Quotulatiousness

August 11, 2009

Deleting your cookies doesn’t protect your privacy

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:44

According to a report in Wired, there are lots of sites out there (including whitehouse.gov) who are actively circumventing the common practice and zombifying the cookies you thought you’d deleted:

More than half of the internet’s top websites use a little known capability of Adobe’s Flash plugin to track users and store information about them, but only four of them mention the so-called Flash Cookies in their privacy policies, UC Berkeley researchers reported Monday.

Unlike traditional browser cookies, Flash cookies are relatively unknown to web users, and they are not controlled through the cookie privacy controls in a browser. That means even if a user thinks they have cleared their computer of tracking objects, they most likely have not.

What’s even sneakier?

Several services even use the surreptitious data storage to reinstate traditional cookies that a user deleted, which is called ‘re-spawning’ in homage to video games where zombies come back to life even after being “killed,” the report found. So even if a user gets rid of a website’s tracking cookie, that cookie’s unique ID will be assigned back to a new cookie again using the Flash data as the “backup.”

This would be a good opportunity for Adobe (who control the Flash cookie capability) and the browser developers to get together and provide end users with enhanced capability to turn off these zombies. Probably a tiny percentage of current users ever bother to delete cookies, so it’s not like this would seriously undermine legitimate uses of cookies, but it would put a bit more control of how personal information is used back in the hands of the individual.

Of course, back here in the real world, I don’t honestly expect any such thing, but regulation is almost always the wrong answer to a given problem on the internet. But that’s what we’re likely to get . . .

August 10, 2009

Yesterday’s menu: random thunderstorms

Filed under: Administrivia, Football — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:18

I did mean to update the blog yesterday, but the pattern of thunderstorms coming through the area intersected perfectly with other activities, so that I didn’t get the chance.

Right after dinner, I sat down to watch the first NFL preseason game between the Buffalo Bills and the Tennessee Titans. Just after the introduction of the Hall of Fame inductees for this year, the power went out. It came back on again a few minutes later, so I got to see the most amusing fake-punt by the Titans, and a couple of first-down passes to T.O., and the power went out again.

This time, the power was out for about three hours. Much donder und blitzen, with lots of horizontal strikes of lightning, which was visually quite stunning.

August 7, 2009

DDoS attacks target one pro-Georgian user

Filed under: Russia, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:35

I find this hard to credit, but CBS says that yesterday’s distributed denial-of-service attacks on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Blogger, and LiveJournal were all aimed at one particular user:

The blogger, who uses the account name “Cyxymu,” (the name of a town in the Republic of Georgia) had accounts on all of the different sites that were attacked at the same time, Max Kelly, chief security officer at Facebook, told CNET News.

“It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard,” Kelly said. “We’re actively investigating the source of the attacks and we hope to be able to find out the individuals involved in the back end and to take action against them if we can.”

Kelly declined to speculate on whether Russian nationalists were behind the attack, but said: “You have to ask who would benefit the most from doing this and think about what those people are doing and the disregard for the rest of the users and the Internet.”

Twitter was down for several hours beginning early Thursday morning, and suffered periodic slowness and time-outs throughout the day.

If it turns out that this is true, I guess it’ll be easier to start looking for the controller of the massive botnet that conducted the attacks . . . and probably has a physical presence near the Kremlin.

Update: The Guardian has more on the story.

August 6, 2009

Twitter under DOS attack

Filed under: Americas, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:58

Twitter users have been unable to access the site for most of Thursday morning, due to a Denial-of-Service (DOS) attack:

The extended silence in a normally noisy Twitterworld began around 9 a.m. Twitter later posted a note to its status update page saying the site had been slowed to a standstill by an attack.

In a denial-of-service attack, hackers typically direct a “botnet,” often made up of thousands of malware-infected home PCs, toward a target site in an effort to flood it with junk traffic. With the site overwhelmed, legitimate visitors cannot access the service.

“On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial-of-service attack. Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users,” co-founder Biz Stone said in a blog post. “We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate.”

Update: Service is back, intermittantly. More background on the attack here.

August 5, 2009

Blotting out Rorschach tests

Filed under: Health, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:50

Colby Cosh examines the furor around James Heilman’s posting of the original Rorschach inkblots to Wikipedia:

It is probably no great loss. Critics of Heilman complain that “decades” of research will have to be abandoned if the Rorschach test becomes impossible to use. But most of this research has been shown, in the last 20 years, to be flapdoodle. As soon as the test became popular — so much so that it became a staple of comedy routines about Freudian psychotherapists, along with couches and thick German accents — it had critics who pointed out that there was little or no statistically validated basis for its interpretation. After the psychiatric profession got around to trying to establish such a basis — and this happened disgracefully late in history — there was little or nothing left of what had once been perceived as the broad general usefulness of the Rorschach.

Much of the folklore that had grown up around specific elements of the test had to be thrown in the trash. It appears to have modest predictive or diagnostic power for a few very specific aspects of personality, and even this surviving foundation is shaky. Yet supporters gave, and some are still giving, the same indignant defences that pseudoscience always receives. Interpreting responses to Rorschach blots is more “art” than “science,” they have insisted. (The mating call of the quack.) Only those who are intimately familiar with the test — i. e., those who believe in it and have come to depend on it — are really qualified to judge whether it “works.”

But can the thousands of psychologists and psychiatrists who have considered the Rorschach test a useful item in the healing toolbox for generations really all have been wrong? Keep in mind that the same practitioners were eagerly recommending and performing lobotomies throughout the same period, and you have your answer.

August 3, 2009

The twittering Tories

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:10

Victor Wong looks at some well-intended-but-bad advice offered to prospective Conservative candidates:

There are times when I wonder if, out of some misplaced maternal instinct, we’re teaching the next generation of politicians to be cowards.

Don’t know quite what I mean? Have a look at this story in this week’s Hill Times:

” ‘At least one of you is going to get disqualified for something you put on Twitter or on Facebook. I don’t know which one of you it’s going to be but it will be at least one of you,’ ” Jenni Byrne, director of issues management in the Prime Minister’s Office, told a group of candidates last week, according to a Conservative source.

The problem with this sort of statement is that it gives your prospective Tory candidate the impression of only two options: either pull out of things like Facebook or Twitter altogether (which cuts you out of at least 20 percent of the potential voting audience) or get your site vetted by Tory higher-ups (which, inevitably, leads to “cookie-cutter” sites, which would make your national campaign happy (so free of controversy!) but which make you look like a mindless clone.

Of course, from the point of view of the PMO, a pack of mindless clones is exactly what they want. Trained seals are so last-century.

July 21, 2009

Anyone fluent in PHP?

Filed under: Administrivia — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:00

Since I have to mess around with CSS again today (very much not my favourite use of time), I was also hoping to fix another problem.

Does anyone know what the PHP equivalent to this kind of HTML snippet would be?

<p>
<a href="url" target="_blank">
<img src="url" alt="string" width="x" height="y" />
</a>
</p>

I think it’s what I needed to do to fix the irritating text artifact that appeared in the banner (pre-CSS overwrite, of course)

Update: Aaaaaaaand . . . it’s back. Drat.

July 17, 2009

How addicted to the internet are you?

Filed under: Humour, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:22

Lore Sjoberg provides you with an easy checklist to discover how bad your addiction may be:

If the ancient Egyptians had the internet, there would have been 11 plagues in Exodus, with “unreliable DSL” tucked in between the frogs and the lice.

It’s a pain when your DSL goes down, but the bright side is that it gives you a chance to rate yourself on the Internet Dependency Scale. Just compare your actions to those listed below and you’ll know what sort of pathetic digital symbiont you really are.

Stage 1 Internet Dependency

Immediate reaction: Check the wires, see if you can steal a neighbor’s Wi-Fi, then get up and do something else.

What you do while waiting for the connection to come back: Read a book, watch a movie, go for a walk. Is this a trick question?

If it doesn’t come back in an hour: Call your service provider, then go back to whatever you were doing.

(Cross-posted to the old blog, http://bolditalic.com/quotulatiousness_archive/005592.html.)

July 13, 2009

Google or Bing? Try them side-by-side

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:23

Craig Zeni sent along this useful link, which allows you to check the results of a search sent to both Bing and Google (so far, in my tests, Google is the hands-down winner): http://www.bing-vs-google.com/.

(Cross-posted to the old blog, http://bolditalic.com/quotulatiousness_archive/005576.html.)

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