Brad Murray

Over the past few years, I've come up with a few bot detection methods that don't seem to be in common use.  These won't do a job at stopping targeted attacks, but will block common scan tools and scripts. Detect a bot by missing nameMost of the web has gone

One of the problems that has existed since the demise of Flash is the lack of a consistent media experience.  Flash definitely had its problems... but it was reasonably consistent across platforms and browsers.  Things are getting better, but that is still not the case with modern audio/video tag

I had an interesting conversation today that brought up an unusual use case for parsing out (top-level) functions in a python file. My first draft produced code that could have a number of problems... the biggest being security.  As it imported the python file, code could be executed.  Another likely

I previously wrote about using iptables to restrict access based on a country.  Please refer to that article for implementing these ipsets.   SSH & iptables geo restrictionSSH brute force attacks are incredibly common. I primarily use sshguard toauto-block individual IPs after a certain number of failed requests. This willcontinue, but

It's now been several months since our terraform based scaling system has needed any manual intervention. A RecapAmong other things, we use terraform to scale CDN edge capacity, as well as custom compute instances for live video transcoding. We use multiple cloud providers with overlapping locations and preferred data centers

Here are some things I would tell my younger self... and things I plan to teach my children.  Some of these seem obvious, but they are lessons I've had to learn. Go for it.  You'll miss out on many opportunities by being too cautious.  Fear and failure are part of

SSH brute force attacks are incredibly common.  I primarily use sshguard to auto-block individual IPs after a certain number of failed requests.  This will continue, but I wanted to add another layer to reduce the number of connections making it to my SSH server processes without either changing the port

Today, I released another piece of software under the MIT license.  This time, it is to allow web users to securely upload files directly to a b2 bucket. The b2 api is reasonably nice, although it has 1 major problem – tokens for small file uploads are not secure in a

Updated 9/22/20 I've been reviewing options for Object Storage.  For many years, we've maintained our own systems for this purpose.  Right now, most of our data is stored on a set of colocated storage servers (in different data centers in the same city) running zfs in a raidz2

I just did a little code cleanup and released one of our internal tools under the MIT license. For on-demand video, Roku devices use a custom file format that stores a number of images (video frames) in a single file.  This file is used for trick-play where you can see

I've been working on a hardware project that includes a small single board computer (SBC) running Linux... in this case, Armbian.  I didn't find any good instructions or scripts for customizing the image without fully rebuilding everything from source, so I did a little investigating.  Here are some of my

I previously wrote on our use of terraform to manage cloud/vps instances.  Here are more updates and notes on what I've ran into. Consistency and AvailabilityThere is no cloud, it's just someone else's computer One of the things I've spent quite a bit of time dealing with is keeping