Guild Media

I read just read this article Best Western and the worst kind of security mix-up. Over the past couple of days it has emerged that customer details, including name, address, phone and credit card numbers were stolen when Best Western were hacked by an Indian hacker with ties to the Russian Mafia.

What needs to be further highlighted is that as we commit more information to electronic storage and retrieval, it is more vulnerable. As we have see in the past year of data loses, vast amounts of information can be lost or exposed through very simple human error or negligence.

Tougher encryption and security is also a joke. In the programming world it is well know that if you can code it, you can hack it. Examples of so called unbreakable security are the DVD format and the security researchers cloning the new passport chips.

We are truly heading towards an information age where there are no secrets, regardless of the noise government makes. Big Brother is its own worst enemy. The traditional idea of security has to be radically rethought.

We are seeing this theme being played out currently in the world of software development, especially with web browsers and Operating Systems. We see the realm of Open Source where vulnerabilities are publicly acknowledged and addressed verses proprietary commercial software where the mantra is security through obscurity (Apple) and denial (Macintosh).

Last year on Google Maps you could go and look at satellite images of a top secret US Navy submarine in dry dock. The US military screamed to take down the images. D'uh hello? If a commercial satellite snapped pictures of this submarine with out looking for it, what about all of the spy satellites that are?

It all goes to show that our concept of security is no more than just that, a concept, or at worse a dangerous expensive joke.

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Does anyone know somebody in deep
inside Google that could point me to the right people?
I want to point something out to Google.

Google Preference Screen Shot

Google has not taken into account that in this mobile age, people are
travelling the world with their laptops or other portable devices and
surfing the net. This means that people are often browsing the internet in a country where they are not a speaker of the native language. Then why does Google assume that people will want to view their website in that language?

Google Account Screen Shot

For example, I am frequently in Germany and using Google. I am constantly faced
with this very annoying feature of Google. Google assumes, that because I am in Germany, that I therefore want Google
in German, rather than looking at my browser language preferences,
which gives a list of preferred languages. For a company that prides themselves on delivering what the user wants,
how can they possibly get this so wrong? Even if I manually change the
language setting to what it should be (English), Google still serves up the wrong
language as shown in the accompanying image.

Hey, even I can program a bit of simple code to look a browser language
preferences and choose the right language that user wants. On the following website that I built, galerie10.at, the website detects the visitor's language preference from the browser. It then compares this against a list of languages available on the website. It will cycle through the list of the visitor's preferred languages until it finds a match. If it does not, then presents the visitor with the default.

Maybe Google can do what I did, and use their own search engine and research the following term "detect browser language preference".

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The hype machine has busy again. The new kid on the block of search engines, cuil.com has not delivered what it promised. Granted it is early days for the search engine, the disappointing results it provides from its searches will probably mean that it is quietly forgotten.

The following article goes into more depth on the failings. 

Cuil Search Engine: After Hype Wears Off, Nothing Remains

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Bounce Rate is a term which is often used to measure a website's audience engagement. It is the percentage of initial visitors who leave your site after arriving at the entry page, without viewing other pages on your site. Google Analytics is a tool that can help you determine your bounce rate.

A low bounce rate means that visitors are exploring your website in greater detail. This can be inferred to mean that they are more engaged with your content.

Further detail and supporting links can be found on the DoshDosh.com article:

How to Analyze and Improve the ‘Bounce Rate’ for Your Website

Dosh Dosh is a blog offering internet marketing and blogging tips, alongside social media strategies. Best consumed by bloggers, entrepreneurs, web publishers, marketers, freelancers and small business owners.

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The internet has moved from being a novelty to integral part of our daily lives. Channel 4 interview the inventer of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Bernes-Lee about the role of government and business in the internet. It is his desire to see the internet remain an open platform of communication and not monopolized or restricted.

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eBay has lost its battle against the competition watchdog to institute a controversial payment policy.

eBay had planned to use Australia to trial the ban on all other forms of payment apart from cash on delivery and PayPal, an electronic service it owns.

There were few voices in support of eBay’s commercial freedom to tie use of its own payments mechanism to purchases (with the Wall Street Journal and The Sheet two of the few).

Sellers were furious about the policy because PayPal charges sellers 30¢ for each transaction plus between 1.1% and 2.4% of the payment as commission.

The ACCC received about 700 submissions, including from the Reserve Bank, Australian Bankers' Association and Google, criticising the move. On June 12, the ACCC released a draft notice revoking immunity from sections of the Trade Practices Act that would shield eBay from being sued for engaging in anti-competitive conduct.

One aspect of the company’s plan remains. eBay requires all sellers to offer PayPal as a payment choice on eBay.com.au along with other permitted payment methods of their choosing.

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Believe it or not, the face that is synonymous with the company we all love to hate, Microsoft is giving up his position as head of the company.Yes, Bill Gates will be putting more of his focus into his charity organization. Mind you, he hasn't left the company completely.

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 Life as a modern web developer would not be bearable without a decent debugger tool such as Firebug for Firefox. It allows you to debug your JavaScript, inspect XMLHttpRequests, the DOM, CSS, and edit them.

While I love Firefox and Firebug, there are other browsers out there that I also have to develop for, the dearth of decent debugging tools these has often left me grumbling and lamenting.

But on one of those procrasting whims, I started googling. And much to my suprise I discovered that the latest version of Opera, 9.5, comes with a built in debugger called Dragonfly.

Dragonfly is only in beta, but what it offers so far is very promising indeed. It may not have all of the features that Firebug currently has, but it is certainly a very useful tool as it is. With the addition of this feature to Opera, the browser is now a serious contender as a developer tool. One thing that was a little annoying, was that Opera's Dragonfly web page doesn't clearly state that, you only need to be using the latest browser, and can activate it under the menu option Tools / Advanced / Developer tools.

My curiosity then led me on to look at Safari next. And yes, there appears to be a similar tool also, but after server attempts at following the instructions from multiple websites I can't activate it. The steps one has to go through to enable it are counter intuitive. With both Firefox and Dragonfly, they are easily accessible via a menu of icon. So I've given up on Safari's development tool until they make it easier to access.

Now there is one browser yet to mention, and I hear the collective groan, Internet Explorer. Once the darling, it is now the millstone around the necks of developers across the world. For years they have had a developer tool in beta, that just has never progressed anywhere. It doesn't even offer an integrated JavaScript debugger.

The future of browsers is becoming very competitive again, with those clearly moving in the right direction, the others that need to pick up their game or be left out of it.

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Last year a story emerged that security researchers managed to skim information at a distance from an Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) card and clone it. This has ramifications for many things as the technology is used for, entry to secure buildings, passports and transport cards.

It is with transport cards, namely London's Oyster card that the issue has arisen again with another security hole found by Dutch researchers. They managed to clone an oyster card to a standard building security entry card which uses the same technology. They then travelled to London to test their clone, travelling for a full day on the London Tube with no problems.

Apparently the hardware required to skim the information is relatively cheap and can easily be used with a standard laptop, making RFID cards and passports vulnerable to anyone with know-how and inclination.

More detail about this story can be found in the following article: "Group Demonstrates Security Hole in Oyster Card".

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Opera has released the next major update of their browser- 9.5.

While I don't use opera as my primary browser, I have kept a copy for web development purposes. What has always pleased me about this browser is that it is proof a commercial company can abide by the W3C standards, unlike Microsoft and their Internet Explorer.

If there was no Firefox I would be using Opera as my browser of preferred choice.

It is claimed by the company that its new browser is more than twice as fast as version 9.2 when rendering
JavaScript and HTML.

Although it accounts for a miniscule share of the desktop browser
market, Opera is the leading browser on mobile phones, including
handsets such as HTC's Touch Diamond and most of Nokia's lin