2wenty Cents

VPN stands for Virtual Private Network and like the deep web, VPNs have democratized internet access and provided security to those who need it most. In addition, they have also removed some of the barriers that service providers put in place based on geography. A famous example of this is the wide use of VPNs to access Netflix content that has not been made available in some geographical locations.   Some individuals reside in countries with repressive governments that have control over the internet and what can be accessed over it and thus control what their citizens can access. Others have to contend with governments that collect their personal data or have mass surveillance programs. All of the aforementioned situations can be avoided with the use of a VPN. Now that the place that VPN technology holds in our highly connected society is obvious, how do they actually work? To uncover the inner workings of the technology, we will employ the use of an analogy. Think of the internet...

Cyber crime has been on the rise and in a world beginning to embrace remote work, it has become all the more important to protect oneself from the havoc often wreaked by cyber criminals.     The majority of cyber attacks exploit the human element that is often baked into technology and this is why security is often one of the greatest concerns of any development team. Unfortunately, one of the most popular entry points for criminals is through your password. If you come up with your own passwords, chances are that they are moderately secure at best and at worst are an open door for cyber criminals. You may want to change them all right now especially if you are reusing some of them. Usually, sites that require login credentials save your password using a hashing algorithm; which transforms your password into a seemingly random assortment of characters referred to as a hash. The hash that results from your password is then saved to a database and then used in the future to auth...

    There is growing consensus that we are indeed in the 4th industrial revolution. One of the most pervasive pillars of the contemporary industrial revolution is digital technology. So pervasive and undeniable is the impact of said technology on today's society that this era has been termed the digital age. Now, with a mass shift to and embrace of digital technology, comes a transformation of the demands of the workplace; roles that have traditionally been staples of the workplace are fast being replaced by digital equivalents of themselves. These digital equivalents are requiring less human participation - unfortunately. Driving this change are leaps that have been made in the field of computing and the dominance of the internet. The consequence has thus been that software developers are arguably becoming the most sought after professionals in many industries. Therefore, with all of the aforementioned realities in mind, how does one go about becoming a software developer tod...

  Programming languages generally fall into two categories: interpreted  and compiled . However, modern innovations and some very intelligent developers have significantly blurred the line between what can be considered an interpreted language and what can be considered a compiled language. How your computer understands code Computers only understand low level machine language; also called binary code. Binary code consists of instructions written as 1s and 0s or binary. Understanding and writing computer programs in binary isn't practical for your run-of-the-mill developer and as such, they need a high level language that is human-readable. This is where high level languages come in.  Therefore, a program is first written in a high level language. Then, a compiler or an interpreter transforms the program's high level language - which a computer does not yet understand - to low level binary code that the computer can then run. Compilers and interpreters are themselves prog...

The term: "The Dark Web," invokes in many illicit activity, criminals, identity theft and hackers. While it does harbor criminal activity, the dark web forms part of a greater portion of the internet known as The Deep Web.  Yes, the deep and the dark web are two different entities. The deep web represents parts of the world wide web that are not indexed by traditional search engines like Google, DuckDuckGo or Bing. That is, they do not typically appear in search engine results. Examples of such are password protected pages like those belonging to websites owned by banks or paid streaming services, websites intentionally hidden from web crawlers, messages exchanged between users on websites/web apps and comments on forums. This very blog is on the deep web. The part of the world wide web that you and I see through our google searches is what is referred to as the surface web. It may not seem like it but the surface web is a only a small portion of the web. Over 90% of the web ...

Windows, Linux or macOS; which operating system(OS) should I use? Before I answer the question, let's explore the world of operating systems a little by talking about each of the three aforementioned systems.  Windows is a proprietary operating system that was developed by Microsoft and runs on a plethora of device types. For purpose, I will only focus on Windows for PC(PC is short for Personal Computer: the laptop you and I use to surf the internet, play games or write and submit reports and assignments is a personal computer). Personal computers are by far one of the more ubiqitious computer types right next to smartphones.There are other types of computers such as supercomputers and mainframe computers but that is a topic worth exploring on its own. Okay, back to Windows:  The Windows OS was first released in November of 1985 as Windows 1.0. Today, the latest version of the OS is Windows 10. Windows is still the most popular OS in the world for PCs and comes built-in on mos...