A few months ago I left Gmail as my primary email provider and migrated to FastMail.com. The original cause of the decision was the fact that Google announced it was going to kill Inbox, but at the same time I started to realize that Google had too much power on the Internet.

If you think about it, Google, a single private company, owns and controls:

• the most used email service (Gmail)
• the most used web browser (Chrome)
• the most used mobile operating system (Android)
• the most used search engine (Google)
• the most used maps service (Maps)
• the most used video streaming website…

I’ve recently started porting a REST API to .NET Core using the ASP.NET Core MVC framework, and one of the requirements is to keep the JSON response structure very similar to the one of the old project, that was written using another language and web framework.

The easiest part is returning response data when the request is successful. In this case, we can call the Ok() method with the response data we want to send back, and the method will generate an OkResult , taking care of content negotiation of the payload (which means choosing JSON, XML, etc.), …

Utilizzare il protocollo HTTPS per la sicurezza dei siti web è importante, ma non solo sulle pagine di login dove si inseriscono indirizzi email e password. Anche le cosiddette “landing page”, cioè quelle in cui l’utente arriva quando apre un sito web, devono essere protette. Il motivo è che tutto ciò che viene trasmesso su HTTP è qualcosa di cui non ci si può fidare. Immaginate un sito web che ha una homepage in HTTP e un link “Premi qui per accedere”. Ci possiamo fidare di quel link? No…

Ho controllato i siti web dei principali operatori di telefonia fissa italiani, in particolare Vodafone, Fastweb, Infostrada (Wind Tre), Tiscali e TIM. …

A mezzanotte del 12 gennaio 2018 è uscito il nuovo album di Francesca Michielin, dal titolo “2640”, e come capita per ogni nuova uscita di una certa rilevanza inizia la corsa alla trascrizione del testo dei brani contenuti nell’album. Il primo che arriva è quello che finisce prima in alto nei risultati di Google.

A mezzanotte e dieci minuti inizio quindi a trascrivere il testo di alcune canzoni, e decido di farlo su Genius.com, una piattaforma di trascrizione a cui sono particolarmente affezionato per il modello collaborativo sullo stile di Wikipedia che propone.

Trascrivo quindi “Bolivia” alle ore 00:15, “Scusa se non ho gli occhi azzurri” alle 00:21, “Due galassie” alle 00:31, “E se c’era…” alle 00:41 e infine “Alonso” alle 00:50. …

If you have deployed multiple servers on DigitalOcean or Vultr, you probably know that every server can be provided with a private IP address that is associated with the private network of the datacenter. This is great, because it allows to deploy distributed services (like databases) that communicate with each other with a latency that is close to zero.

The “issue” is that the private network is shared: that means that in the same subnet there are hundreds and possibly thousands of other servers. So at some point you’ll want to set up a Virtual Private Network (VPN) between your servers, so that they’ll be able to contact each other with custom private IP addresses (like 10.0.1.x) …

So you need to transfer your text messages from a Windows Phone device to an Android one, right? And you realized there’s no simple solution for doing that?

The steps in this guide will make it a bit simpler for you. Note that there are many ways of doing this, so this is just one of them, the one that worked almost flawlessly in my case.

This guide will be divided in three parts:

• Messages export from Windows Phone
• Messages processing/conversion
• Messages import to Android

Requirements

Before to start, let’s make requirements clear. You don’t need both the devices at the same time. …

Periscope has been out for a few months now. Initially available for iOS only, there‘s now an official client for Android too. There’s no support for other operating systems, but they do have a web interface with the ability to watch Periscope streams, as long as you have the direct link to the stream.

It’s easy to get one. Just go on Twitter and search for the hashtag #periscope. You’ll find hundreds of new streams shared every minute.

Let’s take a random one:

https://www.periscope.tv/w/aJPMHDI4NTg1OTV8NTU0MjA3NDgTvHaGVTq82YAt6lB96LLcrCDy7YHPZZ2HzHVGx6gSJQ==

The part of the URL after the /w/ path is what they call the Token ID of the stream. …

A recent analysis showed that there are at least 30.000 instances of MongoDB left unsecured on the Internet, meaning that anyone can access the data without any kind of authentication.

The official MongoDB documentation might feel a little bit complicated on how to properly setup authentication on a MongoDB instance, so this article will hopefully help with an initial basic configuration.

NOTE: this article was updated multiple times, particularly in March 2018 for a check for compatibility with MongoDB 3.6.x, and in March 2019 for compatibility with MongoDB 4.0. The instructions should actually be the same when using any MongoDB 3.x/4.0 …