Author Archives: Alan

Privacy Violations by Facebook Employees

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Schneier points out that Facebook is a privacy train wreck waiting to happen; something I have long believed. People need to take heed and be careful about what they reveal to whom. We are only at the very earliest of stages with our automated privacy specification and/or features. Life and personal privacy is going to get a lot worse before it gets better:

Privacy Violations by Facebook Employees:

“I don’t know if this is real, but it seems perfectly reasonable that all of Facebook is stored in a huge database that someone with the proper permissions can access and modify. And it also makes sense that developers and others would need the ability to assume anyone’s identity.

Click through to Schneier’s site for a reference to the original material.

(Via Schneier on Security.)

A compelling replacement for make

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SCons project logo

SCons


Having lived with make for over 20 years; I’ve decided that something has to be better. Turns out, there is something better.
I’ve been enjoying getting to know both Python and scons together for the last few months.

What a wonderful tool for building. There is a ton of information online, so I won’t add to the mélé with my opinions.

Check it out : scons.org.

Web developers outsmarting users (or not). Design assumptions that hurt.

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Website #FAILs.

Lately I’ve noticed a lot of websites make crazy assumptions about my location. I was thinking it was geolocation gone wrong, but it appears that in general they are doing something completely illogical: they are using my language preference list to guess where I am.

This amounts to assuming that all French speaking people are in France, that all English speaking people are in England and so on.

What does RFC 2616 have to say about this?

14.4 Accept-Language

The Accept-Language request-header field is similar to Accept, but
restricts the set of natural languages that are preferred as a
response to the request. Language tags are defined in section 3.10.
…

Nothing there about location? This is a classic assumption / layer violation in a design.

The worst offenders here are, by in large, financial institutions. When I visit ING Direct, they redirect me immediately to the Canadian login screen. Trouble is — I don’t have a Canadian account. Worse — there is no button to override their error the button to fix the problem is buried and two layers deep. Outsmarted by not too clever web developers.

Ouch. That hurts.

Wonder what would happen if I visited with a language preference set to en_DE or en_FR?

VMware Fusion linux guest os and host file sharing.

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I managed to install vmware tools into my guest OS (CentOS 5.2) using the manual install method, mounting the ISO image and then running the perl installer. So far, so good.

However, the files are all mounted with the host OS uid/gid. There is likely a better solution, but given that the guest is a single user (effectively) environment, I just mapped the host fs to my guest OS uid/gid by editing the /etc/fstab file.

# Beginning of the block added by the VMware software
.host:/ /mnt/hgfs vmhgfs defaults,ttl=5 0 0
# End of the block added by the VMware software

Changes to :

# Beginning of the block added by the VMware software
.host:/ /mnt/hgfs vmhgfs defaults,ttl=5, uid=500,gid=500 0 0
# End of the block added by the VMware software

The 500/500 comes from my id on the linux guest OS, NOT the host OS.

Good luck!

Hype Instead of Content

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Microsoft has apparently released some advertising for their new Office flagship collection (Office 2010). The movie can be seen on YouTube here.

I find it upsetting that they can spend lavishly promoting nothing — note that there are zero product shots in this ad. It is pure blockbuster hype.

Arial!? Don’t get me started on Arial. Perhaps MSFT could have spent a little money improving the Windows font engines and licensing some non-horrid fonts from a reasonable foundry. I still think Arial is a poorman’s Helvetica and will never be a substitute.

Checkout Helvetica vs. Arial if you haven’t already seen this.

Surprisingly, there are still quite a few pages on this topic indexed at Google.

Who Writes This Stuff?

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Sometimes you just have to wonder what the web developers were smoking. A large trading company recently told me the following after I failed to remember my password in three attempts:

Beacuse I might not be using a web browser to do anything else.

Beacuse I might not be using a web browser to do anything else.

So there goes any hope that I’ll get that task done. They are forcing me to ignore them until I can restart my browser. Who really things this is OK? Why to consumers settle for this kind of quality? We should all know better than this.

Cisco VPN Software Replacement under OS X

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Just as I had finished complaining about Cisco’s VPN drivers causing crashes, I stumbled across a macosxhints.com hint about vpnc.

Looks like this is well worth the effort to install and try it out. This will let me get that Cisco code out of my kernel and perhaps make the lock-ups go away.

Further instructions are available at the original poster’s site.

I’ll update this post with my experiences.