REM
Daysleeper anyone? I'll get my coat...
Posts by Matthew Ward
6 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Aug 2007
Kipping at your desk is highly productive, say boffins
MoD loses most of the armed forces
Friday 10th October 2008 10:17 GMT 
Lacking even the basics
I'll admit that I am particularly tech-savvy, but I have a TrueCrypt file on my hard drive that was ridiculously easy to setup through a wizard-based process, and even provides plausible deniability - it's frighteningly easy nowadays to manage your data in an at least fairly secure manner. What on earth were they thinking?
Facebook security hole exposes Paris Hilton's . . . um, pics
Wednesday 26th March 2008 02:10 GMT 
A few weeks?
This has been about a fair bit longer than a few weeks... I remember being able to use this hack quite a few months ago, when people I knew would send me links to photos on Facebook where I wasn't friends with the person concerned (who either took or featured in the photo). Just presumed it was a feature of Facebook so to speak (security through obscurity) as opposed to a gaping security flaw, which it apparently now is.
In reference to an earlier post, I just think there was no particular checking (server-side or javascript) for photo.php at all. It just served up whatever ID you gave it, assuming the user was directed to the URL from a legitimate, internal source.
Do androids dream of an open OS?
Wednesday 7th November 2007 17:34 GMT
RE: Silly
"If the iPhone shows us one thing, it is that future applications on Mobile phones will be like future applications on Desktop machines: they will be delivered through a browser, with the underlying OS being immaterial."
This may be the future that Apple wants for the iPhone, but it certainly isn't the case at present - as evidenced by the hoards of people who want to be able to develop for the iPhone without the "limitations" imposed by only being able to develop within Safari. This may be where a certain niche of applications are headed (and also currently are) in general across all platforms but the majority of development will still be on the OS level for the foreseeable future. The reason Apple wants developers doing their stuff inside Safari only is because they still want overall control of the hardware and software development on the device because it's proprietary. What Google is proposing is completely open, and so the forced "protection" layer is unnecessary and contrary to the philosophy they're aiming for. If the OS itself is designed specifically for the platform and for providing developers with the tools to develop, why insert another layer?
I'm not backing the Google horse quite yet, but I do believe that it will wake up the industry on a software level (much as the iPhone has done on a hardware level) to the point of pushing everybody foward.
PC superstore unhinged by Linux
Thursday 13th September 2007 15:28 GMT
Search Results
Just to clarify, the Maxtor external hard drive and Home & Student edition of Microsoft Office 2007 are just a generic bit of promotional advertising that are returned at the top of all search results, no matter the term. If you search for anything else, they'll still come up at the top of the page.
The actual results for the search time "Linux" are a ZOOM 3049 56k V.92 External Modem. Hell knows why.
The general rule here is don't buy anything from PC World. Ever.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
