Daily Links
Jeff Atwood on the Post PC Era - Read This!
Obviously with the number of iPads, iPhones, iPods, and Android devices being sold, it is pretty clear that before too long the trusty (read dusty in my house) desktop PC will be a thing of the past. Jeff Atwood does a nice job looking at the numbers and defending why most of the world doesn't actually need a PC.Home Sweet Home Art Exhibition
Our friend Anja, over at Fusion, has her very first art exhibition starting this week. She's awesome. Her art is awesome. You should check it out.The Browser You Love To Hate
Its good to see that Microsoft has a sense of humour about IE6.Daily Links
Keep Calm And Carry On
A short film that tells the story of the iconic poster.Apple Announces Plans to Initiate Dividend and Share Repurchase Program
When you amass a hundred billion dollars, it's either that or build a money bin to go swimming in, I suppose.Standard show navigation icon for responsive web design
Good short discussion by Andy Clarke. I think I'm with him on the three-lines as well.Are You a Brogrammer?
I think most of us are happily in the negative-values here at VL. How do you do on this quiz?Mystery Gamma Ray Sources Coming from Milky Way Center
Pretty awesome stuff. I hope I live long enough to witness some truly humanity changing discoveries in space.Daily Links
The $8 Billion iPod
Great TED talk from Rob Reid on the funny numbers often promoted by music and movie lobby groups in the context of copyright.Green Goo
Green goo into the river near Dallas - yep we're on our way to cleaning up the environment... Yeah, right!Free Education from the Khan Academy
I have just found my new favourite thing on the internet. I'll be registering my girls with gmail accounts later and signing them up too. Then I can coach them and get tangible data back on where they are struggling. This is the future of education, mark my words.Sal Khan at TED in 2011
Watch this TED talk. Salman Khan gives a great view on where education has to go to become relevant to modern life. I'm inspired.Chuck Jones on How To Draw Bugs Bunny
One of my all-time favourite characters and the master that gave him life. I'll be watching this YouTube video on repeat for the next few weeks.Daily Links
Diablo III on May 15th
Blizzard Entertainment announced that Diablo III, the next chapter in its action role-playing game series, will be released on May 15, with digital pre-orders starting today.Baldur's Gate Mystery Countdown
Baldur's Gate was originally released way back in 1998. It was a fantastic game. Now there is a countdown on their website. Speculation (or wishful thinking) has a guess a a remade game with the infinity engine. Perhaps even for iOS. We are watching!Flies, sex and booze
It's not only fruit flies that exhibit this behaviour.Walmart to start selling new iPads at midnight local time
Do Canadian Walmarts sell iPads?Ex-Google employee says Google+ has ruined the company
Microsoft-turned-Google engineer James Whittaker -- now once again a Microsoft employee -- fired off a scathing blast Tuesday on a Microsoft blog about why he left Google.Is There Such a Thing as Bayesian Classification for HTTP Requests?
We use Atomic Secured Linux on most of our servers to lock them down and keep out spammy content, SQL injections, and cross-site scripting attacks. It's not our only layer of security, by any means, but it's definitely one of the most powerful. It's also one of the most strict. Which sometimes causes problems. For example, Casinos of Winnipeg is one of our clients. For obvious reasons, they occasionally trigger rules meant to prevent gambling-related spam. Other clients have had problems embedding videos, since common methods of video embedding can also be used to inject cross-site scripting attacks. Managing this is largely a matter of disabling rules and/or categories of rules when they prove problematic. This can either be across all sites or on a site-by-site basis. However, since the rules in use are constantly being updated to account for the latest attacks, the side effects need to be constantly updated as well.
At this point, Atomic Secured Linux is approaching the problem by creating rules for each specific type of unwanted content. Some of these rules are quite broad, and may block both clearly unwanted content and other content that's possibly permissible. The general approach reminds me of where email spam filtering was ten years ago. Prior to Paul Graham's publication of A Plan For Spam in 2002, email spam filters were similarly rule-heavy. As a consequence, they were usually either too weak, letting in large amounts of junk, or too strict, banning lots of perfectly acceptable content. Paul Graham's suggestion was to train a Bayesian classifier on email he'd already flagged as junk, as compared to email he'd left in his inbox. It worked extremely well, especially in comparison to the tools available at the time.
We suspect a similar approach would work for classifying incoming HTTP requests as likely to include spam, cross-site scripting attacks, and/or SQL injection attacks. However, so far we have not found any products that make use of the Bayesian approach. We have found a few somewhat related things online. Jon Bulava wrote a proof-of-concept Apache module that would proxy web content and filter out spammy looking sites. That's close to what we'd like to have, but would work on the client side to filter content sent from another server. We'd want to look at the POST or GET data sent to the server, instead. For SQL injection protection, SQLassie is a database firewall that uses Bayesian filtering to look for malformed queries that are likely the result of SQL injection attacks. This is apparently a response to brittleness in how the GreenSQL database firewall applies it's rules. SQLassie hasn't been released as stable yet, but it's definitely worth keeping an eye on.
If you've heard of an Apache module or other tool for scanning incoming HTTP requests and classifying them as either spam or a potential security threat, let us know. In the meantime, we'll keep adjusting the knobs on our security software to find the right balance between "open to attack" and "locked down too tight to do anything".
Daily Links
Valet and Away Special Until the End of March
Our friends over at the Winnipeg Airport are offering a wicked special on their Valet and Away service until the end of March. Drive up to the airport, hand over your keys, fly away, and come back to a cleaned up vehicle.A Patent Lie: How Yahoo Weaponized My Work
A Wired opinion piece by Andy Baio on Yahoo's decision to sue Facebook. "For years, Yahoo was mostly harmless. Management foibles and executive shuffles only hurt shareholders and employee morale. But in the last few years, the company's incompetence has begun to hurt the rest of us. First, with the wholesale destruction of internet history, and now by attacking younger, smarter companies."
Daily Links
Inventing On Principle
An inspiring talk by Bret Victor at CUSEC 2012.
Mozilla Debates Supporting H.264 Playback
Andreas Gal, Mozilla's director of research, announced on a public mailing list that he wants to proceed with a plan that would enable H.264 decoding on Mozilla's Boot2Gecko (B2G) mobile operating system.Twitter Acquires Posterous
Twitter is increasingly highlighting other types of content, as evidenced by its most recent redesigns. Could this be a acquisition of talent and technology to help the company grow beyond 140 characters?Interview with Sir Jon Ive
Q: What are your goals when setting out to build a new product? A: Our goals are very simple - to design and make better products. If we can't make something that is better, we won't do it.
Daily Links
Homeless Hotspots
Homeless people have been enlisted to roam the streets wearing T-shirts that say "I am a 4G hotspot." Passersby can pay what they wish to get online via the 4G-to-Wi-Fi device that the person is carrying.Curator's Code
Keep the rabbit hole of discovery open by honouring discovery.10 Things To Do While Waiting for Your Flight
Our friends over at Winnipeg Airports Authority have a handy little reminder list of some things you can do while waiting for your flight. The networking item is a great one. There are neat people everywhere.Odds of your Favourite Sports Team Making the Playoffs
Great stats for all sports. The above link takes you the NHL as we watch the falling Leafs and the crashing Jets slide out of the post season.Daily Links
Jean Giraud, AKA Moebius Dies
French comic-book artist Jean Giraud, alias "Moebius" has died at the age of 73. If you were a fan of European sci-fi comics in the 1980's, you'll be familar with his work "Airtight Garage". If you're a fan of French comics, you'd likely think of his gritty western series "Blueberry" first.Daily Links
Media Scares with Solar Flare - NASA Says Business as Usual
If you aren't living in the dark, you might have noticed it has been all doom and gloom with the solar flare activity over the past few days. Fox even has it written up as an attack on earth (editor: morons). Ignore the media and head to NASA's site linked above for real information about what's happening.Hint: not much.
Hint2: watch for northern lights!