Web Analytics
Apple News app getting its own User-Agent in iOS 10
Apple News app to stop pretending it’s the Safari browser. The new User-Agent makes it easier to measure success the App with existing web analytics solutions.
Latest
Hardware
3-year old iPod 5 no longer receiving software updates from Apple
Apple abandoned my 3-year old iPod Touch, and I don’t think I’ll ever buy another Apple product. Consumers must trust companies to deliver software updates.
Store the output of cron jobs in systemd’s journal
Improve your Linux cron job’s log labeling and storage in journald using the systemd-cat utility.
Hypertext
Attack of the AppleNewsBot
A bug in the Apple News crawler caused it to get stuck in a loop sending 100+ requests/second to websites with HTTPS certificates issued by Let’s Encrypt.
Webmaster
Store WordPress commenter data in localStorage rather than cookies
How to move commenter data from cookies to localStorage. Reduces the amount of personal data needlessly transmitted with every HTTP request to your web servers.
Hardware
Review of laptop stickers and Linux merchandise from Unixstickers
Review of Linux and other open-source project stickers, T-shirts, and merchandise from Unixstickers.
Webmaster
Internet Archive plugin for WordPress
A WordPress plugin for automatically archiving everything you publish and external links in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Help preserve your work.
Copyright
Disclaimers for when you’re knowingly pirating intellectual property
“No copyright infringement intended” isn’t a blanket defense; it’s self-incrimination. Saying nothing is better than saying the wrong thing.
MacOS
How to verify that you’ve downloaded genuine Apple software
Tutorial demonstrating how to validate code signing certificate signatures on MacOS updates and other Apple software installers.
Open Standards
Robot discrimination: No robots allowed, except Googlebot
A survey shows how many websites discriminate against and block all search engines and spiders except GoogleBot in their /robots.txt files.
Apache HTTPD
Apache bug leads to websites dropping out of Yandex search
An Apache server bug caused HTTP/2 websites to drop out of the Yandex search engine. Here’s how to work around the bug to get your site back into the Yandex index.
Gaming
Beware of treacherous dual-pairing with DualShock 4 controller
I’d connected my DualShock 4 controller to my PC, but ended up making an accidental purchase from the PlayStation Store while gaming on the PC.