The downside of Webware: The Feds
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Intuit's Scott Cook reveals why QuickBooks is not a popular Webware service.
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Lousy code, PHP and shell script attacks and search engine hacking tools lead to vulnerabilities, study says.
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PHPKitchen has an interesting post covering one of the banes of most web developers existance - the "back button problem".
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This scenario is all too familiar to office workers who collaborate electronically on projects: E-mails get passed around with differing versions of documents-in-progress attached. Instant messages whizz by. Web sites are cited, then lost. It's often a jumbled mess, with no central online location for shared data. There must be a better way.
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I'm back, with a very interesting topic too!  Joel Spolsky, ex-Microsoft Manager and software engineering guru has a new essay, How Microsoft Lost the API War that is creating quite a big storm in the blogging communitiy.  Joel posits that the priests in the holy Temple of Microsoft have lost their way, because it has split into two factions, and the wrong faction is winning. One faction worships on the alter of backward compatibility, while the other is led by fervent priests who are proselytizing to raise up the new gods of .NET and Longhorn. Joel suggests that the new gods will cause the destruction of the holy Temple because Microsoft's great victories were built on the altar of keeping customers happy with backward compatibility. Furthermore the old gods of the Windows API continue to grow more grotesque and cruel with the passing of time, driving former worshipers into the arms of the friendlier gods of World Wide Web.  This story sounds extremely plausible. I must admit that i fit the profile of the developer who used to develop on the Window's API, is familiar with COM and Win32 who now develops mostly using PHP and Python. However I continue to develop and maintain Windows apps that keep our customers happy, and we still plan to develop new Windows apps. Some points:  Temple of the Blind? Firstly, Microsoft is still a compelling place to work for to people who feel that they can make a difference. The Temple continues to attract talented people with a Unix background. For example we have the recent hiring of Ward Cunningham, author of the Wiki.  Microsoft is still able to keep talented people like Raymond Chen, and others like him who continue to look after the Windows API, and Longhorn apparently will still give high priority to backward compatibility. Open sourcerers like Miguel Icaza are sufficiently attracted to the .NET vision to stake their careers on Mono. Longhorn and .NET are compelling technologies, so even if Win32 is not so cute anymore, M'soft is providing something that remains very attractive.  What i do see M'soft doing wrong is that they aren't disseminating the .NET runtime fast enough. It remains an optional install in XP Service Pack 2 for example. Also their IE dev team appears to be hog-tied due to political reasons; nevertheless IE remains good enough, particularly when I can embed IE as an activeX control, something I cannot do with Mozilla (AFAIK) - Update: I'm wrong.  Temple of the Spider?  Secondly, people don't merely use a web browser. They run the web browser in the OS.  So let me ask you, if you are using DreamWeaver or HomeSite or Photoshop or vi or emacs or Gimp, how many of you are willing to give it up for a java applet (or whatever your favorite technology is) running in your web-browser? Precisely.  Temple of the Abandoned?  Third, Joel makes the claim that developers are not developing to the Windows API. Well he could be right. But I bet a lot of them are still calling Win32.  If you are using a framework or IDE like Delphi or wxWindows (or .NET or VB) then you certainly are insulated from the Windows API, but that doesn't mean that you're not calling the Windows API all the time. I don't see Borland dropping their Windows version of Delphi at any point in time.   In fact, the fact that many developers are using some form of framework is a compelling argument for Microsoft to enhance the .NET framework to attract developers who are using other frameworks.  Today, not that many students learn x86 assembler, but that doesn't mean that Intel lost the CPU wars. Just because fewer people are learning Win32 doesn't mean Microsoft has lost the API wars, if the frameworks run predominantly on Win32.  Temple of the Lost  Joel even warns you in the beginning that "because I'm talking about big trends, I need to exaggerate and generalize". But you still get sucked in because Joel Spolsky is a first-class writer, in the same order as Philip Greenspun or Eric Raymond. That makes him so persuasive and plausible. But this is not Indiana Jones and doomed temples, but Steve Jobs and reality distortion fields.  Other opinions:  Harry Fuecks (PHP is ASP's upgrade path),  Dennis Hamilton (M'soft is just covering all bases), Robert McLaws (Joel is wrong in 7 points), Oliver Travers (the web is not good enough), One Run-time to Rule them all....
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The flaw exploited by the most recent versions of the worm such as Santy.C or Santy.E is more general than the original, and can occur anywhere a site designer has left the door open for the inclusion of arbitrary files into PHP scripts, reports IDG News
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Google is Mozilla's sugar daddy.  Is this cause for alarm?
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The trials and tribulations of application dependency in a virtualized, hosted world.
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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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InternetNews.com starts off their latest article the same way Rasmus Lerdorf started off his keynote at php|works this year - "The Web is broken and it's all your fault."   He said the current state of the Internet includes a litany of broken items, but with a little help from PHP there may well be some hope for the Web yet.    The article talks about some of Rasmus' other thoughts on the status of the web, and how, with the right functionality and knowledge spread out through the PHP community, the language can compensate for some of the "stupidity" that web programmers (and users) regularly see.   He also talks a bit about a "rich application delivery system", MySQL versus PostgreSQL, parsing and compiling speed, and opcode caches.
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Latest worm poses a risk to many Web sites using the PHP scripting language.
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Introducing The 404s, Wired's contest to find the least-informative sites on the military web. Strike a blow for open government (and win prizes).  In Danger Room.
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After months of development and testing, this pilot fish and his co-worker roll out their Web-based application to users -- and it turns out to be almost unusable.
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In this new post on the PHP Security Blog, Stefan Esser brings up an interesting issue when dealing with web applications - being able to bind a script/application to a different port on the local machine.   Unfortunately the ability to bind yourself to a port and receive connections is a threat to webapplications installed on different virtual hosts on the same IP, even if other security measures in place, like tight filesystem permissions or executing PHP script with the permission of the owner.   He gives an example in PHP of how this can happen and one of the scary side effects of having it in the same domain - the cookie information is passed in. It's a simple concept that could have very bad consequences in the wrong hands.    Additionally, you don't even have to create it in PHP either. As cyberlot mentions, it could be created in any language that has socket functions. Be sure to check out the comments for more thoughts and comments on the post.
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InfoWorld - A security researcher has found a serious vulnerability in an aging yet widely used software program used for the Internet&#39;s addressing system, prompting the software&#39;s maintainers to retire the affected version.
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Blog: Feature designed to dial Web page phone numbers is subject to cross-site scripting attack.
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Spyware problems continue to rise. Congress is stepping up to the plate--but will its efforts be more effective than CAN-SPAM?