INFOSECC

Every so often, the prevailing forces in the IT industry collectively decide that a protocol must be deprecated. The Internet Messaging Access Protocol (IMAP) appears to be one of the latest victims of this phenomenon. This has caused some inconveniences, but I'm okay with the reasoning behind this: an increased emphasis on security and requiring of multi-factor authentication. Of the tech giants I've seen addressing this, it seems Microsoft hates IMAP more than Google. I use a library that reads my Gmail messages through IMAP, and Google's way of handling the inherent flaws in the protocol is to set up different credentials to access Gmail via IMAP . From a security standpoint, this seems like a half-measure, but it's better than nothing. Microsoft is strongly recommending that Exchange administrators disable IMAP and POP3 (seriously, why is anyone still using POP3?) and making sure two-factor authentication is on for all of tenant accounts, whether they're shared...

Being on a team of two responsible for anything even tangentially related to technology, I've ended up wearing more hats than I ever expected I would. Thankfully, my career has been pretty consistently Windows-centric so I have had opportunity to learn and fall in love with PowerShell as a scripting and automation language... which, side note, is why I use cmdlette as my online moniker on GitHub, Twitter, etc. PowerShell scripts I've written have performed all sorts of tasks from making full vhd backups of virtual machines on Hyper-V servers to scraping event logs for security events. Recently, I've been using PowerShell as a pocket-sized web developer. Sure when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail, but PowerShell is much more like a hammer with a multitool built into the handle. PowerShell and HTML One hat I've had to wear being on a tiny team now is that of web developer. Thankfully, I wasn't tasked with anything too complex--just a basic, lightw...

It's not gonna be pretty, but I'm gonna stitch together some Python code components to make a functional thing. [ maniacal laughter!!! ] The business problem to solve I get daily grain market emails from which I need to extract prices, and drop into a database. This should be automated but I've been either paying for this data or performing manual data entry. I've been putting it off for a few years but it's time to tackle this project and make life easier for present and future me. I'm going to be using a combination of Python tools I've used before and tools I haven't used, and monstrously stitching them together to accomplish the thing I set out to accomplish. First let me farmsplain the commodity grain markets. The market price of a bushel of corn can be found on Barchart . When a farmer brings their corn to the elevator, they will not simply receive the market price, they will collect the market price +/- the  basis  charged by the elevator. The b...