How to Securely Verify Telegram Login Widget Payloads in PHP and Yii2

The Telegram Login Widget returns user profile data signed with a bot token, but every field in the payload can be manipulated by an attacker, making signature verification essential. Developers must recompute an HMAC-SHA-256 hash from the payload and compare it against the provided hash field to confirm the data genuinely originated from Telegram. An auth_date expiry window should also be enforced to prevent replay attacks using stolen but valid payloads. In Yii2, the verified telegram_id can then be bound to an internal user account, creating a new record on first login if none exists. The entire verification process runs locally without any Bot API calls, avoiding network latency, rate limits, or token exposure to third parties.

Lexar Muse portable SSD measures just 3.8mm thick with 1TB capacity

Lexar has announced the Muse Ultra-Slim Portable SSD, one of the thinnest drives on the market at just 3.8mm at its widest point and tapering to 1mm at the edges. The slim profile is achieved through high-density NAND stacking and a custom ultra-thin PCB design. Despite its compact form, the drive delivers read speeds of up to 1,050MB/s and write speeds of up to 1,000MB/s, fast enough to record 4K Apple ProRes video at 120fps. The Muse will be available in 512GB and 1TB storage options when it launches later this year.

Aqara Launches Zigbee and Thread Smart Lighting Lineup at IFA

Smart home brand Aqara has unveiled a broad range of smart lighting products at IFA, following its earlier debut at CES. The lineup includes the Floor Lamp T1, a 4.6-foot LED pole featuring RGBIC lighting with 18 individually addressable zones. Like competing products, the lamp projects ambient color onto surrounding walls. Aqara is also expanding into outdoor smart lighting, broadening its presence beyond indoor home automation. All new devices support both Zigbee and Thread connectivity standards.

RugOne Xsnap 7 Pro launches on Kickstarter with detachable action camera

RugOne's Xsnap 7 Pro is a rugged smartphone featuring a removable rear camera that functions as a standalone action cam. The device carries both IP68 and IP69K water-resistance ratings, allowing it to withstand high-pressure water jets and submersion for up to 30 minutes. First shown at MWC 2026, the phone will go on sale via Kickstarter on September 7th at €799 (approximately $930) in limited quantities. A broader global release is planned for October at a price of $999. The detachable camera module is noted to be less capable than dedicated action cameras such as the DJI Osmo Nano or Insta360 Go Ultra.

West Bengal's Nijashree Scheme Offers Affordable Flats to Low and Middle-Income Families

The West Bengal government has launched the Nijashree Housing Scheme to provide ownership flats to low and middle-income households. Eligible applicants can apply for 1BHK or 2BHK units, which are allocated through a lottery system. To qualify, applicants must meet specified income criteria and must not already own a pucca house anywhere in West Bengal. The scheme's pricing excludes land costs and certain infrastructure expenses, making units more affordable. Construction on a project is initiated only after at least 80% of its flats have received confirmed bookings.

Developer Shares Key Lessons From Building a Type 2 Diabetes Health Platform

A software developer recently built a health website, reversemydiabetes.co, aimed at helping people manage type 2 diabetes through diet and lifestyle guidance. The project surfaced several technical lessons, including the value of simple, well-organized static content over complex dynamic features. SEO was treated as a core engineering concern from the start, with pages restructured around real user search terms rather than internal preferences. Because the target audience skews older and may use slower devices, the developer stripped out unnecessary JavaScript to significantly improve load performance. Trust and credibility also proved critical, requiring clear sourcing, plain language, and careful avoidance of overstated health claims before the site was considered ready to launch.

Lisa Keightley takes CA development role while WPL future remains in doubt

Lisa Keightley has been appointed to a development role with Cricket Australia, marking a new chapter in her coaching career. She will continue to serve as head coach of Sydney Thunder, having signed a two-year contract extension with the franchise. However, her future in the Women's Premier League appears uncertain, with her likely to step away from her position with Mumbai Indians. The dual commitments of the CA role and the Sydney Thunder job are expected to make her continued involvement in the WPL difficult to sustain.

How to build stock chart pattern search without the silent failure modes

A technical deep-dive from DEV Community outlines the correct method for building 'find similar chart patterns' features in stock analysis tools. The naive approach of using raw Euclidean distance on closing prices fails because price level and scale dominate the metric, drowning out actual shape similarity. The fix involves z-normalizing each candidate window independently and optionally working with log returns instead of raw prices, since returns are more stationary. Window length is a key design choice with no universal answer — short windows capture noise while long windows find so few matches that results become meaningless. The piece also flags subtler failure modes like overlapping matches and the limits of dynamic time warping, deliberately stopping short of any claims about predictive value.

A succession question hangs over private banks

RustDesk gains GitHub traction as open-source, self-hostable remote desktop tool

RustDesk, an open-source remote desktop application built with Rust, has gained 84 GitHub stars recently due to growing interest in self-hosted infrastructure. Unlike conventional remote desktop clients, RustDesk uses a two-server model — a rendezvous server for peer discovery and a relay server for connections when direct peer-to-peer links are unavailable. The architecture gives operators full control over traffic and metadata, making it appealing to teams wary of third-party connection paths. The project can be deployed quickly using Docker, though production use requires careful management of server keys, firewall rules, TLS configuration, and software updates. Developers are advised to test RustDesk in a private lab environment before rolling it out broadly, given the operational complexity of self-hosting.

How to Diagnose and Fix Full Disk Space on a Linux Server

Linux administrators facing full-disk alerts can use a structured set of command-line tools to identify and resolve the issue quickly. The process begins with 'df -h' and 'df -i' to pinpoint which filesystem or inode table is exhausted, followed by 'du' commands to drill down into the largest directories. The 'find' command helps surface oversized individual files such as core dumps, forgotten database exports, or misbehaving logs. A lesser-known cause is deleted files that remain open by active processes, which can be detected using 'lsof +L1' and resolved by restarting the holding process. Once the culprit is identified, targeted cleanup tools — including Docker pruning, journalctl vacuuming, and package manager cleanup — can reclaim disk space efficiently.

Spain's Football Federation to Fund Egg Freezing for Women's National Team Players

The Royal Spanish Football Federation (RFEF) is close to finalizing a deal with a fertility clinic to cover egg freezing costs for players in the Spain women's national football team. The arrangement, reported by Spanish newspaper El País, involves a process called egg vitrification, which preserves a woman's eggs for potential future use. The initiative reflects growing recognition of the career-versus-family dilemma faced by elite female athletes. By funding the procedure, the federation aims to give players greater reproductive choice without forcing them to choose between their sporting careers and starting a family.

Hackers Secretly Accessed ID Verification Firm's Live Scan Feed for Over a Year

Cybercriminals gained unauthorized access to a live feed of identity documents being scanned by an ID verification company, maintaining that access for more than a year. The breach meant that every ID processed by the company during that period was potentially exposed to malicious actors in real time. The incident raises serious concerns about the security practices of third-party identity verification services. Such companies handle sensitive personal data on behalf of numerous businesses and their customers. The full scope of affected individuals and organizations has not yet been disclosed.

How a Preview-First Workflow Makes AI Noise Removal More Trustworthy

A preview-first design approach for background noise removal tools prioritizes user confidence by letting people hear a sample result before committing to a full export. The workflow follows a clear sequence: upload, compatibility check, preview, side-by-side comparison, and then an export decision. A key principle is that the before-and-after audio samples must cover the same time segment, eliminating ambiguity that could mislead users into misjudging the processing quality. Compatibility checks are positioned early in the flow to catch unsupported file types or account limitations before any processing work begins. Modeling each stage as a distinct system state, rather than a flag on the final job, prevents the preview from becoming fragile or misleading.

HarperCollins India to publish Sonia Gandhi’s memoir after Penguin India pulls out

Assam CM Himanta Sarma's Chat With Student Over Pending Scheme Payment Goes Viral

A social media exchange between Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma and a student has gone viral online. The student reached out to the Chief Minister directly regarding a pending payment under the state government's Jibon Prerana scheme. The conversation drew widespread attention after it was shared across social media platforms. The Jibon Prerana scheme is an Assam government initiative designed to provide financial support to students.

Sri Lanka Replace Mendis, Fernando With Rathnayake and Madushanka for England T20Is

Sri Lanka have been forced into squad changes ahead of their T20I series against England. Wicketkeeper-batter Kusal Mendis and fast bowler Binura Fernando have been ruled out of the tour. Top-order batter Pavan Rathnayake and pacer Dilshan Madushanka have been called up as their respective replacements. The changes were confirmed by Sri Lanka Cricket as the touring party prepares for the England series.

Why Benchmarking Only Success Cases Creates Hidden Performance Debt

A software developer highlights a common pitfall where performance benchmarks measure only successful code paths, ignoring the cost of cache misses and exception handling. In production environments, failed lookups and debug logging can silently degrade performance, yet most AI-generated code patches optimize for the clean, happy path. The author built a small Python harness to compare three lookup variants — try/except, silent dict.get, and logged dict.get — across a deliberate 20% miss rate. Results are measured in both milliseconds and peak memory to avoid misleading single-metric conclusions. The article, prepared as part of MonkeyCode's product outreach, encourages developers to test with realistic miss-rate mixes rather than relying on idealized benchmarks.

How to Run Linux on Windows Without Dual Boot Using WSL

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) allows Windows users to run a full Linux distribution directly within Windows, eliminating the need for dual booting or a virtual machine. Installation is straightforward — opening PowerShell with administrator privileges and running 'wsl --install' sets up the required components and installs Ubuntu by default. Users can alternatively choose from other distributions such as Debian, Kali Linux, or openSUSE by specifying the distro name in the install command. Once installed, a Linux username and password are created, after which the environment can be verified using basic terminal commands like 'uname -a' and 'cat /etc/os-release'. WSL 2, the current version, uses a lightweight virtualized environment that offers significantly better Linux compatibility than its predecessor, making it a practical choice for developers who rely on Linux tools.

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