Hey everyone,
It’s been a while since I made a blog post. I’ve been busy with a lot of different projects. My projects have all aimed to revolve around some kind of larger purpose, and I can’t wait to share with you what I’ve been up to.
Task Runway
Task Runway is a program I started on December 3, 2023. This program was built originally in Python, with a rudimentary concept. As a fun fact, the original name for this application was Pylit. I took a thematic approach with soaring to the skies, and I thought it was a cool name, but I ended up changing it since other python libraries were named Pylit. Soon we’ll see why the name change was a good idea.
The idea was that Pylit would be a command line utility that could help me in the process of launching other scripts I had developed. In this particular context, I wanted to launch a tool that would help me check information on domain names. I found it time consuming to launch my scripts in the traditional sense after struggling with the fact that you couldn’t easily create taskbar shortcuts with batch files and python files. So, alternatively, you’d have to open a command prompt and browse to the path of the tool to run it. This was finally when I wanted to come up with something to address this.
After some time, Pylit started to show some limitations with the command line interface. I decided I wanted a UI, so I used tkinter to try and build a Python front-end. With this though, I quickly discovered that the binary was quite large after compiling everything due to the nature of python being a higher level language. It was slow to load and a bit clunky. I bit the bullet to redevelop the idea in C#, with the help of AI, as I had never developed in C# before prior to this. This is when I decided a name change would be suitable, and I landed on Task Runway, a software program that helps you take flight into all your favorite tools.
This is when I started to tackle the UI I saw in my head, and turn it into a reality with the help of Windows Forms and Visual Studio. Soon enough, I had a program that I could quickly rely on to launch any application, website, or script I’ve ever made, with the intuitive way in which I designed, custom for me.
I thought it ended there being simply another tool for myself, until I started to see the training applications. As a lead sound engineer at my church, I quickly encountered obstacles when it came to our training process and even when it came to accessing documentation. I thought to myself, would Task Runway be viable for helping this process in some way? Quickly, the tool I had originally made for a custom use-case, began to shine in this environment. I was able to organize links in a numbered format, and reference them in the documentation. Immediately, searching for any application became simple and I could train my peers more effectively. Task Runway was a safety for taking off into a tool that you may have never used before, and I had my first trainee quickly pull off a successful worship service with no issues whatsoever.
The applications for Task Runway didn’t stop there either. I use Task Runway for opening many websites related to the same keyword. When I add a website, I can add something like “(Finance)” in the name, and quickly search “Finance” and find all the finance websites that I have. Instead of going to each bank account to check things, I can quickly have every site load up synchronously at once, and then I can easily keep track of which site I need to visit, and what I need to manage. While it started with my custom scripts, it ended with much more than that, and that’s why I’m so grateful for this amazing project. I know there’s a lot of other awesome launcher projects like this out there, but this one is special to me because I was able to see something and make it a reality, and even be really proud of it.
There are future plans for Task Runway, including a potential redevelopment yet again to Rust, in order to provide cross compatibility across many different operating systems, and to make it even more light-weight. These plans will require me to experiment with complex development techniques, but I am very excited to see where it goes. Task Runway is also open source, so if you want to fork the project and work in it, go for it! It is just over 3,000 lines of code.
You can go to https://taskrunway.com to download the software and view the documentation.
ReportName.com
ReportName.com is a special project that started on May 21, 2023, motivated heavily by Google’s decision to release the .zip TLD, particularly my post here (https://davidinfosec.com/2023/05/googles-zip-tld-and-information-security-concerns/) and some other tiresome occurrences with online scammers.
ReportName.com was inspired after I was watching one of the technical YouTubers I used to watch, ThioJoe. He posted a video regarding a few ways to irritate scammers, and in the video he mentioned how to report domain names. I had been familiar with the concept, but I was glad he was covering it in a new light with his larger platform. He recommended a view report forms in the description, and I went through them and reported some domains, but then I got to thinking about how I could make the process simpler. Imagine, you have 15 report forms. That’s 15 tabs, and it gets quite hard to stay organized about which one you used and which one you didn’t.
Out of fun, being in the domain name world, I wanted to see if ReportName.com was available because I kinda thought of it as inspired by a combination of events, and I was very surprised to see it was available. In the spur of the moment, this was when ChatGPT had recently came around, so I decided to see if ChatGPT could draft me a rough concept of a site that had a checklist for these report forms. Sure enough, I had a super basic concept of ReportName.
I decided to create a first implementation with a check all, tick all button, and it worked as intended. I could go through the links and keep organized. In a community that I’m in, I met an IT manager who had encouraged me that this was more than a project. This began to resonate with me and I started to think of ways I could make ReportName useful to everyone. I knew he was serious when he actually bought a shirt that I had designed for the project. This really changed my mentality about a lot of things, even beyond ReportName. I recognized that I could provide real immediate value to people.
I knew I wanted to add some things that were inspired by recommendations from the folks around me, like being able to add a report summary page, or statistics of that sort. It wasn’t until a special men’s ministry event at my church, where I was able to share about ReportName with a presentation.
This presentation was the excuse I needed to develop ReportName with a more friendly interface, and to redevelop a lot of the things I thought were lacking in the previous revision. I had finally been able to conceptualize a more organized approach than I thought I already had, and I was also able to add a printable report summary as a feature just in time for the presentation.
I held two presentations over the span of a few hours and spoke confidently about ReportName and how to use the various resources that I aggregated. I informed listeners how to:
- How to detect malicious activity and investigate them with common tools
- How to identify whether an email is spoofed or legitimate. (DKIM, SPF, DMARC)
- How to report threats to businesses/government institutions.
- How to recognize common techniques used by scammers in 2024.
- How to stay safe during the increasing creation of AI deepfakes with secret phrases.
While the presentations went very well, I was still determined to make it a learning experience. One of the immediate things I recognized was that ReportName needed to be more accessible to people who may not know a lot about technology, and with that, I wanted to think of some ways to help make it easier to use, assuming no prior experience.
As a new edition to this, I launched the ReportName blog, which features posts based on how to use the tools on ReportName, according to a specific scenario, like reporting a domain name, for example.
This walks the user through exactly how to tackle each scenario, specific to ReportName, and also guides them on what each tool does. I am hoping that it will be things like this that will help the user experience. I also added note-taking to each tool, so that you can add a note as you use something, which will help those in an incident response scenario, where time is of the essence, and you want to keep your notes handy, but move on to each tool as fast as you can. All the notes will be output to the printable summary page which you can share with others, so they know exactly where your mind was in the reporting process.
ReportName.com is free to use and funded by T-Shirt sales and other donations. I may monetize is somewhere in the future with other features but I aim to keep the business model transparent and open. You can go to www.lets.report to jump immediately to the ReportName toolbox.
SpotScam.com
SpotScam is one of the newest additions to my professional portfolio and plays off of the same foundational themes as ReportName. The intentions with SpotScam were to provide a way to help those who didn’t know much about common scams to be able to have a central location where they could find out about them.
Ideally this was the missing piece to allow ReportName to make more sense to someone less technical, and even during my Report name.com presentation, I noticed there were some shortcomings with the existing scam databases that already exist.
This includes pictures and a familiar format across all posts, to quickly identify things that could indicate a threat.
Lessons Learned
I’m always trying to make things simple enough to understand and use. ReportName, Task Runway, and SpotScam, have all taught me unique lessons in communicating technical concepts effectively. I am constantly striving to come across as personable and relatable as I can when it comes to these things and it often is a humbling experience, with an iterative approach to make things simpler and simpler. I am very thankful that I am able to make my ideas a reality with the help of amazing AI powered tools, but also with the help of the peers I surround myself around. Thank you so much for reading about these tools.
I invite you to use them and send me feedback using the emails:
– [email protected]
– [email protected]
– [email protected]