There’s an interesting race that started yesterday which will most likely make for an excellent case for the value of open source software. Secunia has identified a fairly nasty security issue in almost every web browser. You can read up on the details of it on secunia if you want. The gist of it is a vulnerability in popup windows and the ability of other open browser windows that did NOT originate the popup to take over the popup. That sounds relatively benign, but imagine a site where when you go to login, a popup window comes up asking for your authentication information. Unbeknownst to you, joe script kiddie owns this popup and you just gave him your login info. Or, say, you go to your bank and they popup a window ‘0% interest rates on transferred balances!’ Except you’ve been pwned and it’s Joe Script Kiddie again, and he has your account info now.

Anyway, the point of this post is this: my guess is mozilla/firefox will have this patched in relatively short order. Want to lay odds on how long it takes microsoft? I’m not guaranteeing MS will lose – there have been occasions where too much bad press manages to light a fire under their ass and they get patches out relatively quickly. But their track record is pretty bad, generally. I’m laying my money on Firefox, and if I’m right this episode gets added to my ‘why open source is superior to closed source’ file.

Meanwhile, make sure your popup blocker is set to kill, and for sites where you have to allow the popups, make sure you don’t have any other browser windows open that might be a source of malicious scripts. You could also turn javascript off to deal with this, the same caveats apply.

Everyone reading this is running firefox, right? If not, click the link and install it.

Anyway, evangelism aside, I happened across a most excellent extension to firefox yesterday. Regular readers know I’m a huge fan of wikis these days, and over the past year or so mediawiki, the engine that powers wikipedia has evolved into one of the best wiki engines. Now someone has put together a firefox extension that enhances the process of authoring wiki content. It’s geared specifically towards wikipedia authoring, but some testing at work has shown it is helpful in other wiki engines, or at least with oddmuse, which we’re using at Skidmore. If you’re authoring wikipedia content, definitely give this a look, and even if you’re using another wiki engine it might be worth your time to check it out.

No, not that Gravitar (notice the spelling) – this gravatar – a modestly clever idea for making a universally available graphic (an avatar) for web forums, weblogs, and the attendant comment systems. Register yourself, and any system that supports this will begin to show your avatar when you use it. This is much simpler than the normal process of registering your avatar at every site you register for, and their rating system makes sure your r-rated avatar doesn’t show itself in all its glory at, say, disney.com. This is already supported by a lot of the big publishing tools (blogger, movabletype, wordpress, livejournal), and there are implementations out for drupal and phpbb, presumably the other big message board toolsets will have implementations shortly.

I’ve waxed enthusiastic about usenet here over the years, without too much success as far as I can tell. Most folks remain largely unaware of how useful it is. Google has just made some changes to their web interface into usenet that may help in terms of raising public awareness. Basically they seem to have stolen a page from Yahoo’s Groups function – the interface is similar. Subscribe to a group, you can post to it freely, and it keeps track of what you’ve seen and not seen. The difference is google is tying directly into usenet whereas with Yahoo they’re using their own (unfortunately ad heavy) system. It would be awesome if Google would stitch in some improvements, especially RSS feeds (I wish anyone would do this, I’ve craved it for ages) and ‘watches’ similar to what I can do in feeddemon – what I mean by this is…for example, imagine I am subscribed to comp.sys.lang.perl and I have a watch on ‘libxml’ – the system would alert me to any posts that come through mentioning libxml. On the surface this doesn’t seem hard to do, and as you can imagine it’s enormously useful in terms of reducing the amount of chaff you have to sort through to get to the wheat. But anyway, regardless of my own needs, google’s just made it easier for anyone to play around with usenet and get a feel for how useful it is. Check it out.

Microsoft launched their free weblogging system today, joining the likes of typepad (from the movabletype folks), livejournal, the original blogger (now owned by google) and others with a commercial blogging service. This will undoubtable further raise public awareness of the whole blogging phenomenon. Their system’s not half bad on first look either – it seems like it has a decent feature set, including photo galleries, mobile phone integration, buddy lists, music lists and more. It’s hard to say how well it all works though since it requires an MS passport which I dont have and dont want, and since it seems to be overwhelmed with traffic on its first day. Worth keeping an eye on as each of the big players adjust their offerings.

The latest release of inkscape is out. I’ve linked to this in the past. While it can’t yet actually replace Illustrator or Freehand on the professional graphic artist’s desktop, it’s more than competent enough for the average piker like me. There are windows and linux binaries and mac users can grab it if they have fink up and running. Well worth grabbing even if you do use Illustrator regularly.