The Christmas (Hacking) Story challenge is over and unfortunately I didn’t win :), so I publish my response: What is interesting about the files that Ralphie could see on the lamp server? nc is most probably netcat (http://netcat.sourceforge.net/), the “network swiss army knife” (the fact that it’s executable, as can be seen from the directory…

A short post today, again: Via Ajaxian: Leafletter. A very interesting design concept, but remember that Flash files included in your site can access every portion of it just like third party javascript can! (Also their scroll bar seem very counter intuitive) Two problems with websites: the Authenium blog has comments disabled, so that I…

Since I’m very occupied at the moment, I won’t do a full post here, just some interesting links. I hope to get back to my normal schedule sometimes next week: Rift Widens Over Bug Disclosure – the discussion over bug disclosure continues. Why blurring sensitive information is a bad idea – an added note: if…

The Perl Golf contest has ended and I have to admit I don’t even understand the winning entry so I couldn’t have written it. To my defense: I’ve been only programming in Perl ~6 months, so I can’t expect to be a guru. On the flip side: I can’t even get the winning program to…

The thing on everybody’s mind is the recent GMail hack. You can read a very good writeup about it on Joe Walker’s Blog. You can avoid it (if you are an application developer) by Not using the JSON format Not using cookies to store session ID, but rather including the session ID in the URL.…

Jeff Russell’s Starship Dimensions – a must visit for geeks. I wished it had more ships. Via Lifehacker: DivShare – upload and share your files. No bandwidth limit. I fail to see a revenue model so I predict that they’ll disappear relatively fast but until then it is very nice (no ads, no need to…

A few months, 131 posts and I’m already getting very useful feedback. I would like to dedicate this post to all of my readers. Thank you all. Here are two very useful links which I got from my readers: From Anonymous comes: The Trouble With EM ’n EN (and Other Shady Characters). If you think…

before I get to bed: Burrrn works great if you want to write FLAC files to an audio CD MediaCoder tries to connect to Sourceforge at every startup (presumably to check for updates). However it didn’t ask me once if I wanted to do that :(.

While trying to re-encode some podcasts (to have smaller file size), I learned the following lessons: MediaCoder looked very, very professional and I wanted to try it out for a long time. However, it freaked out over my MP3 file and crashed the included MPlayer. No problem I thought, I downloaded the latest Windows build…

Have you’ve had enough yet? 😀 Recently I found out about Soushin, an free solution which tries to help you secure your PHP installation (similarly to mod_security – meaning that it doesn’t require you to modify the source code of your applications). It seems that a new feature which is currently in beta test is…