Archive for the 'Security' Category

4Chan Strikes Again, Hiding Porn in Kids Clips on YouTube

Please note: that this sort of post is what the losers at 4Chan get a kick out of and look forward to seeing, it’s clear that they get a perverse sort of pleasure out of hearing these complaints, but isn’t possible for anyone with a shred of dignity to let events like this go without [...]

Verified Accounts: Twitter’s Next Attempt at Making Money?

How much would you pay for people to know you’re really you? That the updates coming in every 2 minutes on that twitter page come from yours truly and not someone else… someone else pretending to be you?
If you’re like most people, the answer is not much. But there are people out there that really [...]

Google Abandons Standards, Forks OpenID

A couple of hours ago, the Google Security Team posted an article claiming that Google’s made the switch to OpenID, joining Yahoo! and Microsoft in the ranks OpenID providers.
But it looks like someone may have been a bit to hasty to pull that switch (perhaps itching to get some of the limelight Microsoft has been [...]

Disturbing Stats About Facebook Users & Security

There’s a screenshot that’s been sitting on my desktop for a rather long time now, and it’s as scary as it is interesting.
Facebook recently conducted a poll which showed up on the homepage newsfeed, and asked Facebook members just how exactly did they think Facebook’s “friend finder” worked when it prompted them for their email [...]

Possible Severe Gmail Security Vulnerability (Updated)

Gmail may have a serious security vulnerability that can result in the leaking of sensitive private information randomly to people you don’t know, haven’t contacted, and have nothing to do with.
It would seem that between the way Gmail saves and retrieves sessions, existing sessions are authenticated, and views are cached there are one or more [...]

Firefox 3 is Still a Memory Hog

One of the biggest “improvements” that Mozilla claims has made its way into Firefox 3 is improved memory usage, in particular, the vanquishing of memory leaks:
Memory usage: Several new technologies work together to reduce the amount of memory used by Firefox 3 over a web browsing session. Memory cycles are broken and collected by an [...]

Mapping Computer Techniques to the Real World

As a recent Times article describes, shopping plazas are now using cell-phone tracking technology to map shoppers’ activities and movement patterns. The "Path Intelligence" hardware used to track the movements works like this:

A cell-phone-wielding shopper enters the shopping plaza.
Path Intelligence monitors mounted throughout the plaza detect that a new mobile phone is in the vicinity [...]

Want UAC-Free iReboot? You got it: iReboot 1.1 released!

Back in August of 2007, NeoSmart Technologies released iReboot 1.0 – a tiny application that sits quietly and unobtrusively in the taskbar and is used to select which OS you’d like to reboot into.
iReboot isn’t by any means a major application, but it’s gathered a pretty strong following over the months, mostly by people [...]

Preying on the Handicapped and Giving Geeks a Bad Name

When you’ve practically lived online day-in, day-out for the past decade or so you tend to develop a thick skin to the malevolent things that tend to happen every once in a while. But there are some things that you’d never expect, not once in a million years; they strike a nerve and they really [...]

Proper Shell Scripting on Windows Servers with Perl

Fact: Shell scripting is a must for any serious IT admin managing a server. From automating backups to checking logs and keeping server performance and load in check, scripting is a must.
Fact: Shell scripting on Windows sucks. ((Hopefully Monad (Microsoft Power Shell) will provide a solution, but so far the results are mixed; and [...]