Category Archives: Software

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I’ve submitted a pull request over on the Known project git repo that allows you to specify a CURL proxy connect string (which has since been merged).

If specified, this connection string will make all web service and web mention calls be sent via a proxy server.

This was a relatively small change, but is useful in many ways – for example, for communicating through a corporate firewall. It is also provides a way of routing Known to Known communication over TOR.

Why would you want to do this?

Well, this is part of an ongoing effort to harden Known against the new attack realities we face on the internet in the 21st century.

One of the things that the Snowden documents have revealed, is that the bad guys are particularly interested in harvesting everyone’s social graph – who knows who – so that they can, among other things, automate guilt by association.

Going to some lengths to hide this information from an attacker sitting on the wire, is therefore, a prudent thing to do.

Ok, how?

  • Install the TOR proxy on your server; this may just be as simple as typing apt-get install tor.
  • By default the tor package only installs the client, so you’ll need to modify the config to open up a SOCKS relay.
  • Next, tell your known site to use this relay; open your config.ini and set the proxy_string:
proxy_string = 'socks5://path.to.tor.proxy:9100'

Gotchas

Routing over TOR is only part of the solution of course. For the communication to be properly safe, you should also encrypt the communication using HTTPS.

Unfortunately, whether a connection is conducted over encrypted HTTPS or not is largely up to your friend’s webserver. But, you wouldn’t be silly enough to run unencrypted, right?

Given the numbers of nasty attacks that can be launched against an unencrypted web connection, the internet at large is now moving towards deprecating unencrypted port 80 HTTP. Google search results will now give preferential treatment to encrypted websites, so that’s another reason!

So, don’t be part of the problem. Have fun!

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Soundcloud, for those who don’t know, is a service that lets users upload and share their own created sounds and music easily on the interwebs.

It comes with a handy embedded player, which lets you play music from within your own browser, and embed that music in other web pages.

Since I occasionally link to media hosted on Soundcloud from within Idno posts, I thought I’d write a quick plugin to turn these links into an embedded player!

» Visit the project on Github...

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I make use of Jetpack for this blog in order to add some pretty handy functionality, cross posting to my silo accounts, commenting, and OpenGraph.

Unfortunately, I had to make a couple of tweaks in order to get Opengraph working correctly.

This info is dotted around t’internet, but as an aide-mémoire, I figured I’d consolidate here.

OpenGraph headers not showing

To start, I had to get the OpenGraph headers to show in the first place. This required me to make a minor modification to the code of the plugin, not exactly desirable, but good for the moment.

Basically, Jetpack has a list of plugins that it conflicts with, and if one of those plugins is running, then it disables certain features. Unfortunately, I was running one of these plugins.

I didn’t want to disable the plugin, but after reviewing the code, I figured I wasn’t making use of the conflicting functionality (namely Opengraph, and two sets of opengraph headers is known to cause problems), so I removed the plugin from the list.

This list is found in $conflicting_plugins, which can be found in the function check_open_graph() in the file class.jetpack.php. Comment out the appropriate line at your own risk.

Missing/default open graph image

Next, I wanted to provide a default image for situations when the I don’t have a featured image in the post. This required a slight modification to my theme’s functions.php, as described here and here.

Showing your twitter user instead of @jetpack

Finally, I wanted to use my own twitter handle (@mapkyca) for the twitter card, instead of the default @jetpack.

This was another quick addition to my functions.php, e.g.

add_filter( 'jetpack_open_graph_tags', function( $og_tags ) {
        $og_tags['twitter:site'] = '@mapkyca';
        return $og_tags;
}, 11 );

See this discussion for details.