Tag Archives: tech blog

cHTeMeLe is a board game about HTML

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Despite cHTeMeLe’s technical theme, its developers claim you don’t need any web programming experience to play. The game takes web design standards and boils them down into game rules that even children can learn. To help less technical players keep everything straight, the tag cards use syntax highlighting that different parts of code have unique colors — just like an Integrated Developer Environment. No one is going to completely pick up HTML5 purely by playing cHTeMeLe, but it does have some educational value for understanding basic tags and how they fit together.

via cHTeMeLe is a board game about HTML – Video Games Reviews, Cheats | Geek.com.

How to disable Google safe Browsing in Firefox

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To DISABLE:

  1. Type about:config in adressbar of Firefox.
  2. Type safebrowsing in filterbar. Now Change the following Values
  3. browser.safebrowsing.enabled FALSE
  4. browser.safebrowsing.malware.enabled FALSE
  5. browser.safebrowsing.remoteLookups FALSE

How to disable Google safe Browsing in Firefox.

Thats all and the feature will be disabled now. Even though, My advice is not to disable it as Disabling it may increase the risk of getting infected.

And Firefox keeps phoning home for updates and turning it off in the options doesn’t stop it.  Here’s a solution:

You can manually reset the Software Update feature by closing your Mozilla application and deleting the “updates” folder and the two files “active-update.xml” and “updates.xml”, which can be found in one of these locations (using Firefox as an example):

  • Windows XP/2000: C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Mozilla Firefox
  • Windows 7/Vista: C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Mozilla\Firefox\Mozilla Firefox

Above quote taken from here (support.mozilla.org).

Facebook: snitchgate!

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A story about Facebook went around twitter last night that provoked quite a reaction in privacy advocates like me: Facebook, it seems, is experimenting with getting people to ‘snitch’ on any of their friends who don’t use their real names. Take a look at this:

via Facebook: snitchgate! « Paul Bernal’s Blog.

People in my field have known about this for a long time – it’s been the cause of a few ‘high profile’ events such as when Salman Rushdie had his account suspended because they didn’t believe that he was who he said he was – but few people had taken it very seriously for anyone other than the famous. Everyone knows ‘fake’ names and ‘fake’ accounts – my sister’s dog has a Facebook account – so few believed that Facebook was going to bother enforcing it, except for obvious trolls and so forth. Now, however, that appears to be changing.

Apple-Samsung Jury May Have Leaned on Engineer, Patent Holder

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Jurors who zipped through more than 600 questions in three days to arrive at their verdict in the intellectual-property battle between Apple Inc. (AAPL) and Samsung Electronics Co. (005930) had as their leader an engineer with a patent to his name.

via Apple-Samsung Jury May Have Leaned on Engineer, Patent Holder – Bloomberg.

A nice summation of lots of links from all around the blogoshere can be found on Groklaw here.  Here’s a small tidbit from that summation:

Professor Michael Risch points out an even worse inconsistency:

How did the Galaxy Tab escape design patent infringement? This was the only device to be preliminarily enjoined (on appeal no less), and yet it was the one of the few devices to be spared the sledgehammer. And, by the way, it looks an awful lot like an iPad. Yet the Epic 4G, a phone I own (uh oh, Apple’s coming after me) — which has a slide out keyboard, a curved top and bottom, 4 buttons on the bottom, the word Samsung printed across the top, buttons in different places (and I know this because I look in all the wrong places on my wife’s iTouch), a differently shaped speaker, a differently placed camera, etc. — that device infringes the iPhone design patents….

Relatedly, the ability to get a design patent on a user interface implies that design patent law is broken. This, to me, is the Supreme Court issue in this case. We can dicker about the “facts” of point 2, but whether you can stop all people from having square icons in rows of 4 with a dock is something that I thought we settled in Lotus v. Borland 15 years ago. I commend Apple for finding a way around basic UI law, but this type of ruling cannot stand.

Wall Street and the Mismanagement of Software

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It’s clear that Knight’s software was deployed without adequate verification. With a deadline that could not be extended, Knight had to choose between two alternatives: delaying their new system until they had a high degree of confidence in its reliability (possibly resulting in a loss of business to competitors in the interim), or deploying an incompletely verified system and hoping that any bugs would be minor. They did not choose wisely.

via Wall Street and the Mismanagement of Software | Dr Dobb’s.

What is needed is a change in the way that such critical software is developed and deployed. Safety-critical domains such as commercial avionics, where software failure could directly cause or contribute to the loss of human life, have known about this for decades. These industries have produced standards for software certification that heavily emphasize appropriate “life cycle” processes for software development, verification, and quality assurance. A “safety culture” has infused the entire industry, with hazard/safety analysis a key part of the overall process. Until the software has been certified as compliant with the standard, the plane does not fly. The result is an impressive record in practice: no human fatality on a commercial aircraft has been attributed to a software error.

The underground economy of social networks

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In a new study, Barracuda Labs analyzed a random sampling of more than 70,000 fake Twitter accounts that are being used to sell fake Twitter followers.

via The underground economy of social networks.

This underground economy consists of dealers who create and sell the use of thousands of fake social accounts, and Abusers who buy follows or likes from these fake accounts to boost their perceived popularity, sell advertising based on their now large social audience or conduct other malicious activity.

How graphics card supercomputers could help us map the universe

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Over three decades video cards have transformed computer graphics from monochrome line drawings to near photo realistic renderings.

But the processing power of the GPU is increasingly being used to tame the huge sums of data generated by modern industry and science. And now a project to build the world’s largest telescope is considering using a GPU cluster to stitch together more than an exabyte of data each day.

via How graphics card supercomputers could help us map the universe | TechRepublic.