Web review

Disclaimer:
This post doesn’t want to be an invite to hack websites. The admin pages linked by search engines in the “search suggestions” in the article are so easy to find that it’s, I think, exagerated to define this an “hack practice” (infact, many of them were already hacked and spammed by automatic bots ). On the contrary, it wants to be an advice to webmasters and sysadmins to double-check their installations and security measures.

Search engines scan the Web. The entire web, and they often discover something that nobody should see.

This is one of this cases: a webmaster forgets to password-protect the folder where a critical admin tool like phpMyAdmin is, a search engine reaches the folder and it puts in its search index the link.

At this point it’s easy for everyone to discover these security breaches: with a very simple search on a search engine like Yahoo! you’ll get 196 results (November, 7th 2008), they bring to the administrative home page of phpMyAdmin from several domains, with root privileges. read full post »

Today I upgraded to Ubuntu Intrepid, and suddenly… my Samsung SCX-4200 printer stopped working
I recovered my notes from Ubuntu Hardy, where I wrote some operation to make the printer (and the embedded scanner) work. Unfortunately, the “trick” I took from the official Ubuntu forum (see “Samsung SCX-4200 scanner does not work on Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron“) didn’t work anymore, so I spend some time to search for an alternative. And I found it! read full post »

I just encountered a little bug in Google Reader, that I use everyday to read some feeds. One of them (Downloadblog, a nice italian professional blog about technology) is marked in bold, having one unread item, but if I click on it, Reader tells me that it doesn’t contain any unread item.

The fun part of this bug is the message I get if I click on the “All items (1)” link: “Your reading list has no unread items.” that, in the italian version of Google Reader is: “L’elenco Ancora da leggere non contiene elementi da leggere.“. Translated in english it sounds like:

“The Unreaded list doesn’t contain unreaded items”
компютри втора употреба

I recently received an e-mail from the team of Google Adsense, that invited me to partecipate to a simple survey about their advertising service. I cannot speak about contents of this survey, as required by their terms… anyway I have to highlight an interesting point I noticed:

The scripting language used for the survey is MS ASP.Net! You can check this in the screenshot attached to this post: the extension of the Survey’s start page (and, as I checked later, in the survey process)  is .aspx.

It impressed me because, as all we know, Google is usually very far from Microsoft technologies an, in general, from commercial software solutions. Which is the reason to use .Net for a simple survey script?

Today, as promised, Microsoft launched its new project: some days ago it took an obscure domain, opensourcehero.com, that pointed to http://www.microsoft.com/opensource/heroes/default.mspx with a black background and a cryptic senstence: “{Forge} New Powers” and a reference to the launch date: “February 27, 2008“. Now the site is open and the mistery is unleashed.

“{Open Source} Heroes Happen Here” (a bit long as title?) presents some featured developers that became “heroes” because of their prolific programmer profession. It’s strange and a bit ironic that they all uses proprietary technologies from Microsoft (Visual Studio, Windows Server platform…).

The site allows users to ask the “Hero Hack Pack”, a bundle of “free evaluation” software to introduce new people to MS developing.

Microsoft’s idea of the Open Source scene is very bizzarre: why an open source “hero” should develop his free software with proprietary platforms?

Songza is an online free jukebox. Users can search music by keywords and listen songs directly from the web page, without having to download them. Results often offer good quality and large choice, it’s amazing how many songs are indicized.

The “about” page doesn’t explain how the search engine exactly work, and doesn’t give informations about sources… anyway the service is very good and is worthwhile!

http://www.songza.com/

Vista’s “3D Flip” effect is really nice. Honestly, the entire new graphic of Windows Vista is beautiful… even if the rest of the operating system is disappointing

Anyway, if you want to add this feature to your Windows XP… someone has done it: WinFlip is a little and free addon that is capable to re-create the same effect. Just download it and try!

http://winflip.stylekings.de/

Since I definitely chose Firefox (aka “goodbye IE”), I tried a lot of extension, but only a little part of them is still installed on my browser. Here’s my personal list: I’d like to know your comments and suggestions
read full post »

Fliqlo is a simple but really beautyful free screensaver: it simply shows the current time, in a “flip clock” style (do you remember those old office clocks?).
Nothing special, but very nice and somehow useful.

It can be downloaded for free; the same site offers other nice screensavers for Windows.

http://www.9031.com/downloads/screensavers.html

Mozilla has just released a new security fix for Firefox Browser.
Here’s the changelog: