At the moment AI and their malicious bots are the scourge of the internet. They ignore all the conventions and implicit rules built on trust over many years. Cloudflare has called out Perplexity on this abuse at Perplexity is using stealth, undeclared crawlers to evade website no-crawl directives. You can also read more on the impact of these bots at The crawl before the fall… of referrals: understanding AI’s impact on content providers. Read more

Before I start I should probably say what credential stuffing and e-mail plus addressing are. Knowing what credential stuffing is will also let you understand why you should care. Definitions Credential Stuffing is a type of cyberattack where stolen account credentials typically consisting of lists of usernames and/or email addresses and the corresponding passwords (often from a data breach) are used to gain unauthorized access to user accounts through large-scale automated login requests directed against a web application. Unlike credential cracking, credential stuffing attacks do not attempt to brute force or guess any passwords – the attacker simply automates the logins for a large number (thousands to millions) of previously discovered credential pairs using standard web automation tools like Selenium, cURL, PhantomJS or tools designed specifically for these types of attacks such as: Sentry MBA, SNIPR, STORM, Blackbullet and Openbullet. Read more

Most of us get irritated by Facebook’s news feed at some stage of our lives. You can take some control back by installing Social Fixer

The simplest way to reset the DNS cache on your iphone is to switch it to Airplane mode and back. Airplane mode switches of all network connectivity, this has the side effect of clearing the DNS cache.

Updated 23 February 2021 Cloudflare is a Content Delivery Network (CDN) service with a free basic offering. To provide the content delivery service they need to manage your DNS and provide a very nice interface to set up DNS. You can use the free DNS service without making use of the rest of their services. If you use Cloudflare for DNS it is adviseable to use their reverse proxy (CDN) service. It really speeds up your site and also provides some protection against attempts to hack your site. If you use a system like Wordpress for your site you will find many articles on the web to assist in setting up Cloudflare correctly e.g. how to stop /wp-admin from being cached. Read more

If you need to get the text from a scanned PDF or Image file you can use the free Optical Character Recognition (OCR) provided by google drive. Learn more at Google Help

This site appeared in Google’s index less than a day after it was set up. Of course nothing was (is) really ready for prime time. If your site isn’t just a vanity site make sure your content is ready before you go live.