How many times have you been spammed with popups and notifications asking you to subscribe to a newsletter? Quite frankly I find them insulting and annoying. You're scrolling down reading an article and the next thing you know some great big javascript driven popup is right in your face asking for your email address. I don't care. Any website that does that to me ends up on the ignore list.
What I want is to be able to get the news as and when I want it, and the best way to do that is with RSS. Yes, if you're one of those few who haven't heard about RSS then stop reading right now and go away. I'm not talking to you. I'm talking to people who actually care about getting timely information.
Now you can either get a decent News Reader (I use QuiteRSS) or if you need something a little more specialised then you might kludge together something a little more useful. So thats exactly what I did.
I work in the Cyber Security world. Subscribing to newsletters means that I would be at their whim to receive the details. Whereas having something that brings all the news to you is a lot more useful. Even more so if those feeds could all be collated and re-distributed in a website for your colleagues to use as well. So that's exactly what my current Cyber Security Project is all about. (See my Previous Project)
There was once upon a time a piece of software called Planet. It was a news feed aggregator that you could give it specific feeds and it would display everything together. Unfortunately it is no longer in use and hasn't been maintained for a long time. Besides which, I wanted something with a little more flexibility.
Enter "Hack the Planet".
HTP offers a greater level of control and the ability to subscribe to numerous feed services all of which are scanned and collated every 15 minutes. The system will also check against a predefined list of keywords for services which are NOT cyber security related (such as general purpose news feeds, eg. Sky News or BBC News) and decide whether to include them or not. Add to the fact that it can figure out Keywords to allow you to filter all of the news clips to just the specific entries (which has been really useful during the recent PrintNightmare issues).
The name has a number of in-jokes in it. Firstly, well Planet software and all that. It's my tribute to them. Secondly "Hack the Planet" was a key phrase used in the 1995 movie Hackers which featured hacking as a core theme. (Don't get me started on the inaccuracy portrayed in most TV media about hacking, because that really annoys me.) So the theme all fits together.
It's all written in shell script, because it's easy and works. The XML processing is done by xmlstarlet, the web pages are generated through filepp and Make controls the whole thing. The fancy indented DIVs are done by Augmented UI.
All in all, I'm quite happy with the result. There is nothing overly complex with it, and it provides timely information needed by the in-house team of Cyber Security people, whether they are Threat Assessment, Penetration Testers, or people who are just interested in timely news.
No subscription needed.
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