Plurrrr

AWK is a delightful mini-language almost unchanged for decades.

A bare minimum of features includes strings, numbers, functions, associative arrays, line-by-line I/O and shell invocation. Perhaps, if it had fewer features, it would be impossible to program in it at all.

There is an opinion that AWK is not suitable for writing serious programs. Even Brian Kernighan (the K in AWK) is convinced that his language is only good for small one-liners. However, this does not prevent enthusiasts from creating rather voluminous programs in AWK.

Whether or not to regularly spend time and effort upgrading dependencies can be a contentious topic on development teams. Advocates argue that not doing the work allows tech debt and bitrot to accumulate, while opponents accuse them of chasing new-and-shiny novelties while ignoring what’s actually valuable to the product. Despite what feels like an unending amount of time spent on the churn of upgrades, security teams still struggle to get risky old dependencies patched, and developers complain about using deprecated tools.

After being burned several times by excruciatingly tedious forced upgrades of vulnerable or broken legacy codebases, I’ve come down firmly on the side of favouring frequent updates — with plenty of flexibility and some caveats.

Fingerprinting has become a popular method of user tracking due to its ability to connect multiple different browsing sessions even if the user clears browsing history and data. Given there are companies selling fingerprinting as a service, if you want to really protect yourself from fingerprinting, you should use Tor Browser or Firefox with resistFingerprinting=true. If you need to use Chromium, then Brave browser is a good choice. It also randomizes fingerprint for each session, making it harder to link your browsing sessions. However, I do not recommend Brave because it is based on Google’s Chromium engine, thus only encourages Google’s monopoly.

On mobile, only Tor Browser and Firefox with resistFingerprinting=true were able to protect against fingerprinting. Firefox Focus leaks fingerprints even if you clear its session each time. Also note that VPNs does not help with fingerprinting. They only masks IP address.