In 2017, when leadership at Seattle–Tacoma International Airport (Sea-Tac) decided to build a new International Arrivals Facility (IAF), they knew they had to leverage airport resources in a cost-effective manner to enhance customer experience. At nearly 50 years old, the existing facility could no longer accommodate Sea-Tac’s demand for international travel, which grew 107 percent from 2007 to 2017. The latest issue of the  TRB Airport Cooperative Research Program's (ACRP) Impacts on Practice serie...

Although general aviation airports have historically been funded by federal, state, and local entities, the private sector is increasingly playing a larger role. This involvement has ranged on a continuum from service and management contracts to singular projects at airports that involve leasing mechanisms to long-term leases and the whole-scale private development of general aviation airports. In an era of declining resources and increasingly scrutinized public expenditures, private-sector involvement i...

"Attn Lucky Winner" email scam removal guide

What is the "Attn Lucky Winner" email?

"Attn Lucky Winner" is an email scam, targeting Australian users. These letters claim that recipients have been selected as winners of "Mega Millions" raffle, sponsored by "OZ Australia". Supposedly, users have won a ludicrous sum of money - ten million dollars. The content of the letter is vague, mentioning the names of legitimate, generic, as well as nonexistent lotteries, companies and entities. This type of scam is typically used to trick recipients into revealing their personal and banking information, making monetary transactions, calling expensive phone numbers and similar.

UC San Diego Health launches pilot project using drones to move medical samples, supplies and documents between Jacobs Medical Center, Moores Cancer Center and the Center for Advanced Laboratory Medicine, speeding delivery of services and patient care currently managed through ground transport.

The problem: if you publish any document as PDF, in print, etc. and the text contains URLs, there is a chance that one day those URLs won't work anymore. There's nothing to do about that, it happens.

Luckily, this is a solved problem. The solution is to link to a stable and trustworthy website, that is, one that you maintain and host (of course, you're trustworthy!). Then in the document you link to that website, and the website redirects visitors to the actual location.

An example: my book contains a link to https://enjoy.gitstore.app/repositories/matthiasnoback/read-with-the-author. When I moved that repository to a new organization on GitHub, this link resulted in a 404 Page not found error. The proper URL is now https://enjoy.gitstore.app/repositories/read-with-the-author/read-with-the-author. Chris from Gitstore was able to save the day by setting up a redirect on their site, but I wanted to make sure this kind of problem would never be a problem for me again.

The ingredients for the solution:

• A domain name (I registered advwebapparch.com)
• A simple website that can redirect visitors to the actual locations

I wanted to hook this new website into my existing Docker-based setup which uses Traefik to forward traffic to the right container based on labels. It turns out, with a simple Nginx image and some custom setup we can easily set up a website that is able to redirecting visitors.

The Dockerfile for such an image:

FROM nginx:stable-alpine
COPY default.conf /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf

Where default.conf looks like this:

server {
    listen 80 default_server;
    index index.html;
    root /srv;

    error_page 404 /404.html;

    rewrite /repository https://enjoy.gitstore.app/repositories/read-with-the-author/read-with-the-author redirect;
}

This already works, and when I deploying the resulting image to the server that receives traffic for advwebapparch.com, a request for /repository will indeed redirect a visitor to https://enjoy.gitstore.app/repositories/read-with-the-author/read-with-the-author using a temporary redirect.

Generating the Nginx configuration from a text file

When I'm working on my book, I don't want to manually update a server configuration file every time I'm adding a URL. Instead, I'd like to work with a simple text file. Let's name this file forwards.txt:

/repository https://enjoy.gitstore.app/repositories/read-with-the-author/read-with-the-author
/blog https://matthiasnoback.nl

And then I want the Docker image build process to add rewrite rules automatically, So I wrote a little PHP script that does this runs during the build. Here's what the Dockerfile looks like. It uses a multi-stage build:

FROM php:7.4-alpine as php
# This will copy build.php from the build context to the image
COPY . .
# This will generate default.conf based on template.conf
RUN php build.php

FROM nginx:stable-alpine
# Copy the default.conf from the php image to the nginx image
COPY --from=php default.conf /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf

Here's what happens inside the PHP script:

function insertRewritesInNginxConf(string $conf): string
{
    $rewrites = [];

    foreach (file('forwards.txt') as $line) {
        $line = trim($line);
        if (empty($line)) {
            continue;
        }

        $rewrites[] = '    ' . 'rewrite ' . $line . ' redirect;';
    }

    return str_replace(
        '%INSERT_URL_REWRITES_HERE%',
        implode("
", $rewrites),
        $conf
    );
}

/*
 * Generate the Nginx configuration which includes all the actual
 * redirect instructions
 */
file_put_contents(
    'default.conf',
    insertRewritesInNginxConf(file_get_contents('template.conf'))
);

We should add a bit of validation for the data from the forwards.txt file so we don't end up with a broken Nginx configuration, but otherwise, this works just fine.

Generating an html page which can be crawled for broken links

I don't want to manually check that all the links that are inside the "link registry" still work. Instead, I'd like to use Oh Dear for that, which does uptime monitoring and checks for broken links as well.

For this purpose I added another function to the PHP script, which, based

Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 1844 bytes)

One of the key points we've been making concerning Attorney General William Barr and his DOJ's eager support for the terrible EARN-IT Act, is that much of it really seems to be to cover up the DOJ's own failings in fighting child porn and child exploitation. The premise behind the EARN IT Act is that there's a lot of child exploitation/child abuse material found on social media... and that social media companies should do more to block that content. Of course, if you step back and think about it, you'd quickly realize that this is a form of sweeping the problem under the rug. Rather than actually tracking down and arresting those exploiting and abusing children, it's demanding private companies just hide the evidence of those horrific acts.

And why might the DOJ and others be so supportive of sweeping evidence under the rug and hiding it? Perhaps because the DOJ and Congress have literally failed to live up to their mandates under existing laws to actually fight child exploitation. Barr's DOJ has been required under law to produce reports showing data about internet crimes against children, and come up with goals to fight those crimes. It has produced only two out of the six reports that were mandated over a decade ago. At the same time, Congress has only allocated a very small budget to state and local law enforcement for fighting internet child abuse. While the laws Congress passed say that Congress should give $60 million to local law enforcement, it has actually allocated only about half of that. Oh, and Homeland Security took nearly half of its "cybercrimes" budget and diverted it to immigration enforcement, rather than fighting internet crimes such as child exploitation.

So... maybe we should recognize that the problem isn't social media platforms, but the fact that Congress and law enforcement -- from local and state up to the DOJ -- have literally failed to do their job.

At least some elected officials have decided to call the DOJ's bluff on why we need the EARN IT Act. Led by Senator Ron Wyden (of course), Senators Kirsten Gillbrand, Bob Casey, Sherrod Brown and Rep. Anna Eshoo have introduced a new bill to actually fight child sex abuse online. Called the Invest in Child Safety Act, it would basically make law enforcement do its job regarding this stuff.

The Invest in Child Safety Act would direct $5 billion in mandatory funding to investigate and target the pedophiles and abusers who create and share child sexual abuse material online. And it would create a new White House office to coordinate efforts across federal agencies, after DOJ refused to comply with a 2008 law requiring coordination and reporting of those efforts. It also directs substantial new funding for community-based efforts to prevent children from becoming victims in the first place.

Basically, the bill would do a bunch of things to make sure that law enforcement is actually dealing with the very real problem of child exploitation, rather than demanding that internet companies (1) sweep evidence under the rug, and (2) break encryption:

• Quadruple the number of prosecutors and agents in DOJ’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section from 30 FTEs to 120 FTEs;
• Add 100 new agents and investigators for the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Innocent Images National Initiative, Crimes Against Children Unit, Child Abduction Rapid Deployment Teams, and Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Forces;
• Fund 65 new NCMEC analysts, engineers, and mental health counselors, as well as a major upgrade to NCMEC’s technology platform to enable the organization to more effectively evaluate and process CSAM reports from tech companies;
• Double funding for the state Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Forces;
• Double funding for the National Criminal Justice Training Center, to administer crucial Internet Crimes Against Children and Missing and Exploited Children training programs;
• Increase funding for evidence-based programs, local governments and non-federal entities to detect, prevent and support victims of child sexual abuse, including school-based mental health services and prevention programs like the Children’s Advocacy Centers and the HHS’ Street Outreach Program;
• Require tech companies to increase the time that they hold evidence of CSAM, in a secure database, to enable law enforcement agencies to prosecute older cases;
• Establish an Office to Enforce and Protect Against Child Sexual Exploitation, within the Executive Office of the President, to direct and streamline the federal government’s efforts to prevent, investigate and prosecute the scourge of child exploitation;
• Require the Office to develop an enforcement and protection strategy, in coordination with HHS and GAO; and
• Require the Office to submit annual monitoring reports, subject to mandatory Congressional testimony to ensure timely execution.

There is great confusion among Christians about the unforgivable sin. Jesus talks about it in Matthew 12:31-32. This brief study summarizes what the unforgivable sin is, and how you can know you have not committed it. This study is an excerpt from my Gospel Dictionary online course.

In Matthew 3:8-10, John the Baptist invites his audience to bear fruit worthy of repentance. Is he talking about good works? No, the context indicates that the good fruit does not refer to good works, but to good words that are in alignment with Scripture. This is important for properly understanding the gospel.

In Matthew 7:15-19, Jesus tells His disciples how to tell good teachers from bad teachers. He tells them to look at the fruit. Is Jesus telling people to look at the lives of other teachers to see if they have good works? No! Not at all. Listen to the study to see what Jesus IS teaching and why this is important for properly understanding the gospel.

In Matthew 12:33-37, in the context of warning the religious leaders about the sin of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, Jesus talks about good fruit and bad fruit. Is Jesus telling people to look at the lives of other teachers to see if they have good works? No! Not at all. Listen to the study to see what Jesus IS teaching and why this is important for properly understanding the gospel.