One morning I woke up and found that Telegram implemented a new feature called “People Nearby”. If you choose to share your location publicly on Telegram, you’ll appear in a list for users who are physically close to you. Not only that, but they’ll also see just how far away you are down to the meter. However, you don’t need to share your own location in order to see where people around you are located. These are perfect prerequisites to find out just how accurate this feature really is and, more importantly, whether or not it can be used to find out where nearby Telegram users live.
How do you send a password over the internet? You acquire a SSL certificate and let TLS do the job of securely transporting the password from client to server. Of course it’s not as cut-and-dry as I’m making it out to be, but the gist of it holds true and stood the test of time. This hasn’t always been this way though, and one incredibly popular storefront on the world wide web prefers to add a little extra to this day. I’ll be discussing Steam’s unique method of logging in their users, and go down a deep rabbit hole of fascinating implementation details.
As soon as I got my first Android-powered smartphone around nine years ago, I immediately researched how to create apps for it. And within no more than three days, I created an app that made my school’s substitution plans accessible on mobile devices. A couple years passed, the app improved, and soon school staff picked up on it and wanted me to build a similar web-based application to cover all devices. It’s now been nearly five years since I stopped maintaining it and today I want to take a look at the web app once more and assess it from what I’ve learned since then about web development and cybersecurity.