Is your Web site FIPS compliant?
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I?ve been involved in a lot of FIPS-compliance Web site testing lately. I?m a crypto hobbyist, not a crypto expert, so I hesitate to write about it, but I?ll explain the basics as well as I understand them. Crypto experts, please write in if I messed up something important.
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If I want to use the online banking services, I have to use IE. Why? No good reason I can fathom. Heaven knows IE isn&#39;t more secure than Firefox (oh, were it so!
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Some internet traders are not complying with laws that protect shoppers who buy online, according to a new report.   The Office of Fair Trading found many eretailers had a "weak" awareness of the relevant regulations.
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If you run a site that has tons of files for your users to download (or even just a few) that you want to keep safe from a direct link, this new article from the O'Reilly PHP DevCenter might be just what you're looking for.
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(Source: Xythos)  Many organizations still wrestle with how to address compliance requirements through document management. They know that file management and collaboration tools lack many required features and high-end document management systems can be expensive to deploy and difficult for the average team member to use. What's needed is a solution that is "just the right size". Find out how Basic Content Management can be a critical component to transform compliance projects from a burden into an investment.
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There's a tutorial over on mpwebwizard.com that's been updated and talks about using a mirror to handle hits from a popular website (like digg or slashdot).   caching services such as coral content distribution network provide an alternative for when your site goes down, but why wait until it gets to that stage? why not just send all your hits from high-end websites to the coral cache version? well, there isn't a good reason not to, so i'll show you how to do it automatically.   He provides the simple script that looks for certain sites in the "HTTP_REFERER" value of incoming calls and pushes them off to the cached location with a header() redirect. The whole thing is only 12 lines, not counting the $sites array.
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Before heading over to the Web 2.0 conference at the Palace Hotel in SF this morning, I couldn't resist doing some more digging into alternate user interfaces for news reading based on the NY Times keywords.  One thing I learned the hard way is that when you access the Times site from a script (not through a browser) if you try to read an article that's too old (not sure what the time limit is) it tries to redirect you to a login page (which is pretty pointless considering that there's no human being around to log in). I hit this problem yesterday, and then hit it again this morning, but couldn't remember what the problem was. So by writing it up this time I hope to remember.  No doubt some debunked hack journalist posing as a tech industry mogul will slander me for this, but the asshat asshole has no idea how blogging works, and who the fuck cares what he thinks anyway. "cheesecake"
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By John McBride, The Charlotte Observer, N.C.  Sep. 10--You go to Google and get your search results -- then what?   How do you know whether the sites Google returns can be trusted? You can't. It's you against the world.
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In this post to his blog, Chris Shiflett talks about some issues surrounding character encoding and the cross-site scripting issues it can open up in your application.    In the post [on Good and Bad PHP Code], he provides a few useful PHP interview questions, including some questions from Yahoo. He explains that good PHP code should be Structured, Consistent, Portable and Secure   In the comments, many additional improvements have been suggested, but there's one that has yet to be mentioned. When using htmlspecialchars() without specifying the character encoding, XSS attacks that use UTF-7 are possible.    Included in the post is an example to illustrate the point as well as a solution, a simple one involving the header() function, to help correct the problem and prevent bad things from happening.   Be sure to check out http://shiflett.org/blog/2007/may/character-encoding-and-xss#comments">the comments for more great tips.
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Andrei Zmievski has posted something new to his blog today about a feature of PHP6 that's finally been hammered down - HTTP input (request) decoding.   There have been no fewer than 4 different proposals floated before, but this one combines flexibility, performance, intuitiveness, and minimal architectural changes, and has only a couple of small drawbacks. Let's take a closer look.   He details the functionality - what it is, what's been decided on, and the advantages of the method. The basic approach is a "lazy" one where PHP will only store the request when it comes in, no filtering or anything, until you want to do something with it (i.e. get it via $_GET, $_POST, etc). When the request for data is made, PHP looks at the encoding settings and formats the data accordingly.   Advantages he mentions for this method include removing the guess-work on PHP's part for which encoding the request is and that it removes some of the overhead by not processing the data until it's actually needed.
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Stop reading all that 'clickwrap' fine print! A browser bot will accept or reject agreements on your terms. By Mark D. Rasch from Wired magazine.
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It bothers me that so many standards are taking off using hex encoding vs base64+filesafe encoding.  Encoding is necessary for binary data or else you'll end up with corrupt XML documents and broken protocols.  For example FOAF uses the SHA1 hashcode of your email address but then hex encodes it.    Base64 is much more compact and works on all filesystems and in URLs without modification.  The key issue though is to use Base64+filesafe which I'm not sure most developers know about.  I think people are selecting hex encoding because they know without a doubt that the range of characters is only {0-9a-f} and so should work within URIs, XML, and filesystems without any problem.  The trouble is  ...
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By John McBride, The Charlotte Observer, N.C.  Sep. 24--For some parents, the risks of the Web may appear to outweigh the benefits. Does e-mail and help with homework trump pornography and predators?   One way to gain some peace of mind is a product called K9 Web Protection.
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Standards body the Web Services Interoperability Organization, or WS-I, on Tuesday published updated standards compliance guidelines for applications that use file attachments.
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In recent years cartloads of sometimes nonsensical directives have come out of Europe controlling and manipulating the way we live our lives. However there are exceptions and one of these is the recent Water Framework Directive.
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This is a release bulletin for webps. In this version of webps, we look at new administrator options on the back end, and a healthy dose of drag and drop on the front end. By Dan Ragle. 0906
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I have found several limitations with the company that is currently hosting my e-commerce site, and I'd like to make a change. Can you give me an idea of what my options are, what the various hosting sites charge, and what I should be looking for?  --M.S., Waynesville, N.C.