Guides, tips and explanations
A tour through ten real places — email attachments, JWTs, Git commits, SRI hashes, Docker layers, and more — where Base64 encoding and hash functions silently keep the web working.
Read more →A hands-on walkthrough of HMAC — how keyed hashing works, why it beats secret tokens in headers, and exactly how Stripe and GitHub use it to sign webhooks. Includes working Python…
Read more →Raw SHA and MD5 hashes of passwords fall to rainbow tables in seconds. This authoritative guide explains exactly why, how salts and peppers close the gaps, and why bcrypt and Argo…
Read more →Hash functions are everywhere in software — from password storage to Git commits — but what actually are they? This no-math explainer builds real intuition around one-way function…
Read more →Base64 and Base64URL look nearly identical, but swapping `+` for `-`, `/` for `_`, and dropping padding turns out to matter enormously when tokens travel through URLs, HTTP header…
Read more →Why do URLs break when they carry spaces? Why does a plus sign sometimes mean a space and sometimes not? This guide cuts through the confusion between %20 and +, explains when to …
Read more →Take a real JWT apart segment by segment — no libraries required. Learn what each Base64URL chunk actually contains, what every claim means, and why the signature makes it tamper-…
Read more →MD5 was declared broken in 2004 when researchers found they could generate collisions in under an hour. Yet it still appears in download checksums, backup systems, and ETL pipelin…
Read more →MD5 is fast but cryptographically broken. SHA-256 is slower but secure against collision attacks. This side-by-side comparison walks through speed benchmarks, real-world collision…
Read more →Base64 data URIs let you embed images directly into HTML and CSS, skipping HTTP requests entirely. But with HTTP/2 and browser caching, the trade-offs are more nuanced than most t…
Read more →Base64 encodes data — it doesn't protect it. Unpacking the persistent myth that Base64 is a form of security, and laying out the real differences between encoding, encryption, and…
Read more →Base64 encoding turns binary files into safe ASCII text so they can travel through systems designed for plain text — like email. Here's the plain-language explanation of how it wo…
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