“He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future” – Orwell, 1984 Looking back at the last few years, we’ve made some huge leaps at swatting at issues that bit us in back in the past, but still have not made a huge fundamental leap to controlling the…
Santy Paws Came To Town
Well, that was a blast. On Wednesday afternoon, I took Baby Girl to see Santy Paws (Satan Claws or Santa Claus, depending on if you believe in Ceiling Cat, Basement Cat, or are just a plain pagan). We stood in line for close to three hours. There was one Santa’s helper on duty, and for…
A review of 2008
Last year, I made the following observations / resolutions. Let’s check out how well I did: Be a good dad to Mackenzie my gorgeous daughter, and a wonderful (hopefully less chubby) hubby to Tanya, my beautiful wife. I think I succeeded at this one Lose some weight and mean it this time. What New Year’s…
IE exploit spreading via SQL injection
It’s no news that the latest 0day for IE is spreading via SQL injection attacks. What is news is why are we still suffering from SQL injection? We’ve known for over eight years how to utterly end SQL injection. I’m sick of writing about it. We should not be talking about SQL injection any more. This…
WordPress 2.7 released with easter egg
As I noted a few weeks ago, WordPress has had an obfuscated easter egg in it for some time. Despite reporting this security defect / software engineering malpractice to two different WordPress folks (the author of the excellent WP development blog, and the security team’s e-mail), 2.7 was released with the easter egg. Hopefully, this…
I fear mitochondria
I was having lunch today at a nearby Chinese restaurant. I was seated next to some young folks who were loudly having a biology discussion. I tuned in because I’m a geek, but I kept my mouth shut after I heard one bad science moment after another. Unfortunately, the discussion quite quickly changed from being…
Diabetes: One Year To The Day
This is the one year anniversary of being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. It’s been an interesting year, and I’ve learnt a lot about what it means to have diabetes, and it’s definitely impacted my diet. The biggest change is a sad one for me – some of my favorites are simply not good for…
Decoding wp-admin/js/revisions-js.php easter egg
From time to time, I look at WordPress, which as you may have guessed, runs my blog. It’s had a spotty security history. If I can find something in a few minutes, I’ll help out as it’s my data at risk. But then they go and do this: <?php if ( !defined( ‘ABSPATH’ ) )…
OWASP EU Summit
Although I am unable to attend, I hope you can attend the OWASP EU Summit, to be held next week in Portugal. There’s going to be lots of discussion about OWASP’s various projects, and work out futures for all of them. It’s going to be a defining event in OWASP’s existence, and I wish I…
Coding Standard
I’m repro-ing this from the OWASP Top 10 mail list. I would like to hear folks’ thoughts about what I have included, taking into account that this is designed to be a standard, and not just a guide. The OWASP Top 10 Coding Standard I’ve been working on this on and off (mostly off) ever…