Cubic

The European Union is, once again, attempting to dictate global policy way outside their jurisdiction. I run uBlock Origin and Ghostery (you should too!), which already deals with the things GDPR was largely concerned with. The GDPR made the average web browsing experience worse, not better. The Digital Services Act (DSA) expands upon GDPR in a way that supposedly targets very large companies but, digging into it, it actually appears to affect businesses of all sizes. Let's say you run a small business and you have a website. That website has a domain (DNS) that is issued by a registrar (e.g. GoDaddy, NameCheap, etc.) and is hosted on a third party service (e.g. a VPS provider like AWS, DigitalOcean, OVH, etc. or a shared hosting provider like 1&1, GoDaddy, etc.) and then speeds up global content delivery of static assets via a CDN (e.g. CloudFlare). If you are a website developer/admin, all of this sounds perfectly normal and completely innocuous to you. Now let's ...

People who run websites are generally clueless about securing their websites. What follows is a short list of "seven sins" (I know...a cliché) that are committed by those who operate a website that use a dynamic backend scripting language (PHP, Perl, etc.): 1) Installing third-party components without first reviewing them for how well-written they are, if they have had major security vulnerabilities and/or exploits in the past 12 months, how well defended against automated scripts they are, and how well each component defends itself from known and unknown exploits. If you don't know how to do this, then employ the services of a security expert. 2) Not upgrading components the same day an upgrade becomes publicly available. PHP, MySQL, third-party components, etc. All major releases typically have fixes for security vulnerabilities. And most releases likely already have exploits for those vulnerabilities floating around in the wild. Security firms track both the vulnerabil...