I have in my inbox two examples of the most sophisticated phishing scam emails I have ever seen. I only caught them because I always review full SMTP headers in my emails; and the return paths and from addressing did not match – these scam emails claim to be from Amazon Notification, and they have […]
Selenium is a Firefox plug-in that lets you record your web activity and save those actions as a script that you can then play back over and over again measuring and timing the results. It is very useful for testing web sites. Simply install the plugin, start the Selenium IDE (Tools/Selenium), point Firefox at the […]
I am disappointed with the new Virginia State Board of Elections website design. It should be easy for voters to figure out their voting place without putting any more personal information than an address. That this website would even attempt to collect last four of SSN and Voter ID number is insulting and a huge […]
There is a brilliant Oatmeal cartoon about how silly the latest trend at both Facebook and Yahoo of trying to force their users to do something in order to view a completely unrelated thing is: The Oatmeal: State of the Web Scroll down or Jump to a section to the one about Yahoo if it […]
Tagged facebook annoyancesThank you Apple and Steve Jobs for keeping Adobe Flash off my iOS devices and making it easy for me to remove it from my Mac OS X gear. The stability, security, performance, and battery life I am enjoying now were not possible on a Flash-enabled machine.
A few weeks ago I decided to disable Adobe/Macromedia Flash on all my Macintosh computers. I am here to tell you I do NOT regret it at all, and now recommend it highly. Flash was an extremely useful extension for many years; it made it possible to view videos on the web without specialized software […]
Tagged Computer Security, flash, HTML5, Laptop Battery Performance, Web SecurityYears ago, when relatively few people were using Mac OS X, and Apple was struggling to get people to migrate from Mac OS 8 and 9 to OS X; Apple ran a free website that listed OS X software applications by 3rd parties and themselves. It was for several years a fabulous way of finding […]
There is a pretty good write up of the dangers in allowing your browser to accept Cross Site Scripting (XSS) or allowing your web server to carry XSS here: Guardian Article on Javascript based XSS Twitter Hack The article mainly focuses on the recent Twitter exploit, and the dangers of server-side XSS exploits, but we […]
Tagged cross site scripting, flash, javascript, web browser security, XSSTired of those annoying IntelliTXT ads? They can be blocked with this simple extension for Safari, hurrah! http://homepage.mac.com/drewthaler/jsblacklist/ JavaScript Blacklist also blocks those annoying snap.com previews, and the stupid tynt copy & paste blocker (though I have not been running into either of these as much lately). Thank you Drew Thaler! Update: First you will […]
This is probably old news for web propellor heads out there; but if you are diagnosing website problems you should be using Firebug for Firefox and Web Inspector for Safari. They are amazing tools for measuring download times for every object on a page, analyzing the objects on that page, figuring out where the objects […]
Tagged Firebug, Firefox, Safari, web, Web Design