All posts by smarc

Browser, exploits, Security, Software, surveillance

What to Expect When Expecting Content Security Policy Reports

Content Security Policy (CSP) allows you to dictate a policy for content restrictions on a web site that is enforced by the browser. By setting a CSP header, can control the resources that are loaded when a visitor is viewing your website. The CSP spec allows you to build very specific policies for your site that can handle all of the different types of resources that a site might load. It is a valuable tool for protecting your site visitors.

In addition to blocking resources that violate the defined CSP, the CSP spec details a mechanism for sending reports of such violations. Monitoring these violations can help you ensure that your site is never serving content that violates your wishes whether those violations are the result of producer, developer, or hacker actions.

Source: What to Expect When Expecting Content Security Policy Reports

Hardware, microsoft, sysadmin, Win10, Windows

List Hard Drives using Command Prompt and PowerShell

List Hard Drives using Command Prompt & PowerShell in Windows 10

If you frequently work with the Command Prompt or PowerShell, you may need to copy files from or to an external drive, at such, and many other times, you may need to display the drives within the console window. In this post, we will show you how you can list drives using Command Prompt or PowerShell in Windows 10/8/7.

List Hard Drives using Command Prompt

If you need to simply list the drives, you may use WMIC.  Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) is the infrastructure for management data and operations on Windows-based operating systems.

Open a command prompt, and type the following command:

wmic logicaldisk get name

Press Enter and you will see the list of Drives.

You can also use the following parameter:

wmic logicaldisk get caption

List Drives in Command Prompt 2

Using the following will display Device ID and volume name as well:

wmic logicaldisk get deviceid, volumename, description

Windows also includes an additional command-line tool for file, system and disk management, called Fsutil. This utility helps you list files, change the short name of a file, find files by SID’s (Security Identifier) and perform other complex tasks.  You can also use fsutil to display drives. Use the following command:

fsutil fsinfo drives

It will show mapped drives too.

You can also use diskpart to get a list of drives along with some more details. The  Diskpart utility can do everything that the Disk Management console can do, and more! It’s invaluable for scriptwriters or anyone who simply prefers working at a command prompt.

Open CMD and type diskpart. Next use the following command:

list volume

List Drives in Command Prompt

You will see that the console displays the Volume number and letter, label, formatting type, partition type, size, status, and other information.

List Hard Drives using PowerShell

To display drives using PowerShell, type powershell in the same CMD windows and hit Enter. This will open a PowerShell window.

Now use the following command:

get-psdrive -psprovider filesystem

List Drives in powershell

Source: List Hard Drives using Command Prompt and PowerShell

Computer, Geeky, Software

How the browser renders a web page – DEV

How the browser renders a web page

My thinking: if I’m going to build websites that are fast and reliable, I need to really understand the mechanics of each step a browser goes through to render a web page, so that each can be considered and optimised during development. This post is a summary of my learnings of the end-to-end process at a fairly high level.

A lot of this is based on the fantastic (and FREE!) Website Performance Optimization course by Ilya Grigorik and Cameron Pittman on Udacity. I’d highly recommend checking it out.

Also very helpful was the article How Browsers Work: Behind the scenes of modern web browsers by Paul Irish and Tali Garsiel. It’s from 2011 but many of the fundamentals of how browsers work remain relevant at the time of writing this blog post.

Ok, here we go. The process can be broken down into these main stages:

  1. Start to parse the HTML
  2. Fetch external resources
  3. Parse the CSS and build the CSSOM
  4. Execute the JavaScript
  5. Merge DOM and CSSOM to construct the render tree
  6. Calculate layout and paint

Source: How the browser renders a web page – DEV