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    7 Apr, 2020
    Microsoft Buys Corp.com So Bad Guys Can’t
    Cybersecurity , , , ,

    In February, KrebsOnSecurity told the story of a private citizen auctioning off the dangerous domain corp.com for the starting price of $1.7 million. Domain experts called corp.com dangerous because years of testing have shown whoever wields it would have access to an unending stream of passwords, email and other sensitive data from hundreds of thousands of Microsoft Windows PCs at major companies around the globe. This week, Microsoft Corp. agreed to buy the domain in a bid to keep it out of the hands of those who might abuse its awesome power. …

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    5 Apr, 2020
    Making File URLs Work Again in Firefox
    Cloud

    At some point in the last year or so—I don’t know exactly when it happened—Firefox, along with most of the other major browsers, stopped working with file:// URLs. This is a shame, because I like using Markdown for presentations (at least, when it’s a presentation where I don’t need to collaborate with others). However, using this sort of approach generally requires support for file:// URLs (or requires running a local web server). In this post, I’ll show you how to make file:// URLs work again in Firefox.

    I tested this procedure using Firefox 74 on Ubuntu, but it should work on any platform on which Firefox is supported. Note that the locations of the user.js file will vary from OS to OS; see this MozillaZine Knowledge Base entry for more details.

    Here’s the process I followed:

    1. Create the user.js file (it doesn’t exist by default) in the correct location for your Firefox profile. (Refer to the MozillaZine KB article linked above for exactly where that is on your OS.)

    2. In the user.js, add these entries:

      // Allow file:// links
user_pref("capability.policy.policynames", "localfilelinks");
user_pref("capability.policy.localfilelinks.sites", "file://");
user_pref("capability.policy.localfilelinks.checkloaduri.enabled", "allAccess");

    3. In your Firefox configuration (accessible using about:config in a Firefox tab), change the value of privacy.file_unique_origin from true to false.

    4. Restart Firefox.

    After you restart Firefox, you should be able to use file:// URLs, but only from local HTML files on your system (as specified by the second line you added in step 2). It’s possible this may expose an unknown security flaw or weakness that I haven’t foreseen, so keep that in mind.

    If you’re a fan of Markdown-based presentations displayed using your browser, they should work again.

    Hit me on Twitter if you have questions. Thanks!

    …

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    4 Apr, 2020
    Installing MultiMarkdown 6 on Ubuntu 19.10
    Cloud

    Markdown is a core part of many of my workflows. For quite a while, I’ve used Fletcher Penny’s MultiMarkdown processor (available on GitHub) on my various systems. Fletcher offers binary builds for Windows and macOS, but not a Linux binary. Three years ago, I wrote a post on how to compile MultiMarkdown 6 for a Fedora-based system. In this post, I’ll share how to compile it on an Ubuntu-based system.

    Just as in the Fedora post, I used Vagrant with the Libvirt provider to spin up a temporary build VM.

    In this clean build VM, I perform the following steps to build a multimarkdown binary:

    1. Install the necessary packages with this command:

      sudo apt install gcc make cmake git build-essential

    2. Clone the source code repository:

      git clone https://github.com/fletcher/MultiMarkdown-6

    3. Switch into the directory where the repository was cloned and run these commands to build the binary:

      make
cd build
make

    4. Once the second make command is done, you’re left with a multimarkdown binary. Copy that to the host system (scp works fine). Use vagrant destroy to clean up the temporary build VM once you’ve copied the binary to your host system.

    And with that, you’re good to go!

    …

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