• The Author - Bart Busschots

  
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This is not a finished project. Not even nearly. But I think it’s about time I shared what I have, and now is the perfect time since it’s the topic for this week’s Chit Chat Across The Pond segment on the Nosilla Cast.

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I don’t normally log in to Twitter directly – I almost always use clients – but today I did, and I noticed something which shocked me – Twitter is sending login details over an unsecured HTTP connection! I have no idea if Twitter’s always done this, or if they are experiencing some kind of bug today, but either way, this is a serious issue.

Were I to be using public WiFi or any other un-trusted network it would be trivial for someone to get both my username and password and take over my Twitter account. Worse still – if I were to use the same credentials elsewhere like so many people do – all those other accounts could be taken over too. This is just not acceptable in 2009.

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I have been a huge fan of NetNewsWire for many years and have recommended it every chance I got on podcasts, blogs, and in person. Before NNW was free I was a happy paying customer, and, to be honest, I worried a little when it went free. Without charging for it, would the developers keep adding to it? Keep driving it forward? The answer to that was a resounding ‘no’, it stagnated. However, it was still every bit as good as before it became free, so the stagnation didn’t really bother me. It did what I needed it to do, and it did it well, so I was happy.

What did I need it to do? Firstly, it let me organise my feeds into folders nested as deeply as I wanted, and it allowed me to read a folder as if it was a single feed generated as a combination of all the feeds in that folder or sub-folder. I had literally hundreds of feeds, and had them perfectly organised in folders often three or even four levels deep. It also allowed me to sync read and unread statuses between my many copies of NNW on the three Macs I use and on my iPhone. Finally, it allowed me to keep “clippings” which were also synchronised between all my clients.

This all lead to a fantastic workflow. I would read my news feeds on what ever computer I was at, and, when ever I came across a potential story to include in the IMP Live podcast, I’d just drag and drop it to my clippings folder. On Fridays when it was time to assemble the show notes for IMP Live, I’d just go through my clippings folder on my Mac at home and remove stories from the clippings folder as I added them to the IMP Shownotes. Then, the next week, I’d start the process over again. It was the perfect news reading and gathering experience for me.

Then came last week’s ‘update’ to NNW. I use the term very very loosely, because all this ‘update’ did was strip out features, and hence destroy my news reading experience, and my IMP Live work flow. To paraphrase Churchill, NNW have managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory!

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I recently moved to a new machine (a hand-me-down G5 20″ iMac), and when it came to installing my new apps I decided I’d had enough of Adobe AIR and the whole idea of web apps pretending (poorly) to be native apps. I like OS X, and I want the full power of OS X in my apps. I also like how OS X apps all look and work similarly to each other. You just don’t get that with AIR apps like Twhirl (which had been my Twitter client up to that point). Not long before I got my new Mac listener Scott had contributed a short review of Syrinx to the NosillaCast, so I decided to give it a go.

I took and instant liking to the app because it’s a proper OS X app, because it uses the OS X keychain to securely save my password, and because it has Growl support. The fact that it’s free also helps of course! I’ve been using it for a month or so at this stage, and I’m still happy enough with it to keep it as my current client on all three of my Macs. It’s also under very active development at the moment with updates coming out regularly, so I have high hopes for this app’s future.

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There can be no doubt that Twitter has taken off. It has become completely main-stream, and is rapidly rising in popularity and usage, last weekend’s twitpocalypse is proof of that! It would be nice to think that Twitter can remain the peaceful and relatively spam-free haven it is now, but I can see the start of the downward spiral already. Spam. Sure, you choose who you follow, and if you choose badly you can un-follow people, but does that prevent spam? Unfortunately it doesn’t. Anyone can message you using the @ sign, even if you don’t follow them. In many ways this is a great thing, for me, it lets listeners to my podcasts contact me without my having to give out my email address. However, this provides spammers with a mechanism to target people with their infuriating crap.

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‘Click Jacking’ is the latest browser-based security problem to crawl out of the wood work. Since it’s entirely browser based it affects everyone, regardless of their OS, not even Linux users are safe from this one! This is a cross-browser problem and also affects Flash. The technical details have not been released yet, but there is a proof-of-concept exploit doing the rounds. The basic idea is very simple, trick people into clicking on something you want them to click on but they don’t want to click on. From what I’ve been able to piece together from reading various blog postings and reports the attack uses CSS and iFrames to place invisible content over visible buttons or links. When the user clicks the button or link they see the click gets diverted to what ever is in the invisible layer above it instead. If you can do it by clicking the mouse, then you can be tricked into doing it with Click Jacking.

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It’s funny how one thing will often lead to another. It’s not long since I joined the production team of the International Mac Podcast, and now I’ve been invited to join the pool of panellists for the Mac Round Table Podcast. The MRT is a very interesting idea. They have a large pool of Mac Podcasters and each week they host a round-table discussion with three to five members from this pool on some Mac related topic. Because it’s a big pool there’s a great variety of voices on the show and no two weeks are the same. If you’re tying to figure out which Mac podcasts to subscribe to, the MRT is a great place to start since you get to hear lots of Mac podcasters in one place. I’m exceptionally honoured to have been invited into the pool. I recorded my first show last night with Don McAllister, Joseph Nilo, Chuck Joiner & Dave Hamilton, so keep an eye out for it on the RSS feed.

Some of you may or may not know that I've been a regular panellist on the International Mac Podcast Live shows for a good few weeks now. I've also been blogging on Mac-related security matters on the IMP Blog. As of today I've also joined the IMP production team, so expect to hear more of me on the young but expanding IMP network. Although I've been contributing to a number of podcasts regularly for well over a year, I've never really considered myself to be a podcaster, I guess I am now!

While I'm talking podcasts, I may as well mention my other two regular spots. I do a weekly segment on The NosillaCast called Chit-Chat Across the Pond (or CCATP for short) where myself and the host, Allison Sheridan, chat about some geeky topic for about half an hour. I also do a monthly series on the Typical Mac User Podcast called "Introduction to the Terminal" where I try to encourage people to play with the Unix underpinnings of OS X a little more.

Technorati Tags: podcasting, Mac, technology, Apple, IMP

This week it was announced that one of the core protocols that holds the internet together is fundamentally flawed. The problem is not with someone's implementation of the protocol, but with the actual protocol itself. It's hard to over-state just how big a deal this is. At the moment the details of the vulnerability are being kept secret to give the world time to patch, but you can get some technical information from the advisory issued by the US Cert. On Tuesday all the major DNS server vendors released patches at the same time. This is un-heard of, nothing like this has ever happened before in the history of the internet. That alone should bring home just how big this is.

Although the good-guys have successfully kept the details of the flaw secret to date, despite the large numbers of organisations involved, the reality is that the bad guys are frantically trying to figure this out as I type. It's not a matter of if they'll figure it out, but when. The security community have bought us time. That time should not be squandered, but used to protect the internet as a whole, and to protect ourselves.

Internet, Security, DNS, Critical Vulnerability

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I've been recommending FireFox for years now. In fact, I've been using it as my primary browser since it was called FireBird. It has been a more secure and a more feature-rich choice for years. (If you're interested in the security aspects then you might enjoy reading a recent article I wrote for the International Mac Podcast blog comparing Safari and FireFox from a security point of view.) What got me hooked on FireBird was it's plugin architecture. The idea of being able to customise my browser really appealed to me and as FireBird has grown into FireFox the list of available plugins has grown too. No other browser is as expandable as FireFox. If you can think of it, the chances are someone's written a plugin for it!

However, FireFox has long suffered from two major shortcomings, memory leaks you could pilot a large ship through, and a non-native look. FireFox has been chewing up insane amounts of RAM for years, and has always looked like a fish out of water, particularly on OS X. These two problems are both fixed in FireFox 3 and if that was all they'd done I'd be recommending it highly, but they've done much more.

Technorati Tags: internet, browser, FireFox, FireFox 3

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