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MAMA: The "average" Web page - Dev.Opera

2011 Jul 26, 10:00Opera has stats on what an 'average' web page looks like it in terms of HTML elemenets and attributes used etc.PermalinkCommentsweb development html statistics technical opera

Telex

2011 Jul 18, 2:38Neat idea: "When the user wants to visit a blacklisted site, the client establishes an encrypted HTTPS connection to a non-blacklisted web server outside the censor’s network, which could be a normal site that the user regularly visits... The client secretly marks the connection as a Telex request by inserting a cryptographic tag into the headers. We construct this tag using a mechanism called public-key steganography... As the connection travels over the Internet en route to the non-blacklisted site, it passes through routers at various ISPs in the core of the network. We envision that some of these ISPs would deploy equipment we call Telex stations."PermalinkCommentsinternet security tools censorship technical

The magic button — Make Everything OK

2011 Jul 13, 5:48Like the big red button that doesn't do anything but better "because it is slightly cheaper, and because it has the words "DON'T PANIC" in large, friendly letters on the cover"PermalinkCommentshumor internet web

A true American Patriot recites Bill Pullman’s Independence Day speech around New York City  | Great Job, Internet! | The A.V. Club

2011 Jul 6, 7:28"Over this past Fourth Of July weekend, we neglected to note that it was the 15th anniversary of Roland Emmerich’s 1996 blockbuster Independence Day. New York comedian Sean Kleier remembered, and decided to make his own tribute, going to various locations around New York City—Times Square, the Brooklyn Bridge, the subway, and inside a Victoria’s Secret—reciting Bill Pullman’s rousing speech before the movie's final battle sequence, megaphone and all."
PermalinkCommentshumor video bill-pullman independence-day new-york

Playable Archaeology: An Interview with Telehack's Anonymous Creator - Waxy.org

2011 Jun 20, 2:25I knew it was a game but still felt bad war-dialing and otherwise messing around in there. What if I accidentally find a way out? "Telehack is the most interesting game I've played in the last year... a game that most users won't realize is a game at all. It's a tour de force hack — an interactive pastiche of 1980s computer history, tying together public archives of Usenet newsgroups, BBS textfiles, software archives, and historical computer networks into a multiplayer adventure game." Also, see all the accounts of people finding their teenage selves in the game.PermalinkCommentsinternet technical development hack telnet wardial game

LulzSec manifesto: "We screw each other over for a jolt of satisfaction"

2011 Jun 20, 2:09"Why did the hackers at Lulz Security ("LulzSec") invade Sony Pictures websites, take down cia.gov, and release 60,000+ e-mail addresses and passwords? For the lulz, of course—but what might look lulzy to one person could certainly enrage another. In honor of its 1,000th tweet, the witty wankers of LulzSec released a manifesto of sorts, defending their actions to the angry Internets."PermalinkCommentsinternet security privacy hack technical

WPAD Server Fiddler Extension Update v1.0.1

2011 Jun 12, 3:34
As it turns out the WPAD Server Fiddler Extension I made a while back actually has a non-malicious purpose. Apparently its useful for debugging HTTP on the WP7 phone (or so I'm told). Anyway I took some requests and I've fixed a few minor bugs (start button not updating correctly), changed the dialog to be a Fiddler tab so you can use it non-modally, and the WPAD server is now always off when Fiddler starts.
PermalinkCommentsextension fiddler technical update wpad

ViewText: Enter a URL to view its text

2011 Jun 5, 4:57"ViewText.org is a service provided to make reading content on the web easier, faster, and safer by extracting the main article content from news items, blog posts, RSS feeds, and PDF's." Includes API to extract the article text!PermalinkCommentsinternet web article html text api technical

Hidden device distorts news on wireless networks, brews beer, is time machine - Hack a Day

2011 May 30, 3:13"We covered the Newstweek, a wall-wart sized box that injects fake news stories over public WiFi connections last February, but now there’s a great walk through and it seems our doubts about this project were disproved."PermalinkCommentssecurity journalism wifi hack technical

Command line for finding missing URLACTIONs

2011 May 28, 11:00

I wanted to ensure that my switch statement in my implementation of IInternetSecurityManager::ProcessURLAction had a case for every possible documented URLACTION. I wrote the following short command line sequence to see the list of all URLACTIONs in the SDK header file not found in my source file:

grep URLACTION urlmon.idl | sed 's/.*\(URLACTION[a-zA-Z0-9_]*\).*/\1/g;' | sort | uniq > allURLACTIONs.txt
grep URLACTION MySecurityManager.cpp | sed 's/.*\(URLACTION[a-zA-Z0-9_]*\).*/\1/g;' | sort | uniq > myURLACTIONs.txt
comm -23 allURLACTIONs.txt myURLACTIONs.txt
I'm not a sed expert so I had to read the sed documentation, and I heard about comm from Kris Kowal's blog which happilly was in the Win32 GNU tools pack I already run.

But in my effort to learn and use PowerShell I found the following similar command line:

diff 
(more urlmon.idl | %{ if ($_ -cmatch "URLACTION[a-zA-Z0-9_]*") { $matches[0] } } | sort -uniq)
(more MySecurityManager.cpp | %{ if ($_ -cmatch "URLACTION[a-zA-Z0-9_]*") { $matches[0] } } | sort -uniq)
In the PowerShell version I can skip the temporary files which is nice. 'diff' is mapped to 'compare-object' which seems similar to comm but with no parameters to filter out the different streams (although this could be done more verbosely with the ?{ } filter syntax). In PowerShell uniq functionality is built into sort. The builtin -cmatch operator (c is for case sensitive) to do regexp is nice plus the side effect of generating the $matches variable with the regexp results.
PermalinkCommentspowershell tool cli technical command line

Native x86 Android runtime will enable Android apps on Windows

2011 May 26, 1:28This was on my todo list. I'll scratch it off knowing far more funded folks are doing this: "A startup called BlueStacks has developed an Android runtime environment for the Windows operating system. It will enable users to run Android applications alongside conventional Windows software on Microsoft's operating system." "One example would be a convertible netbook tablet that normally runs Windows but switches to an Android interface for greater touch-friendliness when the screen is flipped.
Such a product would offer the full power and multitasking capabilities of Windows but also benefit from having access to Android's broad touch-enabled software ecosystem."PermalinkCommentswindows programming android java technical

Experiences from an IPv6-Only Network

2011 Apr 30, 4:05"This document discusses our experiences from moving a small number of users to an IPv6-only network, with access to the IPv4-only parts of the Internet via a NAT64 device. The document covers practical experiences as well as road blocks and opportunities for this type of a network setup. The document also makes some recommendations about where such networks are applicable and what should be taken into account in the network design. The document also discusses further work that is needed to make IPv6-only networking applicable in all environments."PermalinkCommentsinternet ip ipv6 ipv4 nat technical reference

Why We Need An Open Wireless Movement | Electronic Frontier Foundation

2011 Apr 27, 2:23"The gradual disappearance of open wireless networks is a tragedy of the commons, with a confusing twist of privacy and security debate. This essay explains why the progressive locking of wireless networks is harmful — for convenience, for privacy and for efficient use of the electromagnetic spectrum."PermalinkCommentslaw eff wireless internet technical privacy security

Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies

2011 Apr 27, 2:21Competing price setting algorithms create a very high priced book. "But Peter Lawrence can now comfortably boast that one of the biggest and most respected companies on Earth valued his great book at $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping)."PermalinkCommentshumor internet blog science book commerce ad

SRU: Search/Retrieval via URL -- SRU, CQL and ZeeRex (Standards, Library of Congress)

2011 Apr 18, 4:27"SRU is a standard XML-focused search protocol for Internet search queries, utilizing CQL (Contextual Query Language), a standard syntax for representing queries."PermalinkCommentsstandards search library metadata xml uri technical library-of-congress

Internet probe can track you down to within 690 metres - tech - 05 April 2011 - New Scientist

2011 Apr 8, 2:07"On average their method gets to within 690 metres of the target and can be as close as 100 metres – good enough to identify the target computer's location to within a few streets.", "When a landmark machine and the target computer have shared a router, the researchers can compare how long a packet takes to reach each machine from the router; converted into an estimate of distance, this time difference narrows the search down further."PermalinkCommentstechnical internet privacy geo geolocation security

draft-denog-v6ops-addresspartnaming-03 - Naming IPv6 address parts

2011 Apr 6, 3:52Humorous quote from the doc: "While we readily agree that the naming of IPv6 address parts is not the most pressing concern the Internet is facing today, a common nomenclature is important for efficient communication."PermalinkCommentshumor technical ipv6 name documentation ietf rfc

Capturing HTTPS with FiddlerCore

2011 Apr 6, 10:00

I used FiddlerCore in GeolocMock to edit HTTPS responses and ran into two stumbling blocks that I'll document here. The first is that I didn't check if the Fiddler root cert existed or was installed, which of course is necessary to edit HTTPS traffic. The following is my code where I check for the certs.

    if (!Fiddler.CertMaker.rootCertExists())
{
if (!Fiddler.CertMaker.createRootCert())
{
throw new Exception("Unable to create cert for FiddlerCore.");
}
}

if (!Fiddler.CertMaker.rootCertIsTrusted())
{
if (!Fiddler.CertMaker.trustRootCert())
{
throw new Exception("Unable to install FiddlerCore's cert.");
}
}

The second problem I had (which would have been solved had I read all the sample code first) was that my changes weren't being applied. In my app I only need the BeforeResponse but in order to modify the response I must also sign up for the BeforeRequest event and mark the bBufferResponse flag on the session before the response comes back. For example:

    Fiddler.FiddlerApplication.BeforeRequest += new SessionStateHandler(FiddlerApplication_BeforeRequest);
Fiddler.FiddlerApplication.BeforeResponse += new SessionStateHandler(FiddlerApplication_BeforeResponse);
...
private void FiddlerApplication_BeforeRequest(Session oSession)
{
if (IsInterestingSession(oSession))
{
oSession.bBufferResponse = true;
}
}
PermalinkCommentshttp fiddler technical https geolocmock programming fiddlercore

JavaScript & .NET interop via WebBrowser Control

2011 Apr 5, 10:00

For my GeolocMock weekend project I intended to use the Bing Maps API to display a map in a WebBrowser control and allow the user to interact with that to select a location to be consumed by my application. Getting my .NET code to talk to the JavaScript in the WebBrowser control was surprisingly easy.

To have .NET execute JavaScript code you can use the InvokeScript method passing the name of the JavaScript function to execute and an object array of parameters to pass:

this.webBrowser2.Document.InvokeScript("onLocationStateChanged",
new object[] {
latitudeTextBoxText,
longitudeTextBoxText,
altitudeTextBoxText,
uncertaintyTextBoxText
});

The other direction, having JavaScript call into .NET is slightly more complicated but still pretty easy as far as language interop goes. The first step is to mark your assembly as ComVisible so that it can interact with JavaScript via COM. VS had already added a ComVisible declaration to my project I just had to change the value to true.

[assembly: ComVisible(true)]

Next set ObjectForScripting attribute to the object you want to expose to JavaScript.

this.webBrowser2.ObjectForScripting = this.locationState;

Now that object is exposed as window.external in JavaScript and you can call methods on it.

window.external.Set(lat, long, alt, gUncert);

However you don't seem to be able to test for the existence of methods off of it. For example the following JavaScript generates an exception for me even though I have a Set method:

if (window.external && window.external.Set) {
PermalinkCommentsjavascript webbrowser .net technical csharp

IE9 Document Mode in WebOC

2011 Apr 4, 10:00

Working on GeolocMock it took me a bit to realize why my HTML could use the W3C Geolocation API in IE9 but not in my WebBrowser control in my .NET application. Eventually I realized that I was getting the wrong IE doc mode. Reading this old More IE8 Extensibility Improvements IE blog post from the IE blog I found the issue is that for app compat the WebOC picks older doc modes but an app hosting the WebOC can set a regkey to get different doc modes. The IE9 mode isn't listed in that article but I took a guess based on the values there and the decimal value 9999 gets my app IE9 mode. The following is the code I run in my application to set its regkey so that my app can get the IE9 doc mode and use the geolocation API.



        static private void UseIE9DocMode()
{
RegistryKey key = null;
try
{
key = Registry.CurrentUser.OpenSubKey("Software\\Microsoft\\Internet Explorer\\Main\\FeatureControl\\FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATION", true);
}
catch (Exception)
{
key = Registry.CurrentUser.CreateSubKey("Software\\Microsoft\\Internet Explorer\\Main\\FeatureControl\\FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATION");
}
key.SetValue(System.Diagnostics.Process.GetCurrentProcess().MainModule.ModuleName, 9999, RegistryValueKind.DWord);
key.Close();
}
PermalinkCommentsweboc fck ie document mode technical ie9
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