Sky’s Blog

Is security dead on the Internet? Yeah, it probably is—as long as we rely on software other people have written^[1]. Unless you’re capable of writing all of your own software, without any errors, and keeping it isolated from software written by anyone else, you’re never going to have a secure digital life^[2].

But there are things you can do to protect yourself. NGO-in-a-box has developed Security-in-a-box, a set of tools and tactics for your digital security. Worth taking a look!

It’s often said that “if we can envision it, we can create it,” but in the world of computer (and network) software this is only partially true. We can attempt to create it, but it will always have bugs in it. And those bugs are the chinks in the armor that allow malware to work and cyberwarfare to succeed.

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[1] That’s because I can write a perfect program with no bugs, but nobody else can.

[2] See also The Social Graph of Malware, my site where I explore ways in which social engineering is used by the bad guys to get malware onto your computer.

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In searching for a solution to embed a particular font in one of my games^[1] at YBCA, I spent dozens of hours experimenting with the @font-face cross-browser^[2] CSS technology. It’s a technique that allows your browser (like MSIE or Firefox, right?) to read a TrueType (.TTF) or OpenType (.OTF) font file from a server and then use it to render type on a web page. The headlines on my blog are rendered using this technology^[3]. I’m really happy with the results.

The idea is to give the designer of the web page the ability to select exactly the font he or she wants to see on the finished page!

But, even with this great tech in place, Microsoft is playing its game of insisting on its own solution—they propose it as a “web standard” but in real life it’s implemented by nobody except Microsoft (using their .EOT file format). So there are two competing and incompatible ways of adding fonts to a web page—the open-source method, and the Microsoft method.

Initially I was able to devise a solution that works except for FireFox (it failed both on Mac OSX and on Windows and Firefox represents about 40% of my users so I really need it to work)… and then, by accident… (continue reading…)

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About the WPtouch Mobile Plugin— I ran across this in the news sidebar on a blog I was editing this morning. It’s a WordPress plug-in (yes, it’s not actually a theme even though they refer to it that way sometimes) that converts a regular WP blog so that it reads nicely on a small/narrow screen (like that of an iPhone or iPodTouch). Using javascript (which does work on iPhones, unlike Flash) it lets you see first the titles of articles^[1], then you can click a triangle to expand and see the short description, and click a triangle again to read the entire article. I had one problem^[2] (so far) but I love what it does.

[If you’re reading this on an iPhone you’re already seeing how it works, if not you should feel free to pull out whatever your smartphone is and go to my blog home page to see how it works.]

When you visit a blog that has this plug-in enabled, if you’re on an iPhone (or some other smartphones) you’ll see a concise display of the most recent entries in the blog. It includes titles, dates, and categories only. [Illustration left.] My blog theme is white type against a black background, but the plug-in takes just the pertinent information and displays that using a substitute theme that looks fine on the iPhone screen.

Then… (continue reading…)

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I had a meeting with Alex Polvi (a founder) and Bob Hrdinsky of Cloudkick today. Over a Thai lunch. And then we followed up with a short discussion-demo at their office at the foot of Potrero Hill where I met most/all of their US tech experts.

Cloudkick runs a slick service that lets you manage your Slicehost and Rackspace/Mosso cloud servers (both brands are owned by and housed in Rackspace facilities), providing some data visualization in addition. Of course you could manage your servers using the control panels provided by Slicehost and Rackspace, but Cloudkick’s one-layer-removed management adds some unique extras. And they can “automatically” migrate your Amazon EC2 servers over to Rackspace if you’re interested in that. I have nine virtual servers on S&R (as I’ll call the two services) and signed up for the free Cloudkick services almost three months ago. They were voted Best in Show at Under the Radar (see Cloudkick writeup and video). The company is a little under a year old. It was kick-started by a seed investment by Y-Combinator, and recently obtained an angel round of investment. (continue reading…)

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