Author: Paul Gurney

Paul Gurney is a web architect and web developer based in Maine in the USA.
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Google’s Moto G android phone reviewed

Read the new Ars Technica review of Google’s $179 Moto G — it outshines any other low-cost Android phone. It is an unlocked, off-contract phone perfect for teens or non-power users.

Specs at a glance: Google/Motorola Moto G
Screen 1280×720 4.5-inch IPS (329 PPI)
OS Android 4.3
CPU 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 (quad-core Cortex A7)
RAM 1GB
GPU Qualcomm Adreno 305
Storage 8 or 16 GB NAND flash
Networking 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0. GSM model supports GSM 800 / 900 / 1800 / 1900MHz and UMTS 850 / 900 / 1700 / 1900 / 2100MHz; CDMA model supports 850 / 1900MHz
Ports Micro-USB, headphones
Camera 5MP rear camera, 1.3MP front camera
Size 5.11″ × 2.59″ × 0.24-0.46″ (129.9 × 65.9 × 6.0-11.6 mm)
Weight 5.04 oz. (143 g)
Battery 2070mAh
Starting price $179 off-contract
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Website hacks are like lawn dandelions

Google acknowledged (and fixed) a major vulnerability in its google.com and gmail.com domains.

Redirection, cross-site scripting, cross-site request forgery, and SQL-injection vulnerabilities are to websites what dandelions are to suburban lawns. Even sites maintained by experienced and highly vigilant Web developers are likely to suffer from these Web-application bugs.

From ArsTechnica. Read more here.

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Add a password to your Mac Zip File

Apple makes it easy to compress files using the right-click contextual compression command, but it provides no easy way to add a password to the resulting zip file. You can use the Terminal program to add a password, but it’s prone to mistakes and more time consuming.

 

Instead, use this program called Keka.

http://www.kekaosx.com/en/

Keka is a free file archiver for Mac OS X. The main compression core is p7zip (7-zip port).

Compression formats supported:  7z, Zip, Tar, Gzip, Bzip2, DMG, ISO

Extraction formats supported:  RAR, 7z, Lzma, Zip, Tar, Gzip, Bzip2, ISO, EXE, CAB, PAX, ACE (PPC)

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Amazon.com’s Bezos is buying The Washington Post

Amazon founder Jeff P. Bezos is buying The Washington Post.

Six years ago, Mr. Holovaty held the title “editor for editorial innovation” at The Post, but left in 2007. The co-creator of the popular Web framework Django, he thinks Mr. Bezos will bring “fresh, baggage-less thinking.”

No baggage — and deep pockets — means room to try new things. Might Mr. Bezos apply tech industry concepts like frictionless payments, e-commerce integration, recommendation engines, data analytics or improved concepts for mobile reading?

http://nyti.ms/15IedGQ

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Surviving the Latest WordPress Brute Force Attack

If you have a blog, you need to install this plug-in immediately.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/limit-login-attempts/

There is currently a major type of internet attack being waged by botnets against webservers running WordPress. These bots brute-force their way in past your password screen by making thousands of guesses until they gain entry. WordPress currently does not limit the number of incorrect password attempts. Until it does, you need a plug-in that provides the limiting.

There is currently a significant attack being launched at a large number of WordPress blogs across the Internet. The attacker is brute force attacking the WordPress administrative portals, using the username “admin” and trying thousands of passwords. It appears a botnet is being used to launch the attack and more than tens of thousands of unique IP addresses have been recorded attempting to hack WordPress installs.

One of the concerns of an attack like this is that the attacker is using a relatively weak botnet of home PCs in order to build a much larger botnet of beefy servers in preparation for a future attack. These larger machines can cause much more damage in DDoS attacks because the servers have large network connections and are capable of generating significant amounts of traffic. This is a similar tactic that was used to build the so-called itsoknoproblembro/Brobot botnet which, in the Fall of 2012, was behind the large attacks on US financial institutions.

Source: http://blog.cloudflare.com/patching-the-internet-fixing-the-wordpress-br

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Mac users have trouble using Apple Preview to Fill PDFs

Macworld has a useful post on why some PDF forms don’t display their fields correctly in Apple Preview app.

This is a problem that is 4 years old now: The Preview app/program isn’t setting the appearance flag that Acrobat/Reader require to show the contents of the form fields.

See http://blogs.adobe.com/pdfdevjunkie/2009/11/script_to_fix_mac_osx_previewa.html for more info.

There’s some enterprising workarounds out there:

The script at the Adobe blog page above can be installed in Acrobat (not Reader) and fixes the forms filled out in Preview, which can help the recipients of the forms, but still doesn’t address the root of the problem.

Of course, the best work-around is to simply use Acrobat or Reader rather than Preview until this issue is fixed by Apple.

I didn’t say that Preview wasn’t filling in the data correctly. It’s not setting the appearance flag correctly, causing that data not to show (unless the field is clicked on – or “in focus”) And sure, you could go back and forth pointing fingers and laying blame, (and get nowhere) but bottom line, Adobe created PDF and why should they have to adapt to Apple’s non-compliance? Sure – it would be nice if Acrobat and Reader weren’t quite so sticky about things, but that’s not the case and I don’t see Adobe willingly devoting any resources to this issue; after all, why would they want to encourage people to use Preview over their own products? It truly doesn’t matter who is “correct” – Adobe has acknowledged the problem, provided scripts on their website to help resolve it for recipients of filled in forms from Preview users, and have informed Apple that they need to fix Preview. So, given this scenario, whether we like it or not (and I’m no apologist for Adobe, believe me) it makes sense for Apple to fix the problem. But they haven’t. I’d love to know why not.

There is an additional script on Adobe’s website here:

http://kb2.adobe.com/community/publishing/885/cpsid_88564.html

Source:

http://www.macworld.com/article/2027181/solving-the-mystery-of-the-empty-pdf-form.html#tk.nl_mwbest