IMAP4_SSL(IMAP_HOST) as imap:
	# login with user name and password
	imap.login(IMAP_USER, IMAP_PASSWORD)

	# select mail "folder" to work in
	imap.select('INBOX', readonly=True)

	# list ALL mails in folder ... can also be used to filter mails
	# see https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2060#section-6.4.4
	typ, data = imap.search(None, 'ALL')
	message_ids = data[0].split()

	for message_id in message_ids:
	# fetch "raw" email data
	typ, data = imap.fetch(message_id, '(RFC822)')
	response_part_rfc822_data = data[0][1]

	# create an EmailMessage object from the raw data
	msg = email.parser.BytesParser(
	policy=email.policy.default).parsebytes(response_part_rfc822_data)

	# do your stuff here ...
	# for access to specific parts of the email message
	# see https://docs.python.org/3/library/email.message.html#email.message.EmailMessage
	email_subject = msg['Subject']
	email_from = msg['From']
	# get email body in plain text form (instead of html)
	# ... this might fail, because some mails are HTML-only :/
	email_text = msg.get_body('plain').get_content()

	print('From : ' + email_from + '\n')
	print('Subject : ' + email_subject + '\n')
	print(email_text)

view raw email_from_imap.py hosted with ❤ by GitHub

About Files

Simon Pitt writes how we have moved away from files as a representation of data and how we may have lost some freedoms on the way and gained weird new habits.

Years ago websites were made of files; now they are made of dependencies.

Multi-step Refactoring Pains in C++

Titus Winters talks about maintaining and refactoring large C++ code bases (i.e. code bodies that require multi-step refactoring). He describes how “higher-level” language features effectively make refactoring harder (e.g. functions, classes, templates, concepts).