While the Twilio Messaging API won't charge you for attempting to send an SMS to a landline number, identifying the line type of a phone number can be useful for other reasons. A lot of businesses won't let users sign up with VoIP numbers, for example, because those numbers are more correlated with fraud.

This post will show you how to identify a phone number's line type with Twilio Lookup and Python.

Set Up

In order to code along with this post you'll want to start with the following:

1. Create a Twilio account
2. Install Python 3
3. Install the twilio-python helper library

Create a new file called lookup.py and add the following code.

Happy Galentine's Day, you opalescent tree shark! The holiday dedicated to waffles and your best gal-pals only happens once a year, so I built an SMS-based bot that can generate compliments Leslie Knope would be proud of anytime. Send a text to (765) 234-3009 for a preview of what we're going to build in this short tutorial.

Getting started

Before we dig into some code, make sure that your Python and Flask development environment is setup. If you haven't done so already:

1. Create a Twilio account
2. Buy a phone number
3. Install Python 3
4. Install Ngrok to make your Flask app visible from the internet so Twilio can send requests to it
5. Set up your Python development environment 

If you're new to Python and Flask check out this handy guide for more information on getting started.

We also need to install Flask to respond to incoming web requests.

Adding two-factor authentication (2FA) to your login process increases the security of your user's data. We can extend that to validate sensitive actions like sending money from your account, changing your shipping address, or confirming a medical appointment. Even though the user should be already logged in with a username and password, we want to make sure that they authorize every payment. This blog post will show you how to secure payment actions using Python, Flask, a bit of Javascript, and the Authy API.

PSD2 & SCA

The European Payment Services Directive (PSD2) regulation requires Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) for all transactions over €30 by September 2019. This post will show you how to implement a compliant solution for your application. For more detail on PSD2, SCA, and dynamic linking, check out this post.

The solution in this post is useful regardless of regulatory requirements. For example, Gemini uses push ...

From TLS to authentication, “crypto” is used for a lot more than just currencies. In 2018, security should be part of every developer's toolkit and cryptography a fundamental building block for the libraries and tools we use to protect our data and applications. This post will dive into modern cryptography, an overview of how it works, and its everyday use cases — including how Twilio uses public-key crypto in our Authy application and to secure our API.

Let's start with some context and history.

Meet Alice and Bob

Alice and Bob have a history of illicit dealings. We're not really sure what they're up to, but they don't want us, or the ever-curious Eve, to know. Before the internet, Alice and Bob could pass secret messages by encrypting text with an agreed upon cipher. Maybe that was through letter substitution or shifting or other sophisticated methods. They agreed on the method ...

If you've ever wondered about the story behind your favorite emoji, this app is for you. We'll build an interactive bot to give us more information about just what 💁 is doing. With the Twilio API for WhatsApp and Emojipedia 👌😍 we can easily query this information on demand.

🌅 Getting started

Before we can dig into some code, make sure that your Python and Flask development environment is setup. If you haven't done so already,

1. Install Python 3
2. Install Ngrok to make your Flask app visible from the internet so Twilio can send requests to it
3. Set up your Python development environment 

If you're new to Python and Flask check out this handy guide for more information on getting started.

I've started the project off, so clone or download the repo from GitHub and checkout the getting-started branch.

💬 Setting Up Twilio API ...

There are some features of iOS apps that don’t work from the iOS simulator. Maybe you want to test how your application works with the device camera or send an SMS message from your application. For these examples and more you’ll need to test and debug your app using a real device.

This post will walk through how to run the Xcode simulator on your iPhone or other iOS device and show you how to fix some common errors you’ll see along the way.

How to select your iPhone as the “Simulator” Device

Simulator is in quotes here since this will create an actual app on your phone; it’s no longer a simulation. Open up a project in Xcode and click on the device near the Run ▶ button at the top left of your Xcode screen.

Plug your iPhone into your computer. You can select your ...

Security is at the top of everyone’s mind and phone verification is a simple way to secure your application and help prevent bot accounts. Phone verification is a common security tool used when people sign up for a product or give you their phone number for the first time.

Confidence in your users’ phone numbers decreases fraud and increases reliability of notifications. Let’s take a look at how to verify phone numbers from an iOS application using Swift and the Twilio Verify API.

This tutorial will walk you through the process of SMS phone verification step by step. You can check out the final project on my GitHub.

What you’ll need

To code along with this post, you’ll need:

• A Twilio account
• A Verify App which you can create in the Twilio console
• A Heroku account
• Xcode version 9 or higher

Setting up

Navigate to ...

Apache Spark aims to solve the problem of working with large scale distributed data and with access to over 500 million leaked passwords we have a lot of data to dig through. If you spend any time with the password data set, you’ll notice how simple most passwords are. This is why we’re always thinking about how to encourage stronger passwords and recommend turning on Two-factor authentication everywhere it’s available.

While tools like Excel and Python are great for data analysis, Spark helps solve the problem of what to do once the data you’re working with gets too large to fit into the memory of your local computer.

This tutorial will show you how to get setup for running Spark and introduce the tools and code that allow you to do data manipulation and exploration. Read on to find out how to spot the most common ...

Earlier this year Troy Hunt released version 2 of his popular Pwned Passwords API service. The new version comes with even more compromised passwords and a more secure way to query the password API that doesn’t require sending plain text passwords over the network.

The API update comes at a good time. When NIST updated its password guidelines in 2016, it included a new recommendation to check “memorized secret verifiers”, or passwords, against known data breaches:

When processing requests to establish and change memorized secrets, verifiers SHALL compare the prospective secrets against a list that contains values known to be commonly-used, expected, or compromised. For example, the list MAY include, but is not limited to passwords obtained from previous breach corpuses.

Since the API release, the community has created API wrappers in many of our favorite programming languages. In this post, I round up the libraries in 7 languages ...