February 2004
Feb. 24, 2004
The Black and White about Grey Tuesday (via) Lessig on Illegal Art.
Goliath. WebDAV client for OS X with SSL support.
Feb. 25, 2004
Trepanation. Drilling a hole in your head. Not for the squeamish.
Tear Your iPod mini Open To Get The 4GB Hard Drive? 4GB of Digital Camera storage for less than half the normal price.
Google Search: spong monkeys. I’m second. Rock!
Migrating from PHP 4 to PHP 5 (via) It’s getting closer...
Yahoo! vs. Google. Visually compare the top 100 results for a specific term.
Freedom to Tinker: Great Books. Which five science and technology books should every student read?
Side-stepping IE. A round-up of techniques for dealing with IE’s poor CSS support.
Novel security measures
An article on SecurityFocus led me to this site about Port Knocking. Port Knocking is an interesting security technique in which a box sits online with no ports open to connections and awaits a specific sequence of connection attempts. A user wishing to connect to the box must first attempt to initiate connections to ports in a specific, secret order. Once they do, the box starts up the required service (such as an SSH daemon) on a designated port and allows the user to connect properly.
[... 145 words]Gothamist Interviews: Paul Ford. “the only way to ignore advertising is to die”
Feb. 26, 2004
Classic computer science texts (via) A collection of historic computer science papers.
Software that we really need. b3ta Photoshop challenge. Some of these are priceless.
Finding open locks on Postgresql. May come in useful in the future.
Textpattern: Download. Texpattern 1.12 gamma is go.
Feb. 27, 2004
Crap marketing sites
i-am-asian.com is McDonald’s excruciating “I’m lovin’ it” site targeted at Asian Pacific Islander Americans. With gems like whether we’re sipping green tea or enjoying a Big Mac sandwich, we’re helping make the magic mix called America become even richer
you can’t go wrong. Meanwhile, the infamous beef industry sponsored cool-2b-real has rebranded itself as “zip 4 tweens”—for “tween” kids—not quite teens but definitely not children!
Where’s the raging platypus when you need him?
Mod_python’s PSP: Python Server Pages. Grisha spills the beans for ONLamp.
Bizex
I’m going to try not to turn this in to a blog about Windows security exploits but this one is genuinely interesting in that it actively tries to steal financial information and important passwords. Bizex spreads itself by spamming messages over ICQ advising the recipient to visit a specific URL. When they visit it, Internet Explorer exploits are used to download and execute the main payload which then infects their ICQ program and uses it to message their contacts. The worm also scans their hard drive for information relating to a number of well known financial services which it then uploads to a server via FTP, and it apparently snoops on their browser for any passwords travelling over HTTPS connections as well.
[... 216 words]Feb. 28, 2004
Goodle Good News (via) From everyone’s favourite search engine (maybe).