Category: Web Services

Strange Attractors and TCP/IP Sequence Number Analysis – One Year Later:

The goal of this follow-up is to evaluate any subsequent security measures implemented by the vendors in this field since the release of the original publication, and to evalute several systems that were not covered earlier. For the purpose of this document, we assume that the reader has read the original publication, and has an understanding of the methodology and terminology used.

This article is only for the hardcore network geek, but the illustrations show rather blatantly which OSen have hardened TCP/IP stacks and which don’t. [via Slashdot]

Phillip Pearson continues development of SharpBlog.  Now with extra WYSIWYG.

OSNews: Version 1.4-RC1 of Gentoo Linux is out.  It’s got GCC 3.2 under the hood plus a bunch of other neat stuff.  News hasn’t hit the front page of the website yet.

The Road to RSS 3.0: Aaron Swartz sports his sense of humor.  Here’s a snippet of his RSS 3.0 feed to get you aquainted:

[text example snipped]

Yep, it’s that day.  One year after the Pearl Harbor for my generation.  I’m going to do my best to live the day pretty much like any other.  I’m going to school in the morning, and working in the evening.  Now it’s time to wrap things up and go to bed.

Rael Dornfest: A new version of Blosxom:

About bloody time, I know 😉 The latest incarnation of Blosxom, a lightweight yet feature-packed weblog application, is now available.

There’s oodles of new functionality in this release, including: categories, shared weblog spaces, flavours (read: templates or views), and more.

There’s also a brand spankin’ new Blosxom site, brimming with details, documentation, news, ideas, and contributed applications and integrations.

Share and enjoy.

Anti-Aircraft:

The heightened alert, approved today by President Bush, came as the Pentagon loaded live anti-aircraft missiles into launchers around Washington for the first time in 40 years, and prompted the State Department to shutter more than a dozen embassies and consulates in Asia and elsewhere.

That’s kinda scary.  I live just a few miles north of the beltway.  The problem is that the next wave of terrorist attacks, whenever they happen, will have to make the plane hijackings look like childs play, just like the attacks last year made every previous terrorist attack look like a game.  I’ve got a hint for ya: it’s not going to involve airplanes.  It’s going to be so random that we wouldn’t fathom it, even in our current paranoid state.

It might happen tomorrow, it might happen years from now.  Who knows?  But it’ll be big.  Nuclear?  Chemical?  Biological?  Who knows.  Catastrophic, yes.  Other than that, we don’t know.

I’m sorry to go off on this tangent in such an obvious techblog, but I had to get it out.  I will note that last year, The Washington Post and The BBC were the only two major news outlets that I could reliably access.  I watched some of the world trade center stuff unfold on BBC tv over broadband at the school library.  I was kicked out of the library before details emerged about what the heck was going on downtown surfaced, but many nontraditional places like slashdot, Scripting News and others.

Deadly Bloody Serious:

With regard to my last post about making backlinking easier, I’ve modified UserLand’s code to make it easy to see a particular post’s categories and get at the matching permalink.

Details are in the article. [via McGee’s Musings]

Brent Simmons:

I re-designed ranchero.com—but, the funny thing is, you might never notice. If you look at the user agents page you’ll note that most of the hits come from RSS news readers, from Radio UserLand and AmphetaDesk and NetNewsWire Lite.

Yep.  My RSS file gets more hits than my homepage, and the other stats seem to agree that my RSS feed is read more than anything else.

And that’s okay.

Salon:

Detectives are investigating a complaint that retired astronaut Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin punched a man in the face after being asked to swear on a Bible that he’d been to the moon.

Go Buzz! [via Dane Carlson and She’s Actual Size, Nationwide, Believe]

RandomMaccess: “Even free, iCal isn’t worth the price.” Ouch.

CNet: Coverage of Apple’s new iCal program.

Code Orange, GO! A Washington Post article via Dane Carlson.

STunnel 4.00: An article/tutorial on Hacking Linux Exposed. [via Linux Security]

Kryzysztof Kowalczyk on buffered blogging:

The hard part about blogging is keeping the pace. Blogging is a marathon, not a sprint. That number on a calendar without corresponding link is the worst thing that can happen to a blog. So here it comes: Buffered Blogging TM (patent pending, of course). The idea is simple: have a few pre-written entries and have an automated system to post them if there are no post on a given day. Preparing a few posts in advance is easy. Automated posting shouldn’t be that hard to do either in some systems (e.g. Movable Type). Probably just a bit of hacking. Or someone could provide a web service that would allow people to create a bunch of blog entries and would post them automatically using Blogger API if it would detect that there were no post that day on a given blog.

While this may appear to be cheating, it makes a lot of sense. If you have a really busy day and can’t sit down in front of the computer, you can pull out that mini article or observation that you’ve been meaning to talk about and autopost it. I don’t know if buffering your blog like this is exactly legal in the blogosphere, but then again, only if you get caught… Perhaps it would be something like Userland’s Mail to the Future service. An interesting thought at the very least.

Bluefish: Newsforge points to this open source html/php/css editor for Linux.  The screenshots look good.  I’ve been editing most of my html in the browser lately, though.

Russell Beattie‘s coworkers dig eclipse.

LaNewsFactory: A phjp-based news system and forum system that does not rely on MySQL.  This is good stuff for people using bargain basement web hosting that does not give them access to MySQL.

Emergic points to an InfoWorld article about SAP’s new mySAP CRM.  This is cool, but as I’m reading the article, I roll over the many links in the article.  They all link to stories or metastories at InfoWorld.  I know that they need to do that to make money, keep the user trapped, get more ad impressions, but it stinks at the same time.  I guess it is in contrast with weblog entries that I read more of that tend to hand out external links with pleasure.

I’m just an external link snob then.

Slashdot: Linux may be outpacing Mac on the desktop.  I don’t know if the article referenced is authoritative or not.  The author, Nick Selby seems to be a travel writer, aviation writer, and tech writer on loan to the International Herald Tribune.  From the article:

Dan Kusnetzky, an analyst for International Data Corp., said Linux had a 3.9 percent share of desktops worldwide, outpacing Macintosh’s 3.1 percent.

The article doesn’t quote whose bum these figures were pulled from.  A Macworld article from July of this year pegs Apple’s market share at 3.48 percent.  A recent BBC article pegs it at 5%.  I’m not saying that this author is wrong, I’d like to see the market share of both Mac and Linux higher than the figures quoted.  I think it will be hard to find hard numbers out there that aren’t skewed by the mac vs. pc mentality.

As a sidenote, the International Herald Tribune article left me looking for the scrollbar, but instead I had to find the ‘next page’ button on the bottom right.  I don’t feel too good about this interface, it didn’t feel right.  After playing a bit, the interface on the bottom right is kinda slick.  It allows you to resize text on the fly and change between a single column and multiple column format on the fly also.  I definately like that part of it, but I think that this type of interface still needs a little work.