“Over the past year many organizations are noticeably starting to “get” the importance of web application security and studying up on the issues, but experience doesn’t come overnight. At WhiteHat we meet a lot of different people possessing a variety of views on the webappsec world. So a couple days ago, I was sanity checking some of Bill Pennington’s (VP of Services) slides on “Five Things Every Security Professional Should Know about Website Security”. For some reason the way the advice was laid out it reminded me of the Five Stages of Grief (if your familiar) because it closely mimicked the attitudes of those we encounter depending on their degree of webappsec sophistication. Bill re-did the stages, webappsec style, and it came out pretty funny actually…” via Jeremiah Grossman
5 Stages of Web Application Security Grief
An Engineer’s guide to Bandwidth
Web app developers spend most of our time not thinking about how data is actually transmitted through the bowels of the network stack. Abstractions at the application layer let us pretend that networks read and write whole messages as smooth streams of bytes. Generally this is a good thing. But knowing what’s going underneath is crucial to performance tuning and application design. The character of our users’ internet connections is changing and some of the rules of thumb we rely on may need to be revised…. Read the rest of the article at developer.yahoo.net
Quick idea of the day – Facebook/IMAP connector
I take far too long replying to Facebook messages because they dont come to my Mail inbox. I like that the full message is emailed to me but I hate that i cannot reply and have the message go to the sender, and so they go on sitting there without replies. Why doesnt Facebook allow us to download the messages via IMAP so we can respond to them in our own systems?
Either Facebook should develop an IMAP system to read and reply to Facebook messages (Im only talking about the Mail, not wall posts or anything silly like that), or someone should develop a third-party system that integrates Facebook mail with IMAP.
I dont know a lot about the Facebook API’s but I would hope there was some way to access your own Mail messages through the API. I also dont know a lot about how IMAP is built, but in my mind either an IMAP plugin (if such a thing is possible) to fetch mail from Facebook, or simply a system that fetches mail from Facebook using the credentials supplied by the user and pushes them into an IMAP system (tweaking the headers to put in a different Reply-To address – something like “reply-FACEBOOKMESSAGEID@fbmail.com” – so replies would go back to this third-party system which would then push the reply back into Facebook).
23 essential HTML 5 resources
“Everyone is excited about the possibilities of HTML 5, but there’s a lot to learn and absorb as well. With that in mind, we’ve compiled a list of articles to get you started!” – Ryan Carson via carsonified.com