Quick Links - James Robinson

Quick Links are an assortment of links to code snippets, development tools and articles about web culture, the role of technology, and the impact of technology companies on society…

Wed 27 Sep 2023

A clever way to create responsive type scales using calc(), clamp(), and CSS vars. tobiasahlin.com

A (more) Modern CSS Reset andy-bell.co.uk

The APCA Contrast Calculator, which uses a new contrast assessment method for predicting the perceived contrast between sRGB colors on a computer monitor. www.myndex.com

An excerpt from Jonathan Taplin's new book End of Reality, argues that four billionaires—Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, and Marc Andreessen—have created a world where “nothing is true and all is spectacle.” www.rollingstone.com

Analysis by Markup has found that Twitter is still slowing traffic to competing sites. Users are made to wait on average about two and a half seconds after clicking on links to Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, and Substack — more than 60 times longer than the average wait for links to other sites. themarkup.org

Sun 17 Sep 2023

The incomprable Eric Meyer on CSS Anchor Positioning. meyerweb.com

Sat 16 Sep 2023

The current browser support for webfonts has reached a point where WOFF2 is the only source required. matthiasott.com

The recent breach of MGM Grand was apparently caused by Russian cyber criminals ALPHV (aka BlackCat, Noberus). The breach was achieved through social engineering. Hackers found an employee via LinkedIn, then after a 10 minute call with the help desk, were given access. Malware researchers have reported: “A company valued at $33,900,000,000 was defeated by a 10-minute conversation.” gizmodo.com

A hacker group known as The ShinyHunters, has claimed responsibility for stealing more than 30 million customer order records from Pizza Hut Australia. The data includes names, email addresses, phone numbers, encrypted credit card numbers, and hashed passwords of around one millions customers. www.bitdefender.com.au

Tue 12 Sep 2023

Mozilla Foundations’s *Privacy Not Included buyer’s guide, has concluded that modern cars are the worst product category for privacy. All 25 brands researched collected too much data, most share or sold the data, and most give drivers no control over their data. There was also no information for any brand about whether they meet minimum security standards, such as data encryption. foundation.mozilla.org

Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) have revealed a long running campaign by North Korean threat actor targetting cybersecurity researchers. The North Korean hackers used social media sites to build rapport with researchers, then recommended they install a research tool, GetSymbol, which was comporomised, sending data to an attacker-controlled command and control domain. blog.google

Researchers at the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab uncovered two flaws in Apple iOS that were being exploited by NSO Group to install their Pegasus spyware on victim's phones. A patch for the vulnerabilities has been released for iOS and macOS. www.axios.com