Problems Solved

How to Decode a PEM Certificate (and What Every Field Actually Means)

You have a .pem, .crt, .cer, or .key file sitting on your disk. What's actually inside it? Here's how to decode the contents without the OpenSSL ceremony, and what each field means in plain English.

April 18, 2026 4 min read

SSL Certificates PEM X.509 Tutorial

Freshping Shut Down — What Now?

Freshworks permanently shut down Freshping on March 6, 2026. If you're one of the 20,000+ businesses that relied on it for free uptime monitoring, here's what happened, what your options are, and how to migrate.

April 1, 2026 3 min read

Uptime Monitoring Freshping Migration

Are Domains and SSL Certificates Case Sensitive? Sometimes.

Everyone assumes domain names and SSL certificates are completely case-insensitive. They're mostly right. But there are real-world situations where capitalization changes what certificate you get back, and most people have no idea.

March 19, 2026 3 min read

SSL DNS Security Headers CDN TLS

Netwatch: A Lightweight Internet Outage Monitor for OPNsense That Actually Sends Alerts

OPNsense's built-in tools can detect when your internet goes down, but they can't reliably tell you about it. Monit drops alerts when the network is down. Postfix queuing is fragile on FreeBSD. So I wrote a shell script that handles its own email queue and collects diagnostics at the moment of failure.

February 25, 2026 5 min read

OPNsense Networking Monitoring FreeBSD

OPNsense Kills Your Connections When Failover Has Nowhere to Go. Here's How to Fix It.

If you run OPNsense with a standby backup WAN that isn't always plugged in, the failover system will kill your active connections even when there's nothing to fail over to. I wrote a patch. OPNsense closed it. Here's how to protect yourself.

February 18, 2026 5 min read

OPNsense Networking Failover Firewall

T-Mobile's Netflix/Youtube Hotspot Throttling and Bypassing It with a VPN on OPNsense

T-Mobile Essentials hotspot showed 310 Kbps on fast.com but 300 Mbps on Cloudflare's speed test. Same phone, same moment. Deep packet inspection was throttling video traffic. A WireGuard tunnel to ProtonVPN on OPNsense fixed it completely.

February 18, 2026 6 min read

T-Mobile OPNsense WireGuard VPN

OPNsense Failover Kills States When No Viable Failover Target Exists

Months of stable OPNsense operation, then intermittent DNS hangs across every device. The cause: dpinger declaring the WAN gateway down based on ISP latency, triggering state killing with no failover target. The bug report was closed as a "configuration issue."

February 16, 2026 6 min read

OPNsense Networking DNS Failover

Reported a Zillow Data Scraping Bug to Bugcrowd. They Said It Was Not Reproducible. Reddit Said It Was. Bugcrowd Threatened.

I discovered Zillow whitelists Google server IPs, letting anyone scrape listings via Google Sheets. Bugcrowd dismissed the report, then threatened me for talking about it publicly. The disclosure process is broken.

February 12, 2026 5 min read

Bugcrowd Vulnerability Disclosure Zillow Bug Bounty

Stripe Says Publishable Keys Are Safe to Expose. They're Not.

Stripe's documentation says publishable keys are "not secret" and safe to embed in client-side code. But attackers are using them to validate stolen credit cards at scale - and Stripe blames the merchants.

January 1, 2026 5 min read

Stripe Security API Keys Card Testing

Safari Hanging on Page Reloads? OPNsense, QUIC.

Spent a week debugging Safari hanging on page reloads. Turns out it was my OPNsense firewall's UDP timeout killing idle QUIC connections. Here's how to fix it.

December 2, 2025 6 min read

Safari QUIC OPNsense Networking

MacBook Slow on 5GHz WiFi? Change Your Router's Channel.

My MacBook Pro M3 was barely hitting 40 Mbps on 5GHz with constant packet loss. Every other device was fine. The fix was the router's 5GHz channel. Changed it from 149 to 40 and instantly hit 1.1 Gbps.

February 21, 2025 4 min read

MacBook WiFi Bluetooth Networking