So, there’s this rumour-surrounded gadget that GIYUS wants people to install on their computers as part of the War on Terror. Obviously, I wondered exactly how it worked; did it analyse the Web sites you visit semantically, so as to target its talking points precisely? Did it use some sort of social recommendation mechanism? Also,…
Read More give IT yahoos United States (dollars)So, we looked into the fake phone call to Mr 10%’s office. We even did a little HOWTO. If you recall, we concluded that you needed a bulk SIP carrier sufficiently unscrupulous or clue-light that they didn’t verify the CLI string you passed them, but who hadn’t yet offended at least one major telco in…
Read More your voice across the line gives me a strange sensationIt is come to this. Here is our Secretary of State for Culture: The culture secretary, Andy Burnham, says in an interview today that the government is considering the need for “child safe” websites – registered with cinema-style age warnings – to curb access to offensive or damaging online material. He plans to approach US…
Read More Burn, Hollywood, Burnham!Well, very cool. Yahoo has an API that’s meant to let you do database-like read operations on anything web – you just pass your SELECT… statement and the URL and a few other arguments, and it chucks back a JSON document with your information. I haven’t managed to make it do anything interesting yet, but…
Read More a cloud of reinforced concreteReader Chris “Chris” Williams recently came up with an interesting idea regarding the unnerving incident during the Mumbai terrorist assault when somebody called Mr 10%’s office and, posing as the Indian foreign minister, threatened war. Chris reckons that not only are the two linked, but the phone call was actually the main effort; in fact,…
Read More HOWTO spoof the Pakistani Foreign MinistryVery experienced soldiers don’t like robots. I suppose you could ascribe this to conservatism, but then, the last eight years have been a global crash course in how people who tell you that this war will be different to what the old sergeants think are wrong. Meanwhile, at Canon’s main factory in Japan, the workers…
Read More here, robot!Here’s one political movement struggling with the technological environment, at the Washington Monthly: Frank Luntz, speaking at a panel discussion at the Republican Governors Association yesterday, noted Barack Obama’s enormous email list. “He’s got 10 million names and our candidate doesn’t know how to use this,” Luntz said, holding up a BlackBerry. “There is a…
Read More the third decade, our moveGood post from Jeff Atwood about cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attacks. One thing that comes to mind is that this is an example of the best kind of security exploit – one where the exploit depends on the target system doing the right thing. A Web server is meant to respond to URL requests, and…
Read More CSRF, and a blegMore China convergence blogging. Declan McCullagh reports on efforts by the US and China to sneak something nasty into the ITU standardisation process, through a committee that doesn’t publish its documentation or let anyone else in the room. But the Chinese appear to be the ones leaning forward; The Chinese author of the document, Huirong…
Read More They have wakened the timeless Things; they have killed their father TimeIs anyone else disturbed by the fact Ed Balls appears to have been replaced by Chris Dillow? Ed Balls, the schools secretary and only member of the Co-operative party in the cabinet, will today propose that 100 schools over the next two years become co-operative trust schools owned and controlled by the local community. He…
Read More tomorrow’s public inquiry today