DEV Community: Adler Medrado

Evolving HADES

Adler Medrado — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 02:30:41 +0000

This post describes how HADES evolved to detect fraudulent URLs without relying on paid services.
The focus was to strengthen detection with in-house code, local heuristics (PT/BR), and open public sources, while keeping full control of the pipeline.

https://adlermedrado.com.br/posts/hades-evolution/

My simple cli tool for http requests

Adler Medrado — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 02:28:53 +0000

Tired of using a cannon to kill a mosquito, I switched from Postman to bash + curl for HTTP requests in integration tests. However, the scripts became repetitive, messy, and stopped scaling. To address this, I built a small CLI tool in C to perform exactly what I needed.

Blog post: https://adlermedrado.com.br/posts/pinga-cli-tool-for-http-requests/
Repo: https://github.com/spacexnu/pinga

Simple tools with fewer layers and more control.

Say Cheese: Catch Curious Eyes on Your Mac with a Snapshot

Adler Medrado — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 14:36:51 +0000

Ever worried someone might peek at your MacBook when you’re not around?

Last Friday, I built a simple, effective, and open-source solution to deal with that — and I called it Say Cheese.

Here’s the idea: if someone opens your Mac’s lid without authenticating via Touch ID, a photo is instantly taken and sent to your iPhone through iMessage. You get a live snapshot of the intruder — no fuss.

How It Works

Under the hood, Say Cheese integrates with Do Not Disturb, an open-source tool from Objective-See that monitors the lid sensor on your Mac.

If someone opens the lid without a valid Touch ID authentication, Do Not Disturb creates a temporary file. I hooked into that event and wrote a script that gets triggered automatically.

The script runs ImageSnap, which captures an image using the Mac’s front camera. Then, it uses an AppleScript to send the photo via iMessage.

So:

👀 Someone opened your Mac?
📸 Photo taken.
📱 Snapshot lands on your phone within seconds.

Open Source and Easy to Use

Say Cheese is available on my GitHub:
🔗 github.com/spacexnu/say_cheese

Just follow the setup instructions and let it run in the background. It’s lightweight, efficient, and discreet.

More Tools from Objective-See

If you like this kind of approach, check out the Objective-See site. They provide several powerful open-source tools for macOS, including:

🔥 LuLu (firewall)
🎙️ OverSight (mic and webcam monitoring)
💽 BlockBlock (persistence monitoring)
All free. All built to protect your Mac without bloat or intrusion.

Say Cheese adds one more layer to your defense strategy — a clever way to catch unauthorized access attempts, especially useful if you work in cafés, shared spaces, or open environments.

Privacy is an attitude.
Sometimes, it starts with a snapshot.

Originally posted at: https://adlermedrado.com.br/posts/say-cheese-catch-curious-eyes/

Real-time Deepfakes: what if "seeing is believing" no longer means anything?

Adler Medrado — Sat, 10 May 2025 21:50:37 +0000

An open-source project called Deep-Live-Cam is gaining traction on GitHub — and for good reason.

With just a single still image, it can mimic anyone’s face in a live video call. In real-time. Running locally. No cloud required.

The implication is clear: you can no longer trust a video call at face value.

So here’s the question: how do we verify identity in a world where faces can be forged on demand?

While many react with fear or disbelief, I see only one viable answer: digital signatures.

For years, I’ve been saying: we should encrypt everything — files, messages, infrastructure. But now, that’s not enough.

We need to start signing everything.

Digital signatures ensure authenticity. They prove that something really came from who claims to have sent it and hasn’t been tampered with.

We already sign emails, source code, and software packages. Why not apply the same principle to real-time streams?

Imagine a video call cryptographically signed with the speaker’s GPG key. Even if the face looks convincing, if the signature doesn’t verify, you know something’s off.

I sign every HTML page on my personal website with my GPG key. Not because I’m paranoid — but because I believe security should be a mindset.

Don’t trust. Verify.