While I’m not a huge fan of Internet Explorer, I am quite impressed with the progress the IE team has made. IE7 stands to be the most impressive release so far, with many rendering issues resolved, rather impressive security advances, and a great many improvements on the standards compliance front. I must applaud both the team, and Microsoft for making these moves.
By focusing on standards, instead of proprietary features that degrade the experience for everybody, developers can work towards a unified web, free of browser discrimination and hack filed code. It seems like the Redmond power house has finally started to see where IE needs to go to remain relevant for Web 2.0, and beyond.
Then again, that’s leaving TIME out of the picture.
While HTML + TIME could prove to be a fun toy, due to its very nature – it’s a toy not everybody could enjoy. This is an older (introduced with IE5), proprietary technology that is fairly unknown, and not often used. While it does have some merits in its concept, any design technology that is intended to serve a single, closed platform is simply a bad idea.
Why Microsoft is taking another look at this, I’m really not sure. I’m holding out hope that they are cleaning up old, non-standard features in preparation for the next release. My fear is that they want to make another push with this out-dated, IE-centric technology.
Let’s hope they make the right call, and remove support for proprietary ‘features’ such as this. IE7 has the chance to not only catch up with the other major players, but to help push the widespread adoption of standards compliance.
My employer recently completed the final audit to confirm ISO 17799 compliance, the process was a real eye opener. In a process that should have been fairly short & painless, the ordeal lasted close to a year, with me joining the company just before the second, and largest audit. That made my first few weeks rather interesting, to say the least.
While 17799 does have some complex requirements, most of the issues found had more to do with the overall mentality than with the true technical issues involved.
For the second year I am publishing a year-in-review – something I had generally avoided in the past, as the tone of these posts is typically just cynicism and negativity. Looking back at 2015, it wasn’t all positive (what year is?), but there was certainly some good, and there are great things to look forward to.
In a season filled with empty marketing pitches, worthless predictions, and pointless projections – it’s important to look at the good and avoid the cynicism overload that is all too common.
phpMyID is a simple solution for those that want to run their own OpenID endpoint – the problem is that its author stopped maintaining the project in 2008. Despite this, there’s still quite a few people that use it, because it’s the easiest single-user OpenID option available.
Unfortunately, the author didn’t follow best practices when building the software, and as a result multiple security flaws were introduced. In 2008, a XSS was identified and never fixed (CVE-2008-4730), in the years since then it seems the software has been below the radar.
Primum non nocere (first, do no harm) – an iconic phrase in modern medicine, yet also applicable to many other fields. This is something I wish more people would think about, developers especially – and primarily when writing new APIs. In general, developers don’t have an impressive history with security – quite frankly, developers suck. Seeing as I consider myself a developer, that’s painful to admit.
Chris Andrè Dale posted an interesting article some time ago that got me thinking: Why it’s easy being a hacker: A SQL injection case study – Chris pointed out the problems with educational material that developers are using, and just how bad the examples are.
Before I get started, let me make a couple of things clear:
Apple is evil; pure and simple. I’m fully convinced that Steve Jobs has weekly planning meetings with Lucifer himself1. Apple’s policies are anti-everybody. From bloggers to developers2, Apple seems to make life as hard as possible for those that use their products for profit. With these facts in mind, I tend to shy away from their products when I have a choice (which isn’t always the case); though a while back I decided to buy an iPad for some reason.
