FireFox 3

Yes the day has come, download Firefox 3 now today and lets break a record.

in mean time watch Mozilla Air Live

Longest Day...

Wow. Today is still not over! It is going by so so slow and i been non stop since 6:30 this morning, and still have morning to do. I finally had time to get something to eat. 2 papers down one more left. Just felt like i will let it out.

BTW i have a pounding head-ach

iPhone and Google Trends

Google trend just got an update today. For those who don't know what Google trends is, it a another service by Google still in the lab, aka beta. It allows users to track the popularity of search term, over time. You can read more about it, here http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/new-flavor-of-google-trends.html Know what are some hip, search terms going on in the web-spears. iPhone any one? A little 3G, maybe. Lets check it out: Notice the two main peaks, A and B. "A" falls on the date the iPhone was announced on January 9. "B" was the release date June 29.

Now lets add a little 3G and compared. Look at how it shoot up.

New iPhone 3G :: Twice as fast Half the price

SAN FRANCISCO—June 9, 2008—Apple® today introduced the new iPhone™ 3G, combining all the revolutionary features of iPhone with 3G networking that is twice as fast* as the first generation iPhone, built-in GPS for expanded location based mobile services, and iPhone 2.0 software which includes support for Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync and more.

read more | digg story

MPAA Wants to Stop DVRs From Recording Some Movies

Another article from digg, but this is a good one. From my understanding the MPAA wantes to embed some meta code to prevent DVR fro recording it. The reason being, the movie industry was to change its realses dates, to allow comsumers to get movies earlyer. there thinking if we deliver movies early we need to prevent it from piretes degrading the rest of the businnes modle.

At first it sounds understandable. But more i think about, Why do they want to release movies earlyer? Also if this does pass, how can we prevent abuse of this power? Abuse as embeding more code to prevent or allow certin featurs.

another problem with the model it still not preventing pirets. Remeber the piret community huge copared to MPAA, and can find soultiions, fixes hacks or workarounds to allow themk ditrubit the illegal contant. Annolog any one?

just my two cents





The MPAA wants the FCC’s permission to prevent viewers from recording some movies. The end result would be DVRs that are unable to record some broadcasts.

read more | digg story

U.S. Payrolls Fall, Unemployment Rate Climbs to 5.5%

The U.S. lost jobs in May for a fifth month and the unemployment rate rose by the most in more than two decades, signaling that the world's largest economy is stalling.

read more | digg story

Video shows man hit by car, no one helping

A 78-year-old man is tossed like a rag doll by a hit-and-run driver and lies motionless on a busy city street as car after car goes by. Pedestrians gawk but do nothing.

read more | digg story

Robot Learning through Embodied Gaming

We have developed a client/server robot gaming system consisting of: 1) Java-based teleoperation clients that use augmented reality overlays to drive 2) low-cost commercial robot platforms (i.e., iRobot Create) at selected game severs, moderated by automated referee observers.

read more | digg story

not treated equally

I'm not talking about people, but web browsers. I was on computer watching a tv show online, using IE7. The next day i was re watching the same clip but on my main computer using FireFox. Whats the big deal, IE& showed no ads in the movie while Firefox had few. Keep in mine i had no add on or plugins in IE7 to block ads. These ads were interlaced into the flash video and flash player, which a very hard to block in there own nature. So whats up with this?

I have been running into more and more issues since i been an Opera user. I been a pritty die-hart Firefox user since beta 1.5, but have been using firefox since the first version. Firefox at the time was so attractive, a secure platform, that far superior the Microsft Internet Explorer, that allowed any one to customize it to there needs. Now Firefox is on its second beta released of Firefox 3 (code name minefild) and i was gritting tired of its massive memory resources needs. So after installing Windows xp sp3 on the laptop after the hardrive crashed, i jump to Opera 9.5 beta.

Over all Opera has a very clean interface, with built in internet tools like IRC and bittorent. My favorite is the progress bar. The progress bar let me keep track how much data i sent or received and at what speed. Also it shows how many elements are one the page downloaded and left to be downloaded. This comes useful when uploading large files, though a web site interface that does not keep track of its progress. Widgets are cool, but don't confuse them with add-ons, they lack interaction with the browser.

It's not all fun and games in the Opera world. I find my self in the the Network Site Preferences once a day to mask my user agant to indntfi me with a firefox browser. Not just because im a beta tester but because I'm a Opera user, some sites just dont like Opera browser. If any one they should be afraid of Firefox users, since that browser is far more powerful and more likely can find an exploit. Also they would not have to worry about incompatibility with the Opera browser if the site was W3C compliant.

I'm back to Firefox 3.0 Beta, and loving it. The memory issuies seemed to pluged. It is still very memory intesive beacuse it trys to cash other pages that you might visit. When I was testing kubuntu, i intelled firefox three becuse konqueror sucks. I realy got used to some of the neat and power full plugins that are out there. Some addons up me debug and websites to better understand how the request work, while other speed up page loads by blocking unnecary feilds and ads. Foxmarks also works graet syncing and backing up my bookmarks.

What to do when a hole is found?

Just the other day, i need my old high school GPA and class that i have taken. The school had an on-line system so students could check there grades. Thinking that i could still login to get the information, i gave it several trys, to realize that they no longer kept old student data.

What sparked my interest, is that on failure to login i got a 404 (page not found). I took a deeper look into the source code for the web page and found that there was no real secure authentication. The java script made a simple hash of the student ID, Turning a 5 digit integer to hex. It then tacks on the users 3 digit pin/password to the end of the hex string. It turns out this hex-string is the name of the HTML file on the server that has the students grades.

The flaws in the system are obvious. The only thing they did right was to add the directory with the student data to the robots.txt file so Google would not cache the information.

Should i let this go? Should i bring this up to the school? Would they even listen to me? Should i spend the day to write a program to anonymously brute-force every student's ID and pin, as proof how flawed the system is. I know there is no real personal info available, but why did they add the insecure authentication system.

It get worse since hundreds of schools nation wide use this exact same method, because it is part of a licenced package of software that many schools use, to keep track of students grade.

I also suspect that the pins are not random, but may derive from the student Id of students name. Since they were given, and no person has the power to change it. Hans the software that powers the grading system, generated the pin.

Kubuntu with KDE 4

For over a month i was strictly a Linux user, and was loving it. I was beta testing Ubuntu 8.04 hardy haron with the new KDE 4 graphical environment. i chose to use Kubuntu for the fallowing reasons.

1. Ubuntu is great community.
   
2. It is fast
3. easy to use
4. FREE!

I went with the KDE 4, because it was brand new and it look great. I'm also a Slax user and i did like the layout of kde on my laptop. I. t ran great on my laptop, even with compiz running. Surprisings since this is a four year old laptop with a p4 and 512MB of ram. It worked great for the first 3 three weeks, until i screwed up the video card drivers.

Back on the windows platform. I'm missing the geekienes of being a Linux user. So my plan is to back up some data and clear out my old Linux portions for a new install of Ubuntu. I'm going to use GNOME this time, since i like allot of the programs it comes with. Also I feel GNOME will maximize my laptop screen space with two dock bars. The bottom dock bar i plane to covert it and make it look like the Macs's dock bar in OS X.