The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘Internet’ Category

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SwiftOnSecurity on Twitter: “Web developers and CMS managers literally dance on the smoldering wastes of a million Library of Alexandrias yet we permit them to act as if polite company.… “

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/04/19

[Archive.is: SwiftOnSecurity on Twitter: “Web developers and CMS managers literally dance on the smoldering wastes of a million Library of Alexandrias yet we permit them to act as if polite company.… “] quoting

Hyperlinks are a powerful tool for journalists and their readers. Diving deep into the context of an article is just a click away. But hyperlinks are a double-edged sword; for all of the internet’s boundlessness, what’s found on the Web can also be modified, moved, or entirely vanished.  The fragility of the Web poses an […]

 

It’s all about Link_rot, which is the main reason I have been posting [Wayback] (and when these do not archive, [Archive.is]) archival links in my blog posts since about 2015.
Sometimes I find time to add these to older posts as well, but given there are 7000+ blog posts published, I won’t be able to do that for all past blog posts.

—jeroen

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Posted in Internet, link rot, Power User, WWW - the World Wide Web of information | Leave a Comment »

Prevent link rot before the public condemns you

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/04/05

I’ve written about link rot quite a few times (it even has a category on my blog).

Preventing it is important, as it improves user experience.

For most users this is an unconscious thing when it works and becomes consciously annoying when it fails.

Some user groups are vocal enough to force you to fix link rot after the fact, causing brand reputation damage.

One good example was last year: [Wayback] Users condemn Microsoft for removing KB IDs from some bug documentation | Computerworld.

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Posted in Bookmarklet, Development, Internet, link rot, Power User, Software Development, Web Browsers, Web Development, Windows, WWW - the World Wide Web of information | Leave a Comment »

Bookmarklet to force WordPress classic-editor

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/29

A while ago, WordPress.com heavily started to de-emphasise the Classic Editor in order to boost the Gutenberg editor which is bloaty (in both browser DOM usage (heavily slowing down editing) and content (lots of meta tags that are added to blog source) and is missing essential features (especially nesting of blocks often breaks things).

With 7000+ blog posts in the Classic Editor format (a few in still supported markdown format: that experiment failed horribly!) that still require editing  (especially because of link rot)

So here is the Bookmarklet code to switch back an editing URL that you can use for as long as the Classic Editor is there:

javascript:location.href=document.location.href+'&classic-editor';

Yup, it is that simple: it appends &classic-editor to the URL.

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Posted in Bookmarklet, Classic editor, Development, Gutenberg editor, Internet, link rot, Power User, Software Development, Web Browsers, Web Development, WordPress, WWW - the World Wide Web of information | Leave a Comment »

Jan-Pieter Cornet on Twitter: “@rckjnsn @KarinSpaink @jpluimers @Jan_WdeVries @JeroenFrijters @xs4all @corbosman Zodra je lijn gemigreerd is naar KPN, werken de xs4allnl DNS entries niet meer. Zie punt I3 op …”

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/25

[Wayback/Archive] Jan-Pieter Cornet on Twitter: “@rckjnsn @KarinSpaink @jpluimers @Jan_WdeVries @JeroenFrijters @xs4all @corbosman Zodra je lijn gemigreerd is naar KPN, werken de xs4all.nl DNS entries niet meer. Zie punt I3 op …”

met verwijzing naar [Wayback/Archive] Overzicht – XS4ALL:

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Posted in Internet, ISP, KPN, Power User, xs4all | Leave a Comment »

Wayback machine and VMware KB links

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/22

The VMware KB is notoriously bad into being saved in the WayBack Machine: saved links hardly render at all because of the VMware KB dynamic page loading structure.

But VMware KB articles expire, so a lot of web-pages point to non-existing links and end up through redirections at [Archive.is] https://kb.vmware.com/s/pagenotfound.

Below are a few link forms of the same VMware KB 2011818 article that vanished from the regular web. The first is saved in the WayBack Machine (but does not render), the second is saved and does render after a redirect to a saved third form, the most recent saved fourth form is actually a 404-error redirecting to a prior third form.

  1. https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2011818
  2. http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2011818
  3. http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2011818
  4. http://kb.vmware.com:80/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2011818

The first link form does archive as a rendered page in Archive.is if is is archived. t wasn’t, so the current archived version points to the “pagenotfound” page mentioned above.

Sometimes you have to dig deeper, as not all rendering archived versions contain actual content.

Here the first one is not even archived, the other ones are, but none of them have actual usable content:

  1. https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2007922
  2. http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2007922
  3. http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2007922
  4. http://kb.vmware.com:80/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2007922

This means you have to dig further in history:

  1. https://web.archive.org/web/20140123114343/http://kb.vmware.com:80/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2007922 indicates not authorized
  2. https://web.archive.org/web/20130117041323/http://kb.vmware.com:80/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2007922 shows the actual content.

–jeroen

Posted in Internet, InternetArchive, link rot, Power User, WayBack machine, WWW - the World Wide Web of information | Leave a Comment »

Digital accessibility is hard; Wayback archival of: Formulieren – CIZ

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/17

I know that digital accessibility does not come for free, but it is mandatory in Europe for at least documents and web-sites provided by government and semi-government as per [Wayback] EN 301 549 – Wikipedia

EN 301 549 is a European standard for digital accessibility. It specifies requirements for information and communications technology to be accessible for people with disabilities.

I bumped into numerous tab-order issues when filling out CIZ forms. This makes it way harder for my, as now I require a mouse despite having RSI symptoms for some 30+ years.

So, for my link archive so I can document that all these forms have severe tab-order issues (some fields are not even accessible by keyboard, are being emptied when you leave the field, or not even accessible by mouse): [Wayback] Formulieren – CIZ

Doet u een aanvraag bij het CIZ? Op deze pagina vindt u een overzicht van onze formulieren, zoals een machtigingsformulier en het Wlz-aanvraagformulier.

Hopefully by now the forms have been fixed.

Via:

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Posted in About, InternetArchive, LifeHacker, Personal, Power User, WayBack machine | Leave a Comment »

Cryptosense Discovery

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/15

This is cool: [Wayback] Cryptosense Discovery:

Free tool that discovers security configuration errors in SSH and TLS servers and explains how to fix them. Supports STARTTLS and can also scan HTTPS, POP3, IMAP and SMTP servers.

It gives you a list of servers a target domain uses (for purposes like web, email, etc) that can have external encryption enabled, then allows you to test these.

The list by default has only servers within that target domain enabled, but you can optionally include other servers (for instance if a domain uses a third party for their SMTP handling).

Basically it is the web-counterpart of a tool like testssl.sh (which I have written about before).

Found while checking out how to test the MX security of a domain using [Wayback] testssl.sh as I forgot the syntax, which in retrospect is dead easy as per [Wayback] tls – How to use testssl.sh on an SMTP server? – Information Security Stack Exchange (thanks [Wayback] Z.T.!):

…

testssl.sh --mx <domain name>

works fine.

testssl.sh -t smtp <ip>:25

and

testssl.sh -t smtp <ip>:587

also work fine.

Note that not specifying the port assumes port 443, despite specifying protocol smtp. That doesn’t work.

…

Also, you might try discovery.cryptosense.com which does the same thing only better

That website is made by the cool people at [Wayback] Cryptosense.

Both are a lot easier than the alternatives described in [Wayback] Blog · How to test SMTP servers using the command-line · Halon MTA: using nslookup and dig for determining the affected hosts, using nc or telnet for testing basic connectivity, using [Wayback/Archive.is] openssl s_client to test TLS, and [Wayback/Archive.is] smtpping for measuring throughput.

In addition to the above tools mentioned in the blog, I’ve also used sendEmail (note case sensitivity), ehlo-size, and swaks.

This is what I tested:

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Awk, bash, bash, Communications Development, Development, DNS, Encryption, grep, HTTPS/TLS security, Internet, Internet protocol suite, Power User, Scripting, Security, SMTP, Software Development, SSH, ssh/sshd, TCP, testssl.sh, TLS | Leave a Comment »

Download pfSense Community Edition: pfSense-CE-2.5.1-RELEASE-amd64.iso.gz

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/08

Since this is what I use to VPN home:

pfSense is a free and open source firewall and router that also features unified threat management, load balancing, multi WAN, and more

[Wayback] Download pfSense Community Edition: [Wayback] pfSense-CE-2.5.1-RELEASE-amd64.iso.gz

–jeren

Posted in Internet, pfSense, Power User, routers | Leave a Comment »

Archive.is blog: Twitter archival is slow, so limit the number of tweets you save in it

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/04

[Wayback] Archive.is blog — The website has been slow for some time when…

The website has been slow for some time when archiving Twitter pages, but works fine with other websites. Is there a reason for that? Thx!

Anonymous

1. There are too many pages from Twitter in the queue, which reduces their priority (if it wasn’t for this condition, it would slow everything down)

2. Twitter API sometimes responds with “429 Too Many Requests” or other error, so it usually takes more than 1 attempt to capture the page.

I would suggest refraining from saving pages from Twitter for now, especially those people trying to save dozens or hundreds of tweets

–jeroen

Posted in archive.is / archive.today, Internet, Power User, SocialMedia, Twitter | Leave a Comment »

Booting Windows 10 to the recovery console command prompt

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/01

I bumped into an old draft on notes on NTFS boot issues.

A while ago, I wanted to boot in the Windows 10 “Safe Mode” console, but the F8 option during the boot process was gone.

So I wondered how to get there. There seem to be a few ways, of which almost all require a functioning Windows installation. When you have one, it is relatively easy, as these options will work as summarised from [Wayback] How to open the Windows 10 recovery console:

  • Hold the physical Shift key when choosing “Reboot” in the user interface. There are various ways to get to the “Power” button:
    • in the lower right corner at the logon-screen
    • in the lower right corner at the lock-screen
    • in the lower right corner after pressing Ctrl–Alt–Del
    • in the lower left corner of the “Start” menu
  • In the Settings app, there used to be an “Advanced Startup” feature, but I could not find that any more in Windows 10 version 21H1 any more
  • From a console Window, run either of these commands (the second waits zero seconds before rebooting, the first 30)
    • shutdown.exe /r /o
    • shutdown.exe /r /o /t 0

There is also a possibility to restore the F8 functionality, but you need installation media for it. [Wayback] 3 ways to boot into Safe Mode on Windows 10 version 21H1 explains how to.

Some “notes on NTFS boot issues” links for my archive

(Note that for some of the links, only the [Wayback] ones work: link-rot of the links I saved 6 years ago)

–jeroen

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Posted in Internet, link rot, Power User, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, WWW - the World Wide Web of information | Leave a Comment »

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