FatherStorm.com

Boy. waiting for some companies to drop a new and surprise product can be something of a challenge. Although Google has announced that they will BE announcing their new custom made open-source browser here , and dropped a whole comic book describing it here, and promising to make it avaliable  here (currently a 404) . it’s yet to be seen in the wild. So far, the best info site is here. following is the current official text from the Google Blogs site.

Update.  the download is now active at http://www.google.com/chrome.

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Cache copy below the fold
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Cache copy below the fold
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a few years a go I bought a Winbook laptop. Boy, I never knew. I’ve owned god only knows how many PC’s and laptops in my life. I’ve built my own PC’s so far as to make a case from Aluminum angle-iron and plexiglass. (Asking for static shock anyone?). and have NEVER had a machine that acted like this. The laptop, a A710, top-of-the line when I got it, just sometimes wouldn’t come on. Meaning that no matter what the battery chargge state, power supply connected state, it would reboot at any given point from initiation of POST through a fully loaded OS (Windows XP SP2). at some random point in that period it would sometimes just restart. And when it did so, it could take any of a dozens of retrys before it would ewither load or I would give up. If it  successfully loaded and stay on for at least 45 minutes, it would stay on until at least the next full reboot. Seem the problem was worst in very dry months, especially from September through january, but could happen at any time. I sent it in within the first 6 months, just to get it back with a replaced hard drive, and the same problems, as well as a note that my “screen was dirty”. within a week of getting it back, same problem… set it in twice more, and got it back each time with either a wiped or replaced drive, and the same problem. Decided to leave it on and soldier on. Left it on from December 2007 through June 2008 24/7. after that time, of course the CPU fan was getting loud so sent it in again. they of course replaced the CPU fan. it came back to MicroCenter, who could not get it to boot (wow, just like me) and they sent it right back. SO… this is the fifth time in the shop for the same root problem.. at some point doesn’t this become a lemon? I’ve talked to Microcenter who has assured me that if the problem is not resolved this time, they will replace it with a laptop of comparable vale but I have a feeling we will differ on what a comparable laptop is, with them thrying to stick me with a eePC likely. so. let’s detail what I had that I thought was important when I bought it…

17 inch screen

dedicated video with dual-monitor support.

10/100/1000 MB NIC  (all my docs are on a NAS)

64-bit compatible processor.

(That’s pretty much it…) gimme that and I’m cool

There’s been a ton of speculation lately about whether the unintentional leaking of facebook code on their site constitutes a security threat and if the fact that the code was visible proves that the facebook servers are somehow less secure. Quite frankly I have to assume that those ministrations are being made by people who have never configured anything more complex that a netgear home router. any server, apache or IIS (Windows) can with the commenting out of a single line (Apache) or unchecking of a single box (IIS) show the source code of a page instead of compiling/rendering that page. It has no bearing whatsoever on the security of the code itself, and were it any other way would actually make the servers LESS secure by limiting what a person could set a server to run and what they could set it to run given code AS. So yeah, someone fat-fingered a configuration option, perhaps,

 AddType text/plain .php4

or more dangerously

AddType application/x-httpd-php .png

That second one would let me run PHP scripts that could do all sorts of nefarious things if you were to request a .png graphics file from my server.   as an example, check,

http://www.americasblood.com/BumperSticker.php

Your browser will be convinced it’s an image. If you save it you will AHVE an image, but it’s actually just a PHP script that dynamically creates the image on the fly. If I were to reconfigure the server to serve any .jpg files as php, you would never be able to tell it’s not an image. So by that rule EVERY web server is a security risk and should be shut down. right?

The original register link is:

http://www.theregister.com/2007/08/16/facebook_leak_google_dmca/

Ordon Village

You begin your journey with Link in a small village, where Link is apparently a well-known farmhand. Considering that there are less than ten people in the town, though, perhaps it’s not too surprising that everyone knows your name. Under the tutelage of a local familyman, you’re also being prepared for the adventuring life, as he asks you to travel to Hyrule to deliver something to the royal family there. (more…)

I’ve been writing web pages since the very beginning, starting in the form of Hypercards. In that time I have written numerous CMS’s of my own, from simple flat-file based, to DB driven, back to file-based, but with the addition of full AJAX integration, as well as PHP-driven image creation and even skinning based on swatch files to supplement CSS. I’ve tried the various different commonly available CMS packages form PHP-Nuke, Post-Nuke, Mambo, Joomla, Blog:CMS, Drupal, Xaraya, WordPress and probably more that weren’t significant enough to remember. All that is just to give you an idea that I might possibly actually have some insight as to why I have switched virtually all of my own domains, and most of my client’s domains to Wordpress.
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I have come to worry about the state and direction of this community we call MySpace. It has garnered of late, a reputation as a haven for lechers, paedophiles, deviants. I know that this was never the purpose of this corner of the web, bnut at the same time, it was never the purpose of the web as a whole. Having been on the web since it’s earliest days, chatting via ‘Talk’ and ICB in ‘90 and ‘91, I remember when the whole of the web held the same ideals as MySpace tries to hold today, those idelas being a common ground, a meeting place for people from every stara of society, where rich and poor could meet as equals, where economic limitations were invisible, where race mattered less than intellect, where people were responsible to treat the awful power of unfettered communication with respect and dignity.