Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned - *  With Azure Monitor Notifications you can receive alerts via SMS, email, or a WebHook when Azure is experiencing an incident or when something is logged to your Activity Logs. * Windows Azure Active Directory Sync (DirSync) or Azure AD Sync are deprecated and reached end of support on April 13, 2017.  Azure AD Connect can be used to integrate your on-premises directories with Azure Active Directory. This allows you to provide a common identity for your users for Office 365, Azure, and SaaS applications integrated with Azure AD. * Bare metal is a single tenant server. Compared to the cloud model where multiple users (multi-tenancy) reside on the same physical server, the bare-metal server only has one customer on the server. * A Man in the Middle attack, or MITM, is a situation wherein a malicious entity can read/write data that is being transmitted between two or more systems (in most cases, between you and the website that you are surfing...

This Week I Learned - * Intruders exploit every unprotected resource that travels between your websites and your users. Images, cookies, scripts, HTML … they’re all exploitable. Intrusions can occur at any point in the network, including a user’s machine, a Wi-Fi hotspot, or a compromised ISP, just to name a few. One common misconception about HTTPS is that the only websites that need HTTPS are those that handle sensitive communications. Every unprotected HTTP request can potentially reveal information about the behaviors and identities of your users. HTTPS is a key component to the permission workflows for new web platform features and updated APIs like geolocation -  Web Fundamentals * Twilio now runs texts, alerts and voice calls on the Uber app in most parts of the world. Its largest customer, Whats­App which accounts for about 13 percent of its revenue, uses Twilio to verify customer accounts and logins. Founded in 2008, Twilio is exceedingly simple to use a...

Anything in red usually catches your eye. I noticed the error notification " This page is trying to load scripts from unauthenticated sources " with the shield & a red cross at its corner, in Chrome's address bar on accessing a site over https. This appears to be introduced in version 53. Microsoft Edge locks mixed content too, but the icon doesn't really stand out. Based on the wording ("unauthenticated source") of the warning, I initially thought Chrome had a problem with the sites where the scripts were originating from. But after a little digging, I found that the issue was with active mixed content There are two types of mixed content: active and passive . Passive mixed content refers to content that doesn’t interact with the rest of the page, and thus a man-in-the-middle attack is restricted to what they can do if they intercept or change that content. Passive mixed content includes images, video, and audio content, along with ot...