Through the Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative, HTTP Toolkit has been selected for funding from the EU's Horizon research & innovation program, to expand beyond HTTP and offer the same interception, debugging & testing functionality for applications built on top of the decentralized web.
This is going to be a huge opportunity to in...
Pac-Resolver, a widely used NPM dependency, had a high-severity RCE (Remote Code Execution) vulnerability that could allow network administrators or other malicious actors on your local network to remotely run arbitrary code inside your Node.js process whenever you tried to send an HTTP request.
This is bad!
This package is used for PAC file suppor...
Today Node.js announced and released a security fix for CVE-2021-22939, along with two other high severity issues. They've rated this vulnerability as 'low severity', but I think it's worth a closer look, as (imo) this really understates the risk here, and the potentially widespread impact.
In practice, this poses a risk to anybody making TLS conne...
There's been a lot of discussion recently about how "Safari is the new IE" (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).
I don't want to rehash the basics of that, but I have seen some interesting rebuttals, most commonly: Safari is actually protecting the web, by resisting adding unnecessary and experimental features that create security/privacy/bloat problems.
That is worth ...
Once upon a time, loading common scripts & styles from a public CDN like cdnjs or Google's Hosted Libraries was a 'best practice' - a great way to instantly speed up your page loads, optimize caching, and reduce costs.
Nowadays, it's become a recipe for security, privacy & stability problems, with near-zero benefit. Just last week, a secu...
Some Android apps go to astounding lengths to ensure that even the owner of a device can never see the content of the app's HTTPS requests.
This is problematic for security research, privacy analysis and debugging, and for control over your own device in general. It's not a purely theoretical problem either - protections like this attempt to direct...
HTTP content encoding is an incredibly powerful tool that can save you huge amounts of bandwidth and make your web or mobile application faster, basically for free.
Unfortunately, it's poorly understood by most developers. There's a lot of power here, but few people are aware of the options or what "content encoding" really means, so it's mostly le...
HTTP(S) is the glue that binds together modern architectures, passing requests between microservices and connecting web & mobile apps alike to the APIs they depend on.
What if you could embed scripts directly into that glue?
By doing so, you could:
Traditionally, a TCP port has a single server listening for incoming connections, and that server expects you to send messages in the right protocol for that port. For HTTP, it's normally a web server that'll send you a response directly, or some kind of proxy that will pass all requests through to another server, and then pass the responses back.
...Nothing is ever finished or perfect, and HTTP is no exception.
HTTP SEARCH is a new HTTP method, for safe requests that include a request body. It's still early & evolving, but it was recently adopted as an IETF draft standard, and it's going to add some great new tools for HTTP development everywhere.
What does that mean, why do we need a new...
CORS can be complicated. If you're struggling with it, you might discover the concept of a 'CORS proxy' that promises to solve this, like cors-anywhere or one of the many 'free CORS proxy' hosted services.
CORS proxies let you bypass the security restrictions that CORS applies, with just a tiny change of URL.
That feels convenient, but turning off ...
HTTP is used by almost all Android apps to request data, load content, and send changes to backend servers. If you can see and edit these requests & responses then you can understand, debug, and change how any app works, but Android makes this hard to do.
By default, almost all apps will use HTTPS but won't trust user-installed certificates. T...
Java and the JVM more generally are widely used for services everywhere, but often challenging to debug and manually test, particularly in complicated microservice architectures.
HTTP requests and responses are the core of interactions between these services, and with their external APIs, but they're also often invisible and inaccessible. It's hard...
HTTP is fundamental to modern development, from frontend to backend to mobile. But like any widespread mature standard, it's got some funky skeletons in the closet.
Some of these skeletons are little-known but genuinely useful features, some of them are legacy oddities relied on by billions of connections daily, and some of them really shouldn't ex...
bash ./test.sh in an interactive terminal for example [ -t 255 ] is incorrectly false.
After testing lots of promising but not quite perfect suggestions (see the other answers), I think I've found my own solution that does exactly fit my needs:
if bash -c ": >/dev/tty" >/dev/null 2>/dev/null; then # /dev/tty is available and usable else # /dev/tty is not available fi To explain:
: >/dev/tty does nothing (using ...
$- contains "hBH" in my bash, not i, so that example doesn't work.
I have a bash script from which I want to access /dev/tty, but only when it's available.
When it's not available (in my case: when running my script in GitHub Actions) then when I try to access it I get /dev/tty: No such device or address, and I'm trying to detect that in advance to avoid the error and provide fallback behaviour instead.
To do so I...