Jeff Clavier's Software Only

Cool hack of the day: WhatsUp

I am a sucker for data vizualization projects, especially when it comes to news and stock prices (my roots I guess, as this is what I was building as a young C developer). I particularly like this one: What’s Up, a news map display developed by Jeroen Wijering, a UI designer recently graduated from the Eidhoven Design Academy. It basically displays headlines from a bunch of news (geolocated) RSS feeds on a planisphere. Jeroen says that he plans to make this available as a screen saver at some point.

You can launch it full screen here. Very cool.

Better get that VPN configured before logging again on an open Wifi hotspot

On the first day of Bar Camp, Jacob “Jake” Appelbaum (aka ioerror) did a brief talk on Wifi/IP network hacking. Essentially he demonstrated how easy it is for someone who knows about networking APIs and protocols to develop a sniffer that will dump packets going around the network.

Most specifically, he showed a bunch of unencrypted username/passwords: POP3 email access, Web 2.0 application like Flickr,… Jake’s point in doing this was to raise our awareness on how dumb we are to connect to an open network without using a VPN tunnel that encrypts all data, and accesses Internet services from a secure area. And I can tell you that whoever got his Flickr or email username/password read out loud to the audience became instantly aware of the issue.

So as a minimum: make sure that your email provider allows you to to retrieve your email via a secured connection (like Gmail does), don’t access your bank accounts from open networks (and no, the fact that https is used might not be enough) and if you can, get a VPN connection.

Mine is configured, and ready for the next conference.

Update: It sounds like Google is readying a Wifi VPN software tool alongside a Google Wifi service. Om has more.

Tags: Bar Camp

Not an expanded craigslist, a fake one

Fakesters are having a go at craigslist with this copycat (www.pay-craigslist.org) that looks like an international version of the original site.

Craig says:

 SCAM: site faking craigslist

Just to let people know in a hurry, the site

www.pay-craigslist.org

has no relation to us, and we're escalating dramatically now.

Please get the word out.

Thanks!

 PS: If you link to this fake domain in your posts, add a rel=”nofollow” to the href.

A work around for the "HTTP protocol violation" error in NewsGator

If you are, like me, a user of NewsGator, and, like me, an avid fan of the Gillmor Gang, you have not been able to read the Gang's blog (or the blog of the producer, Doug Kaye) for a while due to an "HTTP violation" error.

Having checked that those blogs actually contained new posts, I have found this work around on Andrew's blog:

Create a file called outlook.exe.config in the same directory as Outlook (on one of my machines, this is in c:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office11). Then add the following text to this file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="Windows-1252"?>
<configuration>
  <system.net>
    <settings>
       <httpWebRequest useUnsafeHeaderParsing="true" />
    </settings>
  </system.net>
</configuration>

Stop Outlook (make sure it's really stopped - Outlook takes a few seconds, at least, to truly stop), and restart it.

Note that you might get a popup stating "This operation failed" the first time you try to restart Outlook. The following attempt works. This worked for me on Windows 2000 and Windows XP (latest SPs), and Outlook 2003.

His post actually contains an explanation of the issue (but I doubt you care). Thank you Andrew!