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Saturday, May 14th, 2005 at 1:41 AM

I’ve just added a new gallery section to my site featuring photos from my various projects. The storage and bandwidth are provided by Flickr and imported into my site using the great Flickr Gallery WordPress plugin, which I modified to suit my needs. Go check it out!

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 14th, 2005 at 1:41 am and is filed under WordPress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Wednesday, May 11th, 2005 at 1:14 AM

Broadcatching (and integration) must be picking up. It’s now early Wednesday, and there are just over 60,000 completes on Monday’s “24″ episodes. That’s a lot of viewers, and a lot of data — over 20,000 GB being thrown around the net.

For those who don’t know about it, “broadcatching” is making use of BitTorrent P2P software (usually Azureus) and RSS to automatically download (HD)TV shows from BitTorrent tracker sites like btefnet.net. With an Azureus RSS plugin or optional TVTAD software, the RSS feed for the BitTorrent site is loaded and scanned for shows that match your criteria. If any shows match, the corresponding .torrent file is downloaded and opened with your BitTorrent client. The show is downloaded from the swarm of other people grabbing the show as well. Lately, there seems to be a significant amount of users sharing TV shows, making for very fast download speeds.

As for the legality of sharing TV shows on the internet, I’m not yet aware of any positive or negative repercussions. I would be interested to hear of some cases, though. I can’t imagine that it makes too much difference to TV execs just yet, as the broadcatching crowd is generally a techie bunch, but look what happened with Napster and the whole digital music scene. I can see where issues might come into play, as BitTorrent-downloaded TV shows are pre-edited to remove commercials, so the advertisers would no longer be making their money. For now, though, I’ll enjoy my 350 MB HDTV no-commercial episodes of “24″ and others a short few hours after their official broadcast.

Update: Well, it looks like I spoke just hours too soon. The MPAA is now after TV sharing sites. Btefnet.net appears to be offline for now. So much for automation. I’m not aware of any other TV sharing sites that offer RSS.

5/25/2005 Update: There are a small few BitTorrent TV sites on the net again, however they have no RSS feed as of this writing. Check out BT-TV.net and EZTV@EFNet.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 11th, 2005 at 1:14 am and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Monday, May 9th, 2005 at 5:21 PM

Yesterday, an article on Slashdot about Dashboard widgets got my attention. It has been discovered that widgets pose a possible threat to users’ systems, as they are automatically run when downloaded. A specially crafted web page can direct your browser to download a widget, and Safari’s default behavior is to decompress the .zip archive. The Finder recognizes the .wdgt extension of the newly unzipped file, and launches the widget. In most cases, this makes for a very user-friendly Dashboard experience. However, user-friendliness almost always comes at a cost. Any code contained within the widget gets run, and that’s where the threat comes in. Some code gets run on the target system without any action on the user’s part, other than loading a web page in Safari.

Widgets do have a security layer provided by Apple, and it is built into the Info.plist files within each widget. A standard widget has no access to the internet, the command-line, files outside the widget bundle, Java applets, browser plugins, or widget plugins. In short, without your permission, a widget is effectively in its own sandbox and can do nothing harmful. When a widget needs access to one or more of these resources, it asks for your permission upon launch. When you click “Accept”, the widget can do whatever it needs.

From a security-oriented point of view, I think the main problem with the widget security layer is that the would-be “attacker,” a widget with bad intentions, defines its own security limitations. Mentioned above, each widget’s security is controlled by the Info.plist file written by it’s author and stored inside the widget bundle. A better solution might be to present the user with a dialog that details what resources the widget is requesting, allowing the user to decide what the widget should be allowed to do. This problem is made worse by an overly simple security interface. Different levels of security controlled by one “Accept” button. If the widget is going to define it’s own security limitations and the user will only see one button for any or all of them, why have more than one level of security? A single “AllowFullAccess” key in the Info.plist file would suffice. Future versions of Dashboard may see a security preference where users can control the level of access they would like widgets to have. This may be a bit of a problem, though, because not all users are aware of what a widget needs to do it’s job, and they really shouldn’t have to know. A solution lies somewhere between what the user knows about the inner workings of a widget and what security allowances are necessary for the widget to function. At best, the user needs to be able to easily control what a widget can do without knowing how it works. This is the type of situation in which Apple’s wizards excel, and I look forward to an elegant yet effective solution.

So what can you do to protect yourself right now? The front line for stopping harmful widgets from automatically installing themselves is to change your Safari download settings, as Safari expands widget archives upon download. In Safari’s “General” preferences tab, uncheck “Open ‘Safe’ files after downloading.” With this unchecked, all widgets and files that download and would normally be auto-opened are simply saved to your default download location in their respective format. While you can still “infect” yourself by opening the archive and running the widget, nothing happens automatically without your permission. Turning off the opening of “safe” files may cause you to go through one more step after downloading something, but your computer’s security is worth the time it takes to switch out of Safari and examine a file before you run it.

The second thing you can do to help protect yourself is learn where widgets are stored in Mac OS X. While widgets can be run from any location via a double-click, they aren’t listed in the Widget Bar (which is activated by clicking the plus symbol in the lower-left of Dashboard). Widgets listed there are kept in the main Library folder inside the Widgets folder, at /Library/Widgets/ inside your boot drive. Optionally, widgets can be kept in separate folders for each user, under your Home folder, then following the same structure above. You can add or remove widgets from either folder, and the Widget Bar will be updated. Stephan.com, the origin of the widget security threat report, claims that “the Dashboard bar is not very good about updating when a widget is removed, but eventually it figures things out.” From my own testing, though, I find that the Widget Bar gets updated as soon as you add or remove widgets and activate it again. Alternatively, you could use Widget Manager to control all the widgets you use.

Finally, you can also learn how to stop an active widget in its tracks. By opening Activity Monitor, in the /Applications/Utilities/ folder, you can see all current processes running on your machine. If you type “dashboard” into the “Filter” search field at the top, you will filter the process list to only dashboard widgets (and whatever else may happen to have “dashboard” in its title). Using the list of widgets, you can click on one and click the red “Quit Process” button, then “Force Quit,” and that widget will be stopped, regardless of what it was doing. While not the best solution, it’s a fairly simple way to end an annoying widget that just won’t quit.

Dashboard widgets are a great addition to Mac OS X, and I would hate to see them become a source of spyware-type problems for users, but the fact remains that they are a rather large opening for such a thing to happen. Widgets allow anyone to write custom Javascript, Cocoa, or shell scripts to do almost anything they want on your computer. While most will use it to create slick-looking and useful widgets, the possiblity for creating harmful ones is there, and your best defense is being aware of the situation and acting in accordance.

Update: Several other sites commented on the widget problem:
The Unofficial Apple Weblog: The Problem With Widgets (Part 1, Part 2)
Macworld:News: Dashboard: Widget (In)Security
Macworld:News: ‘Zaptastic’ widget demonstrates Dashboard exploit
The Mac Observer: Developer Demonstrates Dashboard Exploit

This entry was posted on Monday, May 9th, 2005 at 5:21 pm and is filed under Mac, Security, Widgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Saturday, May 7th, 2005 at 8:06 PM

I still find a surprising amount of people who are convinced that they won’t be able to open a Mac Mini and upgrade it. It’s incredibly easy to do. Other World Computing has a great (200MB!) video tutorial on opening and upgrading the Mac Mini, and it can be found here, along with videos for a bunch of other Mac models.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 7th, 2005 at 8:06 pm and is filed under Mac. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.