Simon Willison’s Weblog

The Academic Vanity Honeypot phishing scheme. Twitter thread describing a nasty phishing attack where an academic receives an email from a respected peer congratulating them on a recent article and suggesting further reading. The further reading link is a phishing site that emulates the victim’s institution’s login page.

# 3:07 pm / phishing, security

Mozilla Telemetry: In-depth Data Pipeline (via) Detailed behind-the-scenes look at an extremely sophisticated big data telemetry processing system built using open source tools. Some of this is unsurprising (S3 for storage, Spark and Kafka for streams) but the details are fascinating. They use a custom nginx module for the ingestion endpoint and have a “tee” server written in Lua and OpenResty which lets them route some traffic to alternative backend.

# 3:44 pm / analytics, lua, mozilla, nginx, big-data, kafka

Wireless Telegraphy Register (via) Russ Garrett used Datasette to build a browsable interface to the UK’s register of business radio licenses, using data from Ofcom.

# 4:08 pm / datasette

What do you mean “average”? (via) Lovely example of an interactive explorable demonstrating mode/mean/median, built as an Observable notebook using D3.

# 4:41 pm / explorables, d3, observable