sky, Author at Sky's Blog

Adobe Reader under attack again

17 December, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

reader_icon_special Adobe Reader is one of the most oft-used programs in the world. (Probably next to MS Word and other word processors.) And we all think it’s safe because it just reads a document format and displays it.

To our surprise, we learned earlier this year that the Adobe Reader processes JavaScript that can be embedded in its PDF documents. Once again, here in December 2009, another vulnerability allows JavaScript can be exploited to turn a PDF into a malicious piece o’ stuff.

The fault won’t be fixed until mid-January 2010. Big companies have long turnaround on fixing software. Yes, they have to test to be sure everything still works after they make a fix – but meanwhile we can’t safely open PDF documents unless we have JavaScript turned off.

The attack vector is to send a poisoned PDF file to intended target individuals, purporting to be “From: a friend” and hoping that they’ll open the attached PDF thinking that it’s safe. Wrong again. You won’t be caught by this, will you?

More on this attack on DarkReading.com.

The Real-Time Web – Indeed!

7 December, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

Unbelievable how much time it takes to keep a “live” blog functioning properly when you’re working with new software.

It’s after 1:00am and I’ve just finished wrestling with the day’s blog entries. Reformatting them to make them look better, and making sure that the feeds of more than a dozen geeks are coming in and being handled properly. (And here and there a little bit of editorial work.)

I’m afraid this is what is known as the Real-time web. [See LeWeb] [Read more…]

Building out infrastructure for a Traveling Geeks tour

3 December, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

The Traveling Geeks are at it again. This time the destination is Paris for LeWeb and some other tech meetings.

Organizing a tour for 15 geeks was a nightmarish task for TG Co-Founder Renee Blodgett, who worked for weeks to put this one together – much shorter lead time than for previous tours. And her co-organizers Eliane Fiolet and Phil Jeudy, plus two web developers, did a heroic job.

The online developers were tasked with creating the new web site, but I came in for the last few weeks to preside over one of my (current) specialties – ensuring that we can mash information together in real time. Here’s what it required and what I learned: [Read more…]

Visualizing data helps us find opportunities

19 November, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

I had run into GapMinder some time ago, but was reminded of it when I encountered this talk that Ola Rosling^[1] gave at Gov 2.0 Summit^[2] that really makes it clear how the visualization of data — especially visualizing data over time — can give us valuable insights into trends in the physical and social world(s). Their Trendalyzer software is used by Google…as you’ll see in this presentation. [Read more…]

The Buddha gets ready for ski season

18 October, 2009 by sky 4 Comments

Wow — I was flying down some intermediate (meaning “easy”) alpine ski run at Squaw Valley early this year when I noticed a pair of colorful skis flashing in front of me. At the top of the lift I stopped the guy who was wearing them and inquired because I noticed they were branded Lhasa skis and had a drawing of the Potola Palace on their tail.

Hmm… Tibet, mountains, snow… very cool, and this looked like fun. These are fat (also phat^[1]) skis in two senses — first, they are wide and work well in deep snow and conditions where there’s piles of snow all over the runs — and second, phat in the sense that they’d let you ski with great exhiliration and joy all over the slopes in varying conditions. [Read more…]