ict.ken.be

Story of a security breach that recently happened on large scale in the wild.

• Company sends invoices by email.
• Some hackers intercept the smtp and replace bankaccount numbers from invoices that are at least 15K.
• Customers pay on this wrong bank account.
• Company decides that because the invoices are from their 'bigger' clients to wait before complaining that they didn't receive the payment.
• They finally do and notice that their customers have been paying to the wrong accounts.
• Digital thiefs gone with the wind.

Lessons learned

• Always check if you are paying to the correct bank account.
• We should always encrypt smtp.
• Social engineering tricks are to easy to implement. (they did use a copy of the online accounting tool to make it look more real)

Conclusion

It's 2016 and a lot of the online payments are still using the smtp protocol. How are we going to teach people that this is not a good thing. And what will companies do to spy on those mails once we all start using encrypted mails.

Https comes to mind... we finally got people looking at the green icon and now we are inserting 'invisible' proxies. I guess... I will be member of the last generation that knew privacy and digital security.

From: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en&ref_topic=2370587

Content

• don't mix languages in the content
• block robots from crawling auto translated pages -> can harm site perception
• keep content for each language on a separated url
• do not use cookies to change content language
• cross link each version of a page (so user can switch with one click)
• avoid automatic redirect on perceived language
• always use UTF-8 in the url and as much as possible
• google will use TLD as strong signal for that country
• if single country and general TLD then you should use country targetting of the google search console settings
• server ip should be close to the users
• indicators of address, google my business, phone,... will be used to localize your content
• google does not use geo.position, distribution and/or html tags
• use canonical when same translation in more then one place
• use hreflang and regional urls

Domain Examples

• example.ie (server location irrelevant)
• de.example.com (country or language?)
• example.com/de/ (can use console targetting)
• site.com?loc=de (not recommended)

Culture

From: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077

• tailored to language, market and culture.
• have support available for the language.
• english dollar vs english pound
• when using culture specific hreflang, also use an only language one
• x-default for mixed and language selectors
• specify only on the cannonical url
• all alternatives should be included, also the page itself
• prefered to keep alternatives in a similar directory structure as main language
• be consistend with your url structure
• display a banner to suggest an alternative page in user language instead of redirecting
• avoid putting language or country in a url parameter
• use UTF-8 for urls
• !! it's not clear if one should or should not translate the urls !!
• page speed within the country is a strong signal
• add ability to swith language
• ensure tourist experience, do not lock users into their current ip location

Html Elements

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es" href="http://es.example.com/page.html" />

or with html header

Link: <a href="http://es.example.com/" target="_blank">http://es.example.com/; rel="alternate"; hreflang=es"

or in sitemap

<xhtml: link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-gb" ...

Static generators

Jekyll example: https://github.com/sylvaindurand/multilingual-jekyll

Was trying to add xunit 2.1.0 nuget to my solution and I received this strange error containing : "A numeric comparison was attempted on ..."

I had to disable resharper, restart visual studio and enable it again before my solution would build again.

• Tools > Options > Resharper > Suspend Now / Resume Now

Weird.

Nice overview of http status codes. More explained about http status codes.

Javascript and therefor Node have some concepts that are often misunderstood by many developers (eg. Java, C#, ... )

I decided to put some basic functionality tests in a visual studio solution, so you can see it all working.

Feel free to add more...

https://github.com/KenVanGilbergen/ken.Spikes.Javascript

Update:

Willy just pointed me to a nice free javascript book collection at https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS