I realized that the new notes feature on Facebook pulling in an RSS feed references images at the original URL. For the non-techies, that means if you have an image in a post (say 1x1 "web bug" style) and someone looks at the note on Facebook, you see the request in your web logs. It just provides tracking, so not XSS like the other stuff that allowed changing profile data (which they fixed pretty quickly). I'm curious if they'll try to fix this one.
Most people have probably heard about the new stuff that Facebook implemented today, primarily since it seems everyone is talking out about it. I think it's rather funny how much it's freaked out people. Like they said in their blog entry about it, the information was already available. Yea, they made it so you don't have to go into as many places to find it, but they've had the API where anyone could compile the data already, and there you don't even get to remove your entries. Yea they could use a few more preferences to change display options (hide stuff from the feed you don't care about), but I think the changes are useful since you don't have to waste as much time on the site to see if anyone posted anything interesting - just spend 15 seconds looking at the feed.
I'm starting to think this is good if people get freaked out about this. Before I always figured they just didn't care about giving the information to everyone. It seems that people just really pay that little attention to the world around them and don't realize people could already track it all?
So I decided to glance across the spam quarantine boxes today, and saw some rather shocking statistics. Note this isn't anywhere close to the average (most people have under 100 over the same 3 weeks), and yes, these are for individual addresses. Even public contact ones we publish on major web pages don't get this much junk. Which makes me really wonder what these people are doing with their addresses. 8485 in 20 days is 424 per day.
this is a funny (and ridiculous) story. He told them what it was, they still overreacted. The Canadian customs guy sounds like a jerk too.
And you always thought those Windows screenshots of that were a joke...
This article is an interesting take on implausibility of the chemistry involved. Although it makes the assumption of organic peroxides, which may or may not be correct. And the fact of one key point about how violent the reactions are and it'd be hard to contain them to create explosives. Unless of course the whole point is to spray a piranha solution around the inside of the plane, which may serve their purposes better than killing everyone anyways. Filling the plane with hydrogen cyanide is also mentioned - with the right gear to protect oneself, an individual could possibly incapacitate everyone else and take over the plane. It's all a matter of how far people are willing to go.
Bruce Schneier writes an good review (which also appeared in the paper), about how while these measures may make sense as a means to foil this specific plan in the short term, long term they're worthless other than to inconvenience people. His last paragraph is a great summary of the whole situation (and why I mentioned above that even attempting or threatening to kill everyone may not even be necessary for the terrorist goals). I think to be able to solve the problem we'll need to start making these standard medication though.
I just saw this letter that Senator Harry Reid sent to the President yesterday regarding the lack of computer security in the US government. I agree with PGN that hopefully both sides will bring it up and it won't be ignored as coming from "the other side", but given the trend in that area it's probably not likely.
The last couple weeks have been interesting. LDAP changes/upgrades. Writing sync scripts, and debugging/analyzing old ones. Figuring out OpenSSL configs. Implementing new spam filtering system, and attempting to tweak said system to have similar effectiveness to greylisting. Implementing new clustered Exchange system. Debugging problems replicating public folders between Exchange 2000 and 2003. Dealing with all the normal day-to-day requests, and putting off half the requests and projects until "later". Then there's the fun added stuff like a failed fiber channel switch, another failed drive in a server, and having to shut down a server room to move a UPS and its battery racks.
So thus the subject - that's pretty much how my brain feels right now. Too many things to do, too many things to remember to do later, and too little time to do it. Tonight is the big UPS move, which involves lots of shutting down servers and making them come up, as well as manual labor moving a couple thousand pounds of UPS equipment. At least I get to shift my hours a bit, so I've spent the day sleeping in and then watching House. Now time to get ready for work...
I received this Out of Office AutoReply this morning:
I am working out of the office <date>, and <work activity on two other dates>. I'll be checking email regularly during this time.
It makes me wonder what the intention is of setting an autoreply when one will be checking mail regularly.
Copyright ©2000-2008 Jeremy Mooney (jeremy-at-qux-dot-net)
