Technology and geeky stuff Archives - Page 27 of 45

Null pointer at Starbucks

6 April, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

Approaching the cash register at Starbucks I noticed this perhaps puzzling message on the little LCD display. It has nothing to do with the economic meltdown, or the amount of cash in the cash drawer, but instead reflects a programming error!

Generally a register displays a short greeting on its display when it is “off” like Come back soon (or at Squaw Valley Winter’s here). In this case the string of characters that usually contains the greeting was probably missing, and the software, encountering the situation, displays the message “null” meaning null pointer error. Made me laugh out loud, and I’d guess that nobody else who saw the message that day had the slightest idea that this little word represented one of the oldest programming mistakes in the book.

It’s the User, Stupid (It’s the Stupid User?)

29 March, 2009 by sky 2 Comments

In The Curious Case of the Invulnerable Browser, Roger Grimes of Infoworld writes about the recent CanSecWest 2009 PWN2OWN contest where hackers pitted their skills against web browsers to see how quickly they could break into a computer. The prize was the computer itself. Roger says that the state of browser security is actually pretty good, but even if browsers were inpenetrable, the major source of computer breakins is users browsing to a web site that then infects their computer. [Read more…]

Essential Strategies for Eventually Launching a Site

22 February, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

I was reading Dion Hinchcliff’s “50 Essential Strategies for Creating a Successful Web 2.0 Product” (you should go read it when you have more time) and I’ve cherry-picked the points that ring true for me. His points are good and very interesting, but some are real gems of wisdom^[1]. And I’ll add some of my own observations to this article. I’ll limit mine to 10 and if you’re ambitious you can read the 50 in his blog. One of the overarching principles is that, as he says, “The Web Community Gets Smarter Every Time It Builds A Product” – which I will exend to add that we marketers and developers are constantly learning, and the more we involve people early in our development processes, and the more closely we listen to them, the faster and better our development cycles will be.
[Read more…]

How to Embed Flickr Slideshows in WordPress blogs

7 February, 2009 by sky 2 Comments

The old method for embedding a Flickr slideshow in a WordPress blog no longer works after WP 2.1. Flickr creates really nice Flash-driven slideshows and there’s easy HTML code to embed these shows on regular web pages, but the code doesn’t work on WordPress-driven sites because the (tinyMCE) editor software removes the code. Now there’s a solution. [Read more…]

EDoS [Economic Denial of Sustainability] attacks

26 January, 2009 by sky 1 Comment

A Denial of Service (DoS) attack is one in which a server or service is “overwhelmed” by traffic and consequently either disabled or made unavailable to its customers. Typically the effect on the target of a DoS attack is a loss of business, or in the less critical cases, just failure to get his/her message out.

However, cloud computing allows us to scale our servers up and up in order to service greater numbers of requests for service. This opens a new avenue of approach for attackers, which originally was labeled an Economic Denial of Sustainability attack by Christofer Hoff (November 2008), with a follow-up just recently. (I was introduced to the concept by Reuven Cohen’s description published just today.)

In short, if your cloud-based service is designed to scale up automatically (which some like Amazon EC2 are), then an attacker can grief you economically by sending a huge number of (automated) requests that appear on the surface to be legitimate, but are actually fake. Your costs will rise as you scale up, using more and/or larger servers (automatically) to service those fake requests. Ultimately you will reach a point where your costs overtake your ability to pay – a point at which your economic sustainability becomes questionable.

Ouch!

[The EDoS concept applies primarily to cloud-based services and not to people who own their own servers, because if you own your own servers and are the target of a DoS attack, you don’t immediately and automatically scale your operation up to a larger size, so the attack doesn’t immediately cost you money. It’s only when the scaling-up is automated and there’s no ceiling that you run the risk of economic damage.]