Recent Posts

926

General Software Discussion / Re: Google Chrome -- a new browser coming (in beta) in a few hours

« Last post by Ehtyar on September 07, 2008, 03:13 AM »

Isn't this the purpose of beta releases, to test them in real world environments and fix errors?

They probably should not have released it with such enthusiasm as they did till the bugs had been squashed, but still, it is a beta version.

-Grorgy (September 07, 2008, 03:02 AM)

I anticipated someone might mention this. It's all well and good to say any beta browser has these flaws, but can anyone give me a good reason as to why Google kept the browser closed source until its initial beta release, other than creating media hysteria, which isn't a good reason to begin with? This is not to mention Google's misuse/abuse of the 'BETA' moniker since the GMail fiasco...

Ehtyar.

927

General Software Discussion / Re: Google Chrome -- a new browser coming (in beta) in a few hours

« Last post by Ehtyar on September 07, 2008, 02:50 AM »

Aaand again...

Ehtyar.

928

Developer's Corner / Re: How to choose programming language?

« Last post by Ehtyar on September 07, 2008, 12:57 AM »

LOL
I'm also pleased, it is a good decision, and python + wx should serve you well.

Ehtyar.

929

General Software Discussion / Re: real reason chrome exist is to prevent microsoft from making a sucky browser

« Last post by Ehtyar on September 07, 2008, 12:05 AM »

[Ehtyar]: The biggest WebKit based problem is its inability to render non-standards-compliant pages well.

But why go to that trouble? Web authoring software, including the pretty fantastic MS Expression Web, creates compliant W3C code. If you (not you personally) can't be bothered to compose a standards-compliant webpage/site, then Google shouldn't have to engineer around your mistakes.

-zridling (September 06, 2008, 11:34 PM)

I suppose you're right, from Google's point of view, however, as an end user, you expect them to do their best to render *all* pages on the internet, not just those that conform to the standards. As an end user, that makes up a part of why Google Chrome sucks.

Ehtyar.

930

General Software Discussion / Re: real reason chrome exist is to prevent microsoft from making a sucky browser

« Last post by Ehtyar on September 06, 2008, 07:37 PM »

I never said my opinion had anything to do with it being WebKit based, though that does indirectly create some problems. The biggest WebKit based problem is its inability to render non-standards-compliant pages well. This may be a feature few people are noticing, but it becomes a huge problem for hobbyists running small websites. This gives rise to the issue of yet another browser to support; with a hacked up WebKit, and a custom javascript engine, no one can say that Chrome will run any Safari code (there is also the issue of Safari not being supported in the first place. You also have the issue of Google's updater, which I won't go into any further than to say it's not open source, and it runs whenever Windows considers your computer to be idle. Options and user modifications are nothing compared to just about any other browser on the market, and then you also have to consider its vulnerability to several known and wild attacks.
My two cents.

Ehtyar.

931

General Software Discussion / Re: real reason chrome exist is to prevent microsoft from making a sucky browser

« Last post by Ehtyar on September 06, 2008, 03:45 PM »

I suppose it might have been easier to draw that conclusion if Chrome itself didn't suck 

Ehtyar.

932

Living Room / Re: When Traffic Shaping Results in ISP Changing

« Last post by Ehtyar on September 05, 2008, 06:44 PM »

IMO GoDaddy is a terribly bad idea. I've heard many-a-horror-story about them. I will confess, however, that I am absolutely head-over-heels for DreamHost (and they have some very nice cpanel options for pop3/smtp email).

Ehtyar.

933

Living Room / Re: Sony Recalls Vaio Laptops

« Last post by Ehtyar on September 05, 2008, 05:59 PM »

Oh dear, my bad.

Ehtyar.

934

Living Room / Re: 'FaceBot' PoC Demonstrates Vulnerability of Facebook Apps

« Last post by Ehtyar on September 05, 2008, 05:40 PM »

Well, wasn't Facebook all about a social network?

-Lashiec (September 05, 2008, 05:28 PM)

LMAO!

Ehtyar.

935

Living Room / New 'Compliance' SPAM Making Rounds

« Last post by Ehtyar on September 05, 2008, 05:27 PM »

Yet another SPAM scam is scamming corporations.

As more and more standards and regulations get passed to help protect consumers and guide businesses in proper procedures, managers also come to expect that they will come up against new compliance standards all the time–even some they haven’t heard of.

This makes the compliance area rife for scammers, who send letters or emails claiming that businesses owe them penalties or haven’t filed the right forms.

Full Story

Ehtyar.

936

Living Room / 'FaceBot' PoC Demonstrates Vulnerability of Facebook Apps

« Last post by Ehtyar on September 05, 2008, 05:23 PM »

A new Proof-of-Concept Facebook app is capable of recruiting visitors into a botnet.

A team of researchers has written a Facebook application for the social network that easily turned victims’ machines into bots able to wage distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDOS), as well as other malicious hacks.

The proof-of-concept Facebot application posed as Photo of the Day, a tool that displayed a different photo each day from National Geographic on users’ Facebook pages. But aside from serving up a photo, it was also serving up malware that recruited the victim’s machine into a botnet. The researchers -- mostly from the Institute of Computer Foundation for Research & Technology Hellas in Greece -- will present their findings at the upcoming Information Security Conference in Taiwan.

Full Story

Ehtyar.

937

Living Room / Sony Recalls Vaio Laptops

« Last post by Ehtyar on September 05, 2008, 05:19 PM »

Sone has issued a voluntary recall of 438,000 Vaio laptops after concerns were raised about the unit overheating and potentially burning its user.

SONY has launched a voluntary recall of 438,000 Vaio notebooks, citing a potential hazard that could cause the machines to overheat or possibly burn a user.

It is one of the biggest computer recalls since 2006 when Dell recalled 4.1 million notebook computer batteries because they could overheat and catch fire.

Full Story

Ehtyar.

938

Living Room / Immunity Releases Open Source Linux Rootkit

« Last post by Ehtyar on September 05, 2008, 05:13 PM »

Immunity Inc. has released an open source Linux rootkit which uses Intel's debugging mechanisms to hide.

The art of burying invisible malware deep inside a Linux machine is about to go mainstream, thanks to a new open-source rootkit released Thursday by Immunity Inc., a firm that supplies tools for penetration testers.

When implemented, Immunity's DR, or Debug Register, makes backdoors and other types of malware extremely difficult to detect or eradicate. It's notable because it cloaks itself by burrowing deep inside a server's processor and availing itself of debugging mechanisms available in Intel's chip architecture. The rootkit, in other words, mimics a kernel debugger.

Personal note: Go do something useful and go fix that python-olly-frankenstein you're always raving about.

Full Story

Ehtyar.

939

Living Room / Scammers Getting Through With Flash

« Last post by Ehtyar on September 05, 2008, 05:06 PM »

Spammers are getting around anti-spam devices by using innocuous-looking flash links.

Online scammers have found a new way to skirt anti-spam filters, this time by making use of Adobe Flash files hosted on free websites.

Spam messages with innocuous-looking content contain links to Flash-based files on ImageShack.com and elsewhere, according to a report from anti-spam service MessageLabs. Then commands embedded in the files redirect the recipient to sites that punt Viagra, work-at-home offers and free software updates.

Full Story

Ehtyar.

940

Living Room / Cryptographic Wedding Rings

« Last post by Ehtyar on September 05, 2008, 05:03 PM »

Bruce Schneier helps a friend build a crypto system for his wedding rings, and is asking for help determining their most effective use.

Cory Doctorow wanted a secret decoder wedding ring, and he asked me to help design it. I wanted something more than the standard secret decoder ring, so this is what I asked for: "I want each wheel to be the alphabet, with each letter having either a dot above, a dot below, or no dot at all. The first wheel should have alternating above, none, below. The second wheel should be the repeating sequence of above, above, none, none, below, below. The third wheel should be the repeating sequence of above, above, above, none, none, none, below, below, below."

Full Story
Ideas Here (must read full story first)

Ehtyar.

941

General Software Discussion / Re: windows based web server

« Last post by Ehtyar on September 05, 2008, 03:27 PM »

XAMPP

Free LAMP but then for Windows. Download the 7-zip version, it only requires unpacking (in a root folder) and you have immediately a working Apache 2.0, MysQL 5 and PHP 5 integrated. Some extra's like a mailserver are included as well.

The original intent for the package is development, not hosting. So the only thing to do is re-configuring Apache for web use.

-Shades (September 05, 2008, 10:30 AM)

Indeed I should have mentioned XAMPP, used it myself more than once. However, the defaults in an XAMPP installation are disastrously insecure. I would recommend using it only for testing, or if not, only once you have enough experience to know what to change.

Ehtyar.

942

General Software Discussion / Re: windows based web server

« Last post by Ehtyar on September 05, 2008, 07:55 AM »

I can configure Apache in my sleep, but that's because I've done it about a thousand times. Some windows users have issues with text-based configuration, and if you are one of these, then you will have problems with Apache. However, Apache's documentation is second to none; you can rest assured that no matter what you wish to know, it will be very easy to find. For a quick overview, have a look here and here. You can also purchase applications to do the config from a GUI, though I would recommend against it, as it's almost certain the GUI will not offer the granularity of the text-based configuration itself.

Ehtyar.

943

General Software Discussion / Re: windows based web server

« Last post by Ehtyar on September 05, 2008, 07:39 AM »

Why, Apache of course. I can't imagine your first recommendation was anything else :S

Ehtyar.

944

Living Room / Re: Memory Stick Grabs Data From Mobile Phones

« Last post by Ehtyar on September 05, 2008, 06:51 AM »

Nifty - and a bit scary. Kinda like firewire

-f0dder (September 05, 2008, 01:00 AM)

LOL!

this sounds like an early-day Slurp trojan for USB devices.

• http://www.everythingusb.com/slurp.html

-lanux128 (September 05, 2008, 01:14 AM)

Except that in this case they're liable to not offer us protection of any kind.

Ehtyar.

945

Living Room / Re: Relax, The Internet Backbone Still Has Room For Your lolcats

« Last post by Ehtyar on September 05, 2008, 06:47 AM »

If bandwidth was scarce ISPs could make more profit. They keep telling the story of the clogged tubes so they can sell the "guranteed bandwidth plans" which of course cost more than the average home use connection.

-housetier (September 05, 2008, 03:57 AM)

Disgusting.

Ehtyar.

946

General Software Discussion / Re: How do you manage your email?

« Last post by Ehtyar on September 04, 2008, 08:03 PM »

I prefer the single inbox idea actually. I can't really see the point of multiple inboxes; I can see which account the email went to. Thunderbird will, however, allow you to specify a folder in which to place email from each individual account.
I wouldn't use The Bat! as it's closed source, Thunderbird is open source, and provides excellent extensions, including GPG/PGP support.
[shameless plug]Thunderbird 3b1 out soon[/url][/shameless plug]

Ehtyar.

947

Living Room / Re: Mythbusters Silenced by Credit Card Companies

« Last post by Ehtyar on September 04, 2008, 07:54 PM »

The credit card companies are seriously incompetent. They really piss me off too, because as a merchant, I end up paying for their mistakes! 

RFID is just another way for them to be idiots and screw their customers without taking responsibility.

-Renegade (September 04, 2008, 07:37 PM)

Very very true, I've seen it also.

Ehtyar.

948

Living Room / Relax, The Internet Backbone Still Has Room For Your lolcats

« Last post by Ehtyar on September 04, 2008, 07:47 PM »

This one is mostly for us lolcat lovers, but there is a serious article behind it.

Many people have feared that lolcats and other traffic are going to block the ‘tubes, but Ars says today that the net backbone bandwidth is in fact growing and plenty prepared to swallow those cats.  Actually they use a prettier analogy–

Given recent media coverage, it’s easy to believe that P2P and streaming video traffic is a rising hurricane battering upon ISP levees, that ISPs are frantically sandbagging their systems against disaster, that throttling, bandwidth caps, and traffic management are urgent and absolute necessities to keep the storm surge at bay. But new research from Telegeography only confirms what we’ve been saying for some time: the Internet backbone isn’t drowning beneath any kind of exaflood. In fact, backbone capacity has grown faster than Internet traffic in the last year—for the second year in a row.

Blog Post
Full Story

Ehtyar.

949

Living Room / Phone Phishers Deliver Legal Threats to Innocent

« Last post by Ehtyar on September 04, 2008, 07:42 PM »

A UK ISP tells of phishers who are cold-calling people, accusing them of piracy and insisting they pay up.

Fraudsters have begun cold-calling householders to accuse them of copyright infringement online and threaten them with court action, an ISP has reported.

The development comes soon after the law firm Davenport Lyons won a widely-reported £16,000 default court award for a videogames firm from an alleged filesharer. Davenport Lyons followed up the default judgement by telling newspapers that it had identified 25,000 more targets that it would take to court if they did not pay a £300 settlement.

Full Story

Ehtyar.

950

Living Room / Skype Ignores e-Bay Vulnerability In Client Software

« Last post by Ehtyar on September 04, 2008, 07:37 PM »

Skype refuses to acknowledge a vulnerability in their client software that can allow an attack to hijack the victims e-Bay account.

One day last month, when Klaus Zimmerman tried to log into his Skype account, he got an error message indicating his username and password didn't match. Concerned something was awry, Zimmerman, a computer repairman living in Wexford County, Ireland, phoned his brother and asked him to check his online status.

"I saw you on earlier, but your picture was gone," the brother reported. "You're now listed as living in Germany." On top of that, the person logged in was no longer answering the brother's queries.

Full Story

Ehtyar.