Notes from a wireframe world

No Flash support.

Yep thats right, right in the middle of Apples show case event of the year, this screw-up. The iPad’s browser doesn’t support flash.

As TechCrunch pointed out

“But the device features browsing as a key element, and there are going to be plenty of people trying to access their casual Flash games and Flash-based video sites, only to be met with that frustrating icon. “

Ports.

Err… one, the iPad’s dock, yep thats right no USB connection, no Micro SD connection, unless that is you buy an additional bit of hardware. How nice of Lord Jobs. Instead of building in two industry standards, users are forced to buy extra items with their new iPad. It’s not like the these standards are large and would take away from the oh-so-important design.

Functionality

As one commentator put it,

“There is nothing new or revolutionary about this device, it’s just a very large ipod (not even iphone since you can’t call with it).”

nuf said.

So of course fanboys and wannabe will buy it, but for the rest of us? Throes of us who have to earn money and don’t worship SJ? I really think very few people will buy it.

I’d much rather have an xt2, at least that supports multi-tasking.

Firstly Happy new year!

Sorry it’s been a while, however I’ve been busy writing code for a new project called TwitterBrite. It’s a twitter client for windows, that similar to applications like hootsuite allows users to post RSS feeds to twitter and search it for useful people to follow, however it solves one of the major drawbacks I see with hootsuite, that of security.

Hootsuite is a purely web based application, if something goes wrong with it (for example it starts re-posting old RSS entries, or spamming your followers with direct messages) their is nothing you can do about it, sure you can login and terminate your account, but as happened to a couple of services last year, what if you can’t login?

Control is I believe one of the biggest stumbling blocks for company wishing to access the power of social media, the what if something goes wrong argument.

Anyway as part of this project, I’ve been working on a .net based DLL that provides an interface for the Bit.ly URL shorten (which TwitterBrite will use) you can download it and a, hopefully useful, read me file from us here.

P.S. The DLL isn’t open source, however if you want the code, drop me a line. If you’re a business and want to keep it close source, I’m willing to sell it, providing I get a free life time upgrade/resell permissions for my products, if you’re interested in making it open source, that fine as well, just as long as you can show your going to move the interface forward.

If you’ve got a jailbroken iPhone, be careful: a worm has broken out in Australia that targets owners who have not changed the default password after installing SSH.

The worm’s behavior is hardly amusing: it changes your background to a photo of Rick Astley, then looks for other phones on the network to infect. The exploit could easily be used by hackers with malicious intent for more nefarious purposes.

If you have a jailbroken iPhone and you’ve installed SSH without changing the default password (from “alpine”) you need to do so to avoid such attacks. If you have not jailbroken your iPhone or iPod Touch and installed SSH, you are not affected.

Sophos writes of the exploit:

SophosLabs is analysing the worm’s code, which suggests that at least four variants have been written so far. One of the attributes of the latest variant (labelled the “D” version) is that it tries to hide its presence by using a filepath suggestive of the Cydia application.

The source code is littered with comments from the author suggesting the worm has been written as an experiment. One of the comments berates affected users for not following instructions when installing SSH, because if they had changed the default password the worm would not have been able to infect them.

If you have been Rickrolled in this rather nasty way fear not. There is a relatively simply way to remove the virus, using whatever file system browser you fancy and look for the following files

/bin/poc-bbot
/bin/sshpass
/var/log/youcanbeclosertogod.jpg
/var/mobile/LockBackground.jpg
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.ikey.bbot.plist
/var/lock/bbot.lock

if they are their you need to delete them, and re-boot your iPhone (remembering to change your SSH password), if however they are not on your phone, you have “Version D” of the virus installed, it is a little more sneaky as it pretends to be the iPhone App Cydia. In order to fix this veriant you need to delete the following files and then re-install Cydia.

/usr/libexec/cydia/startup
/usr/libexec/cydia/startup.so
/usr/libexec/cydia/startup-helper
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.saurik.Cydia.Startup.plist

So let’s hear it Apple fanboys for the secure iPhone!

Yes that’s right, normally we’d advice people to change their password regularly however twitter users are being advised by Twitter NOT to amend their passwords, usernames or e-mail addresses.

Twitter is investigating an issue with users becoming locked out of the service after changing their email address or username, or resetting their passwords.

Of course this will be very concerning for security experts around the world, it would be the perfect time to launch a password stealing/phishing attack on Twitter, as the normal advise (change your password) will at this time be counterproductive.

We will update you when this issues is sorted.

Posted via email from scottherbert’s posterous

It appears that at least 10,000 @hotmail @msn and @live accounts have been compromised, a list of theses accounts including passwords was posted to pastebin.com a site commonly used by developers to share code samples.

The list runs alphabetically from Ar thro Bl which suggests that there are more out their.

This was reported to Microsoft immediately in the UK and US by neowin and they are currently awaiting feedback on the situation.

Fundamentally if you have a Microsoft account (hotmail, live, msn, Zune etc) we strongly recommend you change not only your password by your security question as well.

hat tip to neowin and the BBC