SHARING IS CARING.
Here are some things we want to share with you and the world.
Pakistan got its first female Google Developer Expert in Machine Learning
An engineering graduate from the National University of Sciences & Technology (NUST), Aqsa Kausar has become Pakistan’s first female Google Developer Expert in Machine Learning. Machine Learning is the application of Artificial Intelligence that helps the computer system to predict the outcome and take action accordingly without being explicitly programmed. Aqsa Kausar has done a lot of contribution in her field, she organized workshops in different events including Google DevFest 2018 and Google Cloud Next Extended 2019 held in Islamabad. She was also part of Google’s Machine Learning Train-the-Trainer session recently held in Singapore. Aqsa is currently working with a Software firm Red Buffer. While talking to TechJuice, she said, “Being a part of Red Buffer has helped me immensely in my journey to becoming a GDE. Red Buffer has some of the best talents in Machine Learning & AI including some amazing tech-savvy women. Our CEO Tayyab Tariq has always been highly supportive and encouraging in my GDE journey, often saying “it’s not about you, it’s about how you use what you have to help others.” In her free time, Aqsa also writes blogs on Medium (An online publishing platform) on topics related to Machine Learning. She wants people to learn about this field especially women as she sees a lot of potential in the country. Aqsa told us, “I believe more women should step forward and make use of this amazing opportunity offered by Google, not just for their personal growth and networking, but also to widen the culture of knowledge sharing in Pakistan and to build communities of value.” Google Developer Expert program is globally recognized...
Laravel 7 is now released! – Laravel News
Laravel 7 is now released and includes many new features including Laravel Airlock, better routing speed, custom Eloquent casts, Blade component tags, fluent string operations, a new HTTP client, CORS support, and many more features. Before we jump into the new features we’d like to point out that starting with version 6, Laravel now follows semver and will release a new major version every six months. You can see how the release process works here. Laravel Airlock Laravel Airlock provides a featherweight authentication system for SPAs (single page applications), mobile applications, and simple, token-based APIs. Airlock allows each user of your application to generate multiple API tokens for their account. These tokens may be granted abilities/scopes which specify which actions the tokens are allowed to perform. Custom Eloquent Casts Laravel has a variety of built-in, helpful cast types; however, you may occasionally need to define your own cast types. You may now accomplish this by defining a class that implements the CastsAttributes interface. Classes that implement this interface must define a get and set methods. The get method is responsible for transforming a raw value from the database into a cast value, while the set method should transform a cast value into a raw value that can be stored in the database Blade Component Tags & Improvements Blade components have been overhauled to allow tag-based rendering, attribute management, component classes, inline view components, and more. Since the overhaul of Blade components is so extensive, please consult the full Blade component documentation to learn about this feature. HTTP Client Laravel now provides an expressive, minimal API around the Guzzle HTTP...
8 ways to increase your productivity as a web developer
Making websites takes time. There are a lot of parts you have to think about if you want to create a good, solid website and sometimes it might feel like there just isn’t a way to go through the work faster. Whether you work alone or with a team of designers and back-end developers, there are a lot of way to be more productive. A mistake many people and many companies make is that they set out to standardize their product. They only build based on a single WordPress theme, or all their sites have the same features. If you want to work with bigger clients they almost never want standard work though. They instead want something custom-fit to their needs and requirements. That’s more interesting work, more challenging and pays more. But it also means you you can’t standardize your product. You can’t (and don’t want to) standardize your product, but what you can do is standardize your process. As a lead front-end developer with over 15 years of experience, I spent a lot of time thinking about how to optimally configure this process. If you’re intentional about it you can get some impressive productivity gains in all areas of the process. Here’s 8 ways to do that, from the beginning of the project through to the end: Start from a solid base Agree on design shortcuts Use handoff tools Use a CSS framework Re-use your components Use Emmet Use Polypane Set up automated quality checking Start from a solid base If you start from scratch every single time, you can be sure you’re never going to be...
Persistence – COM Hijacking | Penetration Testing Lab
Microsoft introduced Component Object Model (COM) in Windows 3.11 as a method to implement objects that could be used by different frameworks (ActiveX, COM+, DCOM etc.) and in different Windows environments allowing interoperability, inter-process communication and code reuse. Abuse of COM objects enables red teams to execute arbitrary code on behalf of a trusted process. Administrator privileges are not required to perform COM Hijacking since classes in the HKCU registry hive are executed prior to the classes in HKLM. The only exception affects high integrity processes (elevated) which objects are loaded only from HKLM location to prevent elevation of privileges. There are multiple methods that execution of code can be achieved but there are several cases which COM has been used in red teaming scenarios for persistence, lateral movement and defense evasion. Depending on how the malicious code will executed various registry sub-keys are used during COM Hijacking. These are: The above sub-keys are under the following registry hives: Discover COM Keys – Hijack Identification of COM keys that could be used to conduct COM hijacking is trivial and requires the use of Process Monitor in order to discover COM servers which are missing CLSID’s and doesn’t require elevated privileges (HKCU). Process Monitor can be configured with the following filters: COM Hijacking – Process Monitor Filters Opening files and executing tasks like a standard user will produce a list with COM keys that could be hijacked in order to load an arbitrary library to a trusted process. COM Hijacking – Process Monitor Results The results could be used directly or exported in various formats like CSV and XML. Process...
Laravel 5.8 is Released – Laravel News
February 26, 2019 / Paul Redmond Laravel 5.8 is now released and available to everyone. This release includes several new features along with the latest bug fixes and improvements to the framework’s core. Some of the new features include: PHP dotenv An integration with PHP dotenv 3.0 ships with Laravel 5.8 and includes the following new features through PHP dotenv 3.0: Check out our PHP dotenv 3.0 Released article for full details on the v3.0 updates. Carbon v2 Laravel 5.8 is capable of using either Carbon v1 or Carbon v2, including the ability to use CarbonImmutable, and even make CarbonImmutable the default. Localization has changed quite a bit in Carbon v2, with much better internationalization support offered than v1. You can learn more from our writeup Carbon Updates Coming to Laravel 5.8. Cache TTL Changes A significant change that might have a moderate to high impact is the Cache TTL Changes Coming to Laravel 5.8. Passing integers to cache methods represents seconds now instead of minutes. Check out my article if you want to change from integer values to a Carbon or \DateInterval instance during the migration process. Deprecated String and Array Helpers Don’t be too alarmed that String and Array helpers are deprecated in Laravel 5.8. They offer little value (asides from style) over using the class equivalents, and Laravel plans on releasing the helpers as an optional package if you want to keep using them. Automatic Policy Resolution Starting in Laravel 5.8, as long as policies and models are in conventional locations, you will not need to register them in the AuthServiceProvider class. If you prefer to...
How AI Is Becoming a Helping Hand In Mobile App Development
As we all know with the increasing technological stacks and the increase in mobile app development ecosystem which is getting deeper into our day to day lives. With all these new things the emergence of Artificial Intelligence Technology is also equally a big point of attraction for all of us. AI is not ready to use technology, This is a multifaceted tech having a wide range of other technological stacks like Machine learning and deep learning along with NLP. Mobile app development services nowadays also implement the use of AI in it. This works at different levels, sometimes for building new apps and also for making some minor changes in the existing app. Many of the mobile apps in spite of their complex development and ample amount of content are capable of becoming more user engaging. AI is impacting more on developing mobile applications and has just started taking proper shape. With the use of AI in mobile app development, the app is getting updated and is trying to reach a great number of user and increase the business of the organization. Various aspects that explain how AI will change the mobile app development process. Artificial Intelligence has been especially effective for some applications in regard to driving client commitment and business development. Only a dormant calculation dependably isn’t powerful to draw in clients dependent on the client conduct. In this regard, AI helps to connect with clients dependent on the distinctive client and reaction designs. How AI truly helps client connection and commitment by fitting the application itself to the client requests? Indeed, here are a couple of...
Web Application Penetration Testing Checklist – GBHackers
Web Application Pentesting is a method of identifying, analyzing and Report the vulnerabilities which are existing in the Web application including buffer overflow, input validation, code Execution, Bypass Authentication, SQL Injection, CSRF, Cross-site scripting in the target web Application which is given for Penetration Testing. Repeatable Testing and Conduct a serious method One of the Best Method conduct Web Application Penetration Testing for all kind of web application vulnerabilities. Web Application Penetration Testing Checklist Information Gathering 1. Retrieve and Analyze the robot.txt files by using a tool called GNU Wget. 2. Examine the version of the software. database Details, the error technical component, bugs by the error codes by requesting invalid pages. 3. Implement techniques such as DNS inverse queries, DNS zone Transfers, web-based DNS Searches. 4. Perform Directory style Searching and vulnerability scanning, Probe for URLs, using tools such as NMAP and Nessus. 5. Identify the Entry point of the application using Burp Proxy, OWSAP ZAP, TemperIE, WebscarabTemper Data. 6. By using traditional Fingerprint Tool such as Nmap, Amap, perform TCP/ICMP and service Fingerprinting. 7.By Requesting Common File Extension such as.ASP,EXE, .HTML, .PHP ,Test for recognized file types/Extensions/Directories. 8. Examine the Sources code From the Accessing Pages of the Application front end. Authentication Testing 1. Check if it is possible to “reuse” the session after Logout.also check if the application automatically logs out a user has idle for a certain amount of time. 2. Check whether any sensitive information Remain Stored stored in browser cache. 3. Check and try to Reset the password, by social engineering crack secretive questions and guessing. 4.check if the “Remember my password” Mechanism...
Sunsetting React Native – Airbnb Engineering & Data Science – Medium
This is the fourth in a in which we outline our experience with React Native and what is next for mobile at Airbnb.Where are we today? Although many teams relied on React Native and had planned on using it for the foreseeable future, we were ultimately unable to meet our original goals. In addition, there were a number of technical and organizational challenges that we were unable to overcome that would have made continuing to invest in React Native a challenge. As a result, moving forward, we are sunsetting React Native at Airbnb and reinvesting all of our efforts back into native. Failing to Reach Our Goals Move Faster When React Native worked as intended, engineers were able to move at an unparalleled speed. However, the numerous technical and organizational issues that we outlined in this series added frustrations and unexpected delays to many projects. Maintain the Quality Bar Recently, as React Native matured and we accumulated more expertise, we were able to accomplish a number of things that we weren’t sure were possible. We built shared element transitions, parallax, and were able to dramatically improve the performance of some screens that used to frequently drop frames. However, some technical challenges such as initialization and the async first render made meeting certain goals challenging. The lack of resources internally and externally made this even more difficult. Write Code Once Instead of Twice Even though code in React Native features was almost entirely shared across platforms, only a small percentage of our app was React Native. In addition, large amounts of bridging infrastructure were required to enable product engineers to work effectively. As...
What is machine learning? We drew you another flowchart
The vast majority of the AI advancements and applications you hear about refer to a category of algorithms known as machine learning. (For more background on AI, check out our first flowchart here.) Machine-learning algorithms use statistics to find patterns in massive* amounts of data. And data, here, encompasses a lot of things—numbers, words, images, clicks, what have you. If it can be digitally stored, it can be fed into a machine-learning algorithm. Machine learning is the process that powers many of the services we use today—recommendation systems like those on Netflix, YouTube, and Spotify; search engines like Google and Baidu; social-media feeds like Facebook and Twitter; voice assistants like Siri and Alexa. The list goes on. In all of these instances, each platform is collecting as much data about you as possible—what genres you like watching, what links you are clicking, which statuses you are reacting to—and using machine learning to make a highly educated guess about what you might want next. Or, in the case of a voice assistant, about which words match best with the funny sounds coming out of your mouth. Frankly, this process is quite basic: find the pattern, apply the pattern. But it pretty much runs the world. That’s in big part thanks to an invention in 1986, courtesy of Geoffrey Hinton, today known as the father of deep learning. Deep learning is machine learning on steroids: it uses a technique that gives machines an enhanced ability to find—and amplify—even the smallest patterns. This technique is called a deep neural network—deep because it has many, many layers of simple computational nodes that work together to munch...Top 10 Changes in ASP.NET 5 and MVC 6
Update on April, 30 2015 When I wrote this blog post, I wrote that Microsoft was not planning to support VB.NET in ASP.NET 5/MVC 6. That was true when I wrote the blog post, but this blog post generated some strong reactions from the VB.NET community. Well, it looks like VB.NET is back! http://www.infoq.com/news/2015/04/VB-Core I spent the last couple of weeks writing sample code for ASP.NET 5/MVC 6 and I was surprised by the depth of the changes in the current beta release of ASP.NET 5. ASP.NET 5 is the most significant new release of ASP.NET in the history of the ASP.NET framework — it has been rewritten from the ground up. In this blog post, I list what I consider to be the top 10 most significant changes in ASP.NET 5. This is a highly opinionated list. If other changes strike you as more significant, please describe the change in a comment. 1. ASP.NET on OSX and Linux For the first time in the history of ASP.NET, you can run ASP.NET 5 applications on OSX and Linux. Let me repeat this. ASP.NET 5 apps can run on Windows, OSX, and Linux. This fact opens up ASP.NET to a whole new audience of developers and designers. The traditional audience for ASP.NET is professional developers working in a corporation. Corporate customers are welded to their Windows machines. Startups, in stark contrast, tend to use OSX/Linux. Whenever I attend a startup conference, the only machines that I see in the audience are Macbook Pros. These people are not the traditional users of ASP.NET. Furthermore, designers and front-end developers – at least...
U.S. Ban on Huawei isn’t About Cyber Security, But 5G Leadership Race
The United States ban on Huawei is not greatly about cyber security and national security concerns as continuously stated. It’s all about the state of 5G leadership in the world to cripple the Shenzhen based technology company; Huawei, from dominating the world’s networks with its state of the art 5G architecture and equipment. In May 2019, the United States Department of Commerce added Huawei on an entity list. Even with cyber security and national security as the top claims banning Huawei from the Central North American country, the U.S. further extended Huawei’s ban to May 2021, after a full year of compliance and no-Involvement in the country’s business and tech ecosystem. This proves that cyber security is not the core claim, given the time frame of the ban, but rather a goal to limit Huawei from procuring necessary components to up its 5G division, and general technology equipment catalogue. As a result of the ban, Huawei as a fast pace company has since 2019 devised ways to serve its customer base and continue to blend as a 5G industry leader. The company’s roadmap includes, a custom operating system to power its smartphones; HarmonyOS, and procurement of technology components from other countries and suppliers like Samsung in South Korea. In the light of the current covid-19 pandemic, the unilateral changes of trade rules by the U.S. will hurt the world’s efforts in recovering the economy in the post covid-19 world. With the new rule, exported semi-conductors and technology equipment would require a company to request for authorization before using the specified technology. By way of example, the new rule is...Online Platforms That You Can Use to Expand Your Business
Selling things online can be a little tricky when trying to find the best platform to connect you with your target audience. There’s a large number of online platforms your business can use to have your products and services on display for everyone to see. This can be done through different methods but you generally only want to apply the ones that will bring you the most success as these platforms may not suit you or the market segment you’re targeting. Here are some of the online platforms to consider: 1. Social Media Every business that functions online in any way has integrated social media because of how effective it is. Use social media to expand your business as you can attract many different people and demographics to your store through your interactions with them. You can even set up your store on some social media platforms, like Facebook, where people can purchase your products or hire your services directly. 2. Pick the Best Online Platform for your Web Store Hosting your website on some eCommerce platforms can be really damaging to your wallet as the expenses can be a lot higher than you can afford. While eCommerce platforms, such as Shopify, are really popular, they’re not really the most economical for a lot of businesses. The good news is that there’s a list of the best alternatives to Shopify to help if you don’t have a big budget to work with. All you have to do is search for these different platforms online and you’ll find dozens within minutes. Cross-compare them to find the...
10 Best React Native App Templates of 2018
React Native has been gaining in popularity for one obvious reason: it allows developers to write code across different mobile operating systems. This means that you no longer have to build the same app for iOS and for Android from scratch or specialise in one or the other operating system. Now you can code apps for both platforms with the same powerful JavaScript technologies you use for building web apps. Pioneered by Facebook and released as open source, React Native is being used by apps such as Facebook, Instagram, Netflix, Airbnb, etc., and can only go from strength to strength. To help keep you updated about the best React Native app templates on the market, we’ve compiled a list of the 10 best available at CodeCanyon for 2018. 1. One of the most popular React Native app templates available at CodeCanyon, MStore Pro allows users to convert their existing online shop to a mobile store app. The template requires no coding skills and is very easy to customise. It is fully integrated with WordPress and WooCommerce, supports PayPal, Stripe, and COD, and allows users to log in with their Facebook account. User Abhibavishi says: “Awesome product, great support! Love the quality of the code, along with the final output. I wish I could give more than 5 stars!” 2. App Platform only came on the market in January but is already one of the best-selling app templates at CodeCanyon for the year. That’s probably because it’s a bundle of multiple apps that follow the same design and coding pattern, and it enables developers to create any number of apps including recipe, restaurant, events and/or shopping...
10 Best React Native App Templates of 2019
React Native has been gaining in popularity for one obvious reason: it allows developers to target different mobile operating systems with a single codebase. This means that you no longer have to build the same app for both iOS and for Android from scratch, and you don’t have to forgo one or the other platform. Now you can code apps for both platforms with the same powerful JavaScript technologies you use for building web apps. Pioneered by Facebook and released as open source, React Native is being used by apps such as Facebook, Instagram, Netflix, and Airbnb, and can only go from strength to strength. To help keep you updated about the best React Native app templates on the market, we’ve compiled a list of the 10 best available at CodeCanyon for 2019. React Native App Builders 1. React App Builder React App Builder React App Builder is a multipurpose, React Native app builder that helps developers and non-developers alike create any kind of IOS or Android app they want—Chat apps, events apps, recipe apps, shopping apps, restaurant apps, etc. All you need to do is choose one of the available templates, edit and re-order the app’s more than 30 sections, customise the design, colours and layout, add your content, and you app is ready to publish on Google Play and App Store. User getamove says: “Smart platform with amazing customer support. Highly recommended.Thanks!” Turn a WordPress or Shopify Site Into a React Native App 2. gikApp gikApp If you need to convert WordPress or Shopify sites into professional and fully functioning mobile apps quickly and easily, the gikApp is ideal. This React Native app template app offers 3...
Cyber Security Expert and Representative Matt Boehnke Calls for Immediate ESD Scam Hearings – One of the Largest Thefts of All Time | Shift Washington
With details of the historic scam on Washington State Employment Security Department still being revealed, we thought Representative Matt Boehnke (R-Kennewick) would be the perfect Newsmaker Interview to provide Shift readers with insight on what the Inslee Administration failed to do to prevent “hundreds of millions of dollars” to be stolen from our state’s treasury. Boehnke is a first term legislator with 30 years of military and commercial experience in cyber security. While Democrat legislators say they might hold a hearing on this scam next year, Representative Boehnke is calling for a legislative investigation now. From what you have learned, what took place at the Employment Security Department that allowed such a large-scale scam to take place? I believe the Washington State Employment Department (ESD) was involved in a series of highly orchestrated cyber-attacks by an intelligent, well-organized criminal organization. This organization has a history of conducting reconnaissance, scanning, gaining access, maintaining access, and covering their tracks. During the reconnaissance phase, which I believe began earlier than Governor Inslee’s “stay home, stay safe” order, this organization conducted surveillance operations to understand and learn as much as possible about the standard operating procedures within the ESD. Then when the order was given, they slowly began this fraud operation on the citizens of Washington. Remember, these are citizens who were just told they were unemployed, most live paycheck-to-paycheck, and are just trying to put food on their tables. What could have been done to protect Washington taxpayers from this criminal activity? There are many steps that organizations implement in an attempt to prevent such an attack. As a cybersecurity professional for...
React Native: Bringing modern web techniques to mobile – Facebook Code
If you’re new to React, you can read more about it on the React website. You can also get started with React Native for iOS, which was released at F8 2015 on the React Native website. It started with React We introduced React to the world two years ago, and since then it’s seen impressive growth, both inside and outside of Facebook. Today, even though no one is forced to use it, new web projects at Facebook are commonly built using React in one form or another, and it’s being broadly adopted across the industry. Engineers are choosing to use React every day because it enables them to spend more time focusing on their products and less time fighting with their framework. It wasn’t until we’d been building with React for a while, though, that we started to understand what makes it so powerful. React forces us to break our applications down into discrete components, each representing a single view. These components make it easier to iterate on our products, since we don’t need to keep the entire system in our head in order to make changes to one part of it. More important, though, React wraps the DOM’s mutative, imperative API with a declarative one, which raises the level of abstraction and simplifies the programming model. What we’ve found is that when we build with React, our code is a lot more predictable. This predictability makes it so we can iterate more quickly with confidence, and our applications are a lot more reliable as a result. Additionally, it’s not only easier to scale our applications when they’re built...Unit Testing in ReactJS using Jest and Enzyme – DZone Performance
According to Michael Feathers, “Any code that has no tests is a legacy code.” So as a developer it is your duty to avoid creating legacy code by using test-driven development (TDD). There are many tools available for unit testing in ReactJS but we will be going through Enzyme and Jest. What is Test Driven Development (TDD)? Test Driven Development (TDD) is a programming practice which enables developers to write code only if an automated test has failed, thereby avoiding duplication of the code. The primary aim of TDD is to write code which is clear and bug-free. As a developer, you need to write tests for every small functionality of the application. It is a cyclic process and each cycle starts by writing a unit test. Test Driven Development can easily be compiled in four easy steps: Importance of Test-Driven Development (TDD) Using TDD provides the following benefits: Why Should You Use Test-Driven Development (TDD) for ReactJS? If you have worked with ReactJS, then you probably know that code grows really fast in ReactJS. The code gets filled up with a lot of complex conditions due to service calls and change of state. Every component of your React application that lacks unit tests becomes a legacy code which is very difficult to maintain. Although we can add unit tests after we create the production code, it will be very risky as some scenarios can get overlooked which will cause the issue at the production stage. Setting Up The Environment for Test-Driven Development (TDD) The most important thing to do first is to set up the environment for writing...
