It’s heavily rumoured that Cloudflare will soon be announcing a Public DNS server. Their website, every1dns.com is currently empty, but Google have a cached version of the site available. The two DNS servers, easier to remember than Googles are said to be 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1. According to their website, both support encrypted DNS as well as DNS over HTTPS. They claim they have retained KMPG to audit our systems annually to ensure that...
Word blacklists, censorship, and Google Shopping
As of recently, Google have ‘broken’ Google Shopping. It appears they have set up a blacklist of words which cannot be used in searches. The problem is commonly called the Scunthorpe Problem. This is where certain words or phrases are caught by a spam filter or search engine because the words used contains a string of letters which have been deemed to be unfit to be used. As can be seen with with the words Scunthorpe, Shitake...
UK Gov sites hijacked by Cryptominer, and Subresource Integrity
Over the weekend, thousands of websites around the world, including the UK’s NHS and ICO and the US Government Court system, were compromised, and caused visitors to mine crypto-coins – generating money for the miscreants. These sites were using a popular plugin called Browsealoud. Their support software “adds speech, reading, and translation to websites facilitating access and participation for people with Dyslexia, Low...
State of the Web – Autoplaying Audio and Video
It’s an ongoing debate – users do not like videos to autoplay (apart from YouTube), and designers want their website to feature their video and audio immediately on visiting the page. In the distant past, this has often been ‘solved’ by using Adobe Flash to play videos. Browsers soon caught up to this madness, and added ‘click to play’, forcing users to click to view Adobe Flash players. Since the replacement...
Which Payment Gateway
Often, the choice of which payment provider to use is a case of which offers the lowest cost, or which offers the functionality that’s required for your business. Once past these limitations, many payment providers are the same; offering either an on-page or external redirection site to take payment, and returning a secure callback to verify that payment has been taken. Some of the best payment providers are simply because of their new...