Earlier this week I discovered an interesting Outlook.com phishing mail that had been caught by the anti-spam measures we deploy for our e-mail customers. Well, to be fair, the phishing attack itself was not anything new or sophisticated, but the choice of hosting provider was rather interesting.

This week Google went ahead and removed support for HTTP Public Key Pinning (HPKP) from Chromium after some initial stumbles. The change was committed and tagged for Chromium 72.0.x and can now be observed by users of Chrome Canary.

I recently got the opportunity to discover how long Google would keep showing my content on the search engine result pages when my web server was unavailable. Predictably, I only had a short window of time before my content got removed. And the first content to go was my top ranking pages.

Last month I was managing some DNS records and accidentally wiped the A-record for blog.paranoidpenguin.net, making this blog effectively unavailable. I noticed the issue but thought it would be interesting to see how much time Google would grant me before starting to de-index my pages. Entering the unknown, I proceeded to delete the remaining sub domains from my DNS to remove any trace of life.

Last year I discovered that some of my content had been deleted from Google’s index. After confirming that Googlebot could still access the post in question and excluding every possibility of accidentally blocking Googlebot (robots.txt, firewall rules etc.), I opted to resubmit the post for indexing using Google search console.

I’m pretty much done with getting annoyed by all the spam and fake applications populating the Chrome Web Store. But still, once in a while you come across something special that is just too good to pass up.

While installing some apps and extensions from the Chrome web store I noticed that there were a few well known products delivered by developers totally unknown to me (and Google search). LastPass, AVG AntiVirus, Snapchat, Viber and others were available sporting their trademark name and logo, but from publishers without any affiliation with the actual brand.