WhatsApp – a Haven for Paedophiles and Terrorists?

Yep – thought that would get your attention!

It’s headlines like this that the UK Government (and the press) are throwing around in order to drum up support for one of the most intrusive and privacy damaging campaigns to date.

The premise is that bad people use these services, which make heavy use of encryption to keep messages private, and by doing so hamper the security services who can no longer access private information in order to monitor them and stop them from doing bad things.

Now I’m not denying that these bad people do use WhatsApp (and similar applications) to enable them to communicate without their messages being intercepted. But I use WhatsApp and so do my wife and kids and we are not bad people. If WhatsApp are expected to put a backdoor into their systems to allow access to the content by so-called ‘authorised agencies’ then what about our privacy?

So, what will 2018 be the year of?

They say that life is what you make it so time to make some resolutions …… yes?

Well, if John Sonmez from Simple Programmer is to be believed – maybe not!

I receive regular email updates from the Simple Programmer website and the one I received on 27th December caused me to stop and think.

Online Tool of the Month – BuiltWith

Have you ever looked at a website and thought ‘I wonder what that’s written in’? Well, even if you haven’t I certainly have which is why I was interested to hear about BuiltWith.

Simply put, BuiltWith puts websites under the microscope and produces a detailed report about what it sees.

From Webservers and SSL Certificate providers through programming languages, Javascript libraries, content management systems and advertising platforms it sees it all. The produced report contains links to allow you to see technology trends across the Internet which may well assist with infrastructure decisions for your next project.

Ditching AntiVirus

Just like us, as computers get old they tend to slow down. It’s a fact of life pure and simple.

With computers it tends to be due to the hardware not keeping up with the new requirements of today’s applications (just try running later Windows or Office on a Pentium 4 and you’ll see what I mean). We tend to put up with the slow down until something finally gives out, a hard-drive or motherboard for instance, and then we buy a new one.

Well my Windows 10 development workstation was slowing down and while it’s a few years old now, it is still a pretty high spec – i7-3770 with 32GB RAM and SSDs – this thing used to fly.

But recently it was noticeable that it was taking longer to boot, applications like Visual Studio and SQL Management Studio seems to struggle to load and surfing the web was a bit of a grind.

Online Tool of the Month – QuickType

I was recently working on a freelance project which required interaction with a 3rd party webservice that returned a JSON result.

While connecting to the service and fetching the data was a fairly trivial task, looking at the data being returned it was clear that a lot of POCO/DTO classes were going to be required.

Obviously these are easy to create but they are time consuming and prone to the odd typo. I then remembered a labour saving service called QuickType which would take the returned JSON and generate the C# code for me – I just needed to pull it into my project.