Attached please find the slides from my presentation on vulnerabilities in home networks. This talk briefly discusses the lack of security enabled by default on home routers as well as the browser exploits which will take advantage of these.

• Slides

As if breaking the state machine for web browsing wasn’t enough, whats at the top of the results? SPONSORED results. I’m sorry but piss off roadrunner. I pay enough for your flaky service to not have to deal with you trying to sell me shit at the drop of a misplaced “m”

UPDATE:
DSL reports noticed this also. Check them out for some additional details.
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/90502

Facebook Beacon is a new effort announced by Facebook to allow users to share their buying preferences. A few lines of javascript allows a website to post to facebook what items you purchased, games you played, movies you saw etc. Hell attach the three lines of code to your toilet so you can alert your emo friends when you drop a deuce.

Seriously, are we that vain of a country that we need to tell everyone in the world we bought a DVD. I don’t care who you are I don’t give a toss if you bought friends volume 1 on DVD on overstock.com. If you think everyone does, you’re an ass.

Oh well I do beg your pardon Steam. How absurd of me to attempt to play a game I purchased. Please accept my apology for bothering you while you were doing other, much more important things. I’ll try back later when its more convenient for you.

T-MOBILE, the T-MOBILE logo, T-ZONES, the T-ZONES design, the HOTSPOT design, T-MOBILE MDA, T-MOBILE SDA, T-MOBILEWEB, the WORLDCLASS logo, the “digits” design, the T-MOBILE acoustic logo, and the color magenta are registered and/or unregistered trademarks of Deutsche Telekom AG in the US and/or other countries.

Amazing. Consider mauve officially mine. I trademark mauve. Its mine. Use it, I’ll fucking sue you then kick you in the shin.

Via: Gizmodo

In terms of animation Applets fall short… way short. Writing a program to animate something is as painful as drawing a picture with LOGO. Applets lack the ability to draw and animate as effectively as alternatives like flash and silverlight. Flash gives the user simple easy ways to import media or draw vector (or raster) images and animate them using keyframes. Need advanced animation or programatic animation? Flash actionscript has you covered. It can animate as well as provide an event driven program.

Java Applets however have none of this. Each frame must be drawn programatically and requires a blanking in between. While this isn’t a huge inconvenience it shows Java applets are not intended to be powerful animation tools.

Additionally Java applets are supposed to provide a robust GUI experience. In actuality Java applets provide for a clunky slow loading experience frequently resulting in a large ominous gray box in the center of a browser.

When Java originated (early 90’s) applets were a very powerful tool allowing for robust GUI development. Java applets were leaps and bounds ahead of any early version HTML controls. This utility however diminished as HTML became less of a presentation markup and more of an interaction markup. My realization that java applets are obsolete was concreted by AJAX, asynchronous Javascript and XML. This technology fixed the primary problem still plaguing HTML: The HTTP protocol.

Historically Web pages have always functioned with a query and a response. forms simply alter parameters in the query. What this caused was any time any server interaction occured, the web page needed a total page reload. This greatly diminishes a HTMLs ability for GUIs as any updates required completely reloading the page. AJAX changed this.

AJAX allows for partial page refreshes. That is a portion of the page can be reloaded through javascript and xml calls resulting in faster more robust GUIs being developed using a STANDARD HTTP connection appropriate for in browser use.

Calling them completely obsolete is unfair though. Java applets do have a purpose, just not in browser. Java applets can be a powerful visualization tool of data as well an excellent GUI for showing off a proof of concept. In fact things like Java Web Start have done an excellent job of rejuvenating applets by breaking them out of the browser and executing them in their own window where they belong.

There’s a few issues. One being that facebook doesn’t actually give emails in text. Facebook converts emails to images for spam prevention purposes. This is a bit of a problem as thats a pretty important thing to tag. Anyways. Check it out if you’re bored.

GreaseMonkey Microformats in Facebook

1. XBOX Live Gamercard – So there it is. Constantly updating with all my details. Note the “pro”. Yes, I am.
2. RSS – RSS is the best way to view sites. RSS files are sent to a reader and you only see UPDATES to the site. This means you don’t have to repeatedly check it for updates. Try google reader or adding the RSS feed to your google start page (click it in firefox to do so)
3. Microformats - Semantic Interoperability at its lowest common denominator. Microformats are an attempt to get you to start using the semantic web with minimal intrusion (technically RSS is too but thats really too much details for now). So basically This page has been metatagged with some sweet code to let microformats readers pull out authors, events, locations, bookmarks, tags and a whole slew of other things. How do you see microformats? Well like i said they just tag the content so you already see them. How do you use them? Use firefox and download Operator to get started. From there you can take any event i publish and add it to your calendar. Try it out here.
4. No-www.org – Basically this is a site dedicated to the extinction of the www prefix in webpages. It’s deprecated and dead. We don’t need it anymore but we can’t stop using it. http describes the protocol we plan on using and thats enough. we don’t need a redundant www tagged in there. i dont send mail to mail.gmail.com why should there be a www.gmail.com
   ]]> http://condescension.net/2007/09/12/everyday-things-change-but-basically-they-stay-the-same/feed/ 0 http://condescension.net/2007/09/12/hakia-alright-im-impressed/ http://condescension.net/2007/09/12/hakia-alright-im-impressed/#comments Wed, 12 Sep 2007 14:28:29 +0000 Mike Corey http://www.condescension.net/?p=35

   So maybe I was wrong. I looked more into hakia today. They actually have a pretty sweet search engine. It seems to utilize wordnet as well as some cool proactive querying. Hakia actually extracts queries from the webpage as its crawled. Thats pretty cool.

   Additionally they use a SemanticRank which is allegedly better than popularity rank. This is actually a very useful concept. It seems to be similar to what Chris Anderson talks about in the long tail. While popularity is important in some cases it is generally geared towards the lowest common denominator. For example Amazon.com has information about a lot of things and is very popular. However its safe to say that if I want information about a new phone, a niche blog post dedicated to the phone will most likely contain more information as it is written by subject matter experts in the field they’re interested in.

   So how well does it all work? I’m not sure yet. I’ve officially switched my quick search bar from google to hakia for a few weeks (or more if it goes well) I’ll let you (my 5 readers and whoever catches this on technorati) know how it goes.

   UPDATE:
   Christian from Hakia was kind enough to correct me. Hakia doesn’t actually use wordnet. Its actually ontological semantics. Pretty cool stuff really check out the link in his comment.

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