Dear reader,

Looking at recent developments in technology, a few news items caught my attention over the last couple of days.

IT has always been an interesting business. But the last 5 to ten years, it has become all about money. How do I mean? Well, companies are looking at the cheapest outsourcing solution available, which is often reversed years later due to rising cost in the countries or regions they outsourced to. The news I believe is interesting is of a slightly different nature: Hackers now outsource their work: It is cheaper to have people in India crack captcha’s than try to hack your way through them (!!). Read the article here. It killed me.

Hans Reiser, founder of the ReiserFS, a filesystem for the Linux operating system has murdered his wife and was found guilty after having confessed. He’s jailed for 15 years. Did he do it because her bits didn’t fit?? Read the news here.

Bloomberg made a small error last week by (accidentally?!) publishing Steve Jobs orbituary - scaring me and a big portion of the planet with me. Lots of discussions all over the internet, but up till now it seems That Steve Jobs is still alive and kicking - let’s hope so. We’ll see the ninth, as Apple is getting ready to hold an event announcing new products. If he’s dead, we’ll no by that date.

Microsoft has released the beta version of Internet Explorer 8 - promising this browser will respect common Web Standards. We don’t know which standards it will respect, but according to testers it looks (relatively) promising. Maybe the big dog from Redmond is really changing certain aspects of doing business?? Let’s all hope so.

Well, that’s about it for me. I hope you’ve enjoyed this post and my remarks (cynical, I know). I’d love to see your opinions in the comments.

Have a great day,

Servaas

Google, provider of the fastest growing mail on the planet, never sleeps. Recently Google has been concentrating on security related features, and the latest is no exception. Google now allows you to monitor what Gmail sessions you have running, even if by remote programs that you allowed. You are back in control.

Your email account can contain a lot of personal information, from bank alerts to love letters. Email that, I’m sure, you don’t always want other people to see. We understand how important your Gmail accounts are to you, so we’re adding a new layer of information and control. With this new feature, you can now track your recent sessions and you can also sign yourself out remotely.

I think this is getting real interesting, as I have often wondered how I would be able to keep track of al the external programs logging in to different google products, and if it is still relatively secure or not. I also believe this move could help bring awareness to people about security risks.

Read more details about it on Google’s Gmail blog here.

A couple of students at the University of Amsterdam have developed a small piece of software that scans web based software for security leaks and vulnerabilities. The current version of the program, WAD (Web Application Detector) supports three of the most popular platforms on the internet today:

1. Wordpress
2. Joomla
3. phpBB

According to the report that was written by the students, it is often almost impossible for an administrator to know what is running in the webdirectories and what attack or flaw caused outages.

This report describes a way to find out what applications and which versions are present inside a directory tree on a web server. A proof-of-concept is used to demonstrate the practical use. This tool enables web server administrators to act proactively and take measures before web applications are hacked.

You can find hte software as well as the links to the report here. The software will be moved to Sourceforge as soon as it has been approved.