taint.org: Justin Mason's Weblog

Links for 2010-02-08

dailylinks — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 23:05:04 +0000

PeteSearch: How to split up the US : wow. fascinating results from social-network cluster analysis of Facebook, splitting up the entire USA into 7 clusters
(tags: clusters facebook data statistics maps culture analytics datamining demographics socialnetworking graph dataviz)

dailylinks — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 23:05:03 +0000

Inside View from Ireland: Analysing Electronic Forensics Evidence : fascinating note from Bernie Goldbach: ‘MORE THAN 20 YEARS ago, I worked with message traffic and the work told me the importance of verifying source material.’
(tags: bernie spam anti-spam authentication spoofing security phishing)

dailylinks — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 23:05:04 +0000

Op-Ed Contributor – Microsoft’s Creative Destruction – NYTimes.com : MS internal politics routinely torpedoed cool new projects. surprise, surprise. ‘Engineers in the Windows group falsely claimed [ClearType] made the display go haywire when certain colors were used. The head of Office products said it was fuzzy and gave him headaches. The VP for pocket devices was blunter: he’d support ClearType and use it, but only if I transferred the program and the programmers to his control.’
(tags: cleartype microsoft software bureaucracy politics culture management corporate nytimes)

dailylinks — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 23:05:04 +0000

dailylinks — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 23:05:03 +0000

Trojan torrent sites – why you should never reuse passwords : ‘for a number of years, a person has been creating torrent sites that require a login and password as well as creating forums set up for torrent site usage and then selling these purportedly well-crafted sites and forums to other people innocently looking to start a download site of their very own. However, these sites came with a little extra — security exploits and backdoors throughout the system. This person then waited for the forums and sites to get popular and then used those exploits to get access to the username, email address, and password of every person who had signed up.’
(tags: passwords security torrents warning twitter accounts)
What Second Life can teach your datacenter about scaling Web apps : good scaling advice from Linden Labs’ Ian Wilkes (who doesn’t seem to have a blog, sadly)
(tags: linden ian-wilkes scaling datacenters scalability deployment ops services)

dailylinks — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 23:05:05 +0000

Lift View First : explaining Lift’s code-free “display only” templating system. I like it. Very similar concept to WebMake’s “scraped templates”: http://webmake.taint.org/doc/scraping.html , nearly 10 years old now!
(tags: java scala lift templates templating scraping)
Daily Links Posts from pinboard.in : hmm. may be one for the TODO list
(tags: pinboard tags blog wordpress rss links)
Ross Anderson and Steven J Murdoch rip into Verified By VISA : ‘this is yet another case where security economics trumps security engineering, but in a predatory way that leaves cardholders less secure.’
(tags: verified-by-visa security phishing web banks banking money authentication finance visa 3dsecure papers)

dailylinks — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 23:05:05 +0000

Spamalyser : a custom pastebin for spam messages. cool
(tags: spamalyser spam anti-spam paste pastebin web)

dailylinks — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 23:05:02 +0000

DNS Pre-fetch Exposure on Thunderbird and Webmail : Ugh, very bad idea indeed. A backchannel for spammers/phishers/attackers from the mail reader is something we definitely do not want to provide. This is why we chose to cut URLs at the registrar boundary for URIBL lookups in SpamAssassin
(tags: privacy email dns mozilla thunderbird prefetching urls abuse security spam)
Pricewatch – The route of the problem : great article about Dublin Bus’ shortcomings, featuring an interview with Antoin! Very interesting to hear about the upcoming GPS-based accurate bus timetabling service to be visible via their website, that’ll be fantastic
(tags: gps busses dublin-bus dublin mass-transit commute travel)

dailylinks — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 23:05:02 +0000

explanation of the PS3 exploit : good walk-through by Nate Lawson
(tags: ps3 root hypervisor exploits mod-chips consoles reversing)
The SAY2K10 bug [LWN.net] : LWN follows up on the FH_DATE_PAST_20XX fiasco. ‘It would appear that what SpamAssassin needs is some dedicated maintenance talent which is not dependent on evening hours put in by developers committed to other projects.’ I wish
(tags: spamassassin say2k10 bugs maintainance lwn commentary)

dailylinks — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 23:05:02 +0000