Devirtualizing Nike.com's Bot Protection (Part 1)

Over-engineering my TV watching: automating playback via Chromecast

Simplify Your Blazor Applications Using .NET 7’s New Bind Modifiers

Reverse Prompt Engineering for Fun and (no) Profit

Issue #322

1/24/2023

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Hey-ya
Another day, another issue!

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Today's Sponsor: Telerik UI for Blazor

Develop Blazor apps and modernize legacy web projects in half the time with a high-performing Grid and 100+ truly native, easy-to-customize UI components.

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Devirtualizing Nike.com's Bot Protection (Part 1)

Published: 6 January 2023
Tags: javascript, reverse engineering, web

William dissects a script that is responsible for browser fingerprinting.
Some highlights:

  • Browser fingerprinting is the process of "collecting data about a user's browser, which is then used to create a unique fingerprint for differentiating between genuine users and bots"
  • VMs are used to further obfuscate these scripts
  • It's all done in the browser


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Over-engineering my TV watching: automating playback via Chromecast

Published: 20 September 2022
Tags: go, javascript, rust, web

Roberto Frenna presents his solution to watching Italian TV abroad.
Some highlights:

  • Chromecaster is written in Rust and exposes HTTP APIs to control volume, playback, and cast media using multiple players
  • Roberto made a reverse proxy written in Go that tunnels requests to Italy to bypass geoblock and supports dynamic translation of playlist files
  • First post of the series


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Simplify Your Blazor Applications Using .NET 7’s New Bind Modifiers

Published: 17 January 2023
Tags: c#, dotnet, sponsored, web

Telerik explores how .NET 7 has drastically simplified writing async code in response to user input.
Some highlights:

  • Illuminates how it was done pre .NET 7
  • Uses local storage to sync bound values
  • Highlights some other binding attributes like get and set


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Reverse Prompt Engineering for Fun and (no) Profit

Published: 28 December 2022
Tags: ai, machine learning, reverse engineering

Shawn Wang attempts to reverse engineer the prompts for Notion AI features.
Some highlights:

  • Prompt injection is a type of attack in which malicious text is injected into a trusted system, with the goal of compromising the system's trustworthiness
  • The article discusses the different types of prompt injection outcomes, and argues that the vast majority of prompt injection examples are harmless
  • I can't believe prompt engineering is an actual thing


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How did I do?

* Amazing
* Articles not relevant to me
* Articles were relevant, but badly written
* Summaries told me everything I wanted to know
* I like turtles

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Stats (updated daily)

Sent: 3041

Opens: 1443

Clicks: 269

Link Clicks Clicks % Unique Clicks Unique Clicks %
Devirtualizing Nike.com's Bot Protection (Part 1) 59 27.96% 61 27.85
Over-engineering my TV watching: automating playback via Chromecast 68 32.23% 70 31.96
Simplify Your Blazor Applications Using .NET 7’s New Bind Modifiers 23 10.90% 23 10.50
Reverse Prompt Engineering for Fun and (no) Profit 61 28.91% 65 29.68

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