A CD from Sony that can tell how many times you have copied it !!!
I can remember that Martin, a flat mate at University, used to leave his copy of New Scientist hanging around in the kitchen for us to read. Since that time I have often bought a copy and now check the website. A pretty astonishing catch in this months issue concerning a patent from Sony.
First of all it’s not astonishing from Sony since you may remember that they already made a complete mess with their previous attempt. Second, well, will they learn it’s easy to hack whether they try to use software or hardware ? Third this could easily backfire on them, I’m not sure how but a company that has been so stupid thus far is bound to mess up again ! People have figured out how to spy on which links you visited using CSS so spying on what you played with this type of device installed would probably be feasible.
Allowing people to transfer the music to play on mp3 players is obviously not in Sony’s interest. It’s not like they make mp3 players (can you hear the sarcastic tone?).
Maybe Sony should read Architectures of control and “PRM” over at ‘The Flowing Candy Bees’, they might realise how they could be liable again.
Published on
Monday, August 28, 2006 in
Code and Web.
Jeremiah Grossman demonstrates an issue with CSS and visited links which allows sites to verify the sites you have visited prior to theirs.
The issue/bug/vulnerability isn’t new, as comments explain, it was first discovered in 2002 and is well documented here at the seclist.org site.
CSS has a feature that can be abused to exactly the same ends. It is simpler, more accurate, and more easily abused than the timing attacks described in the above paper.
There is a demonstration here of how it works, on top of the Grossman post :
https://www.indiana.edu/~phishing/browser-recon/
It seems variations enable this hack on IE, FireFox, Opera and Mozilla unless there are plug-ins that block the browser from comparing with its history function…
A personal page service that allows you to choose what and where you add content, isn’t new, but when it just does that, then it quickly provides more than the others, with more freedom in the what (you add) area.
I recently finished work on a plug-in that provides personal page functions, so I appreciate the value of WebWag, it is very impressive. Both functional and usability aspects are good. This type of product is capable of easily expanding services and functions as well.
You can add pages that appear as tabs at the top of the page, rename the whole area, add, move delete the boxes that correspond to the different functions and content that appears. I didn’t find a way to edit the way the page looks (colours, font size, column width, page width). Also it could be me, but I couldn’t place search anywhere else but in the middle column.
The system is impressive however and I think it will only get better…
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