WorkPapers Release Around The Corner

After much anticipation from the WorkPapers user community, I am proud to announce that invitations for WorkPapers trials and testing will go out throughout the following week. After watching some fireworks tonight (from Honolulu Hawaii), I will setup the first pre-production release that will be setup as invitationware. Those who actively participate in this phase over the next couple weeks will receive a free one year subscription to the service. Please notice the ‘actively participate’ qualifier. That means posting to the user forum with bugs since there will still be a few, suggesting improvements, commenting on your own work application … Continue reading WorkPapers Release Around The Corner

Whew!! Coming Up For Air

Hi All. Crawled out of the dark coding dungeon for some fresh air over the next couple days. Then back into web site touch-ups, alotta photoshop, and some rounding out the rough edges, then deployment. Last night uploaded a milestone version of the web version of WorkPapers to the repository. This version pretty much does all of the base functions – tying together workstep and results editors to the tree view, attachments, project tracking, and the first step of Google Apps integration.Okay, okay, I know you all have no idea on what I am describing… thinking out loud. But when … Continue reading Whew!! Coming Up For Air

New WorkPapers Release Coming

Hi All! It’s been a while, but since then have been hard at work programming on a couple of projects with a couple of languages. Over the past couple weeks, since mentioning WorkPapers in a blog posting, several users have replied via email calling, requesting, and some demanding a new release. Well, it’ll be out in a few weeks. This next release will enhance the previous version synchronize, file exchange, and export – with a few long-awaited reporting upgrades. A subsequent release will include WorkPapers Web Edition with client software synchronization and/or pure filthy rich online experience. This mix of … Continue reading New WorkPapers Release Coming

MySQL Setup On OS X 10.5x – The Missing Procedures

This posting is basically to document the procedure for setup, so others do not have to go through the ordeal that I went through. I am not sure why more explicit instructions are available , since when I Googled for the run-time errors that were produced as a result of using the MySQL DMG package, there were a myriad of comment postings and forum postings but very few solution. First, download the DMG package and the tar file (both) from MySQL download site. DO NOT INSTALL THE DMG INSTALL PACKAGE. Unpack the tarball and move to /usr/local/yourMySQLVersionFolder (<-substitute with your … Continue reading MySQL Setup On OS X 10.5x – The Missing Procedures

Twitter Phishing Rampant – Today’s Flavor

The Twitter buzz (<- that’s funny) this morning were a bunch of postings about a phishing direct mail that would include a link which included a link to bzpharma.net (don’t click here if my blog software automatically links!!). When the end-user goes to the site, malicious software is executed that retrieves the user’s Twitter password, then spam direct messages all of their followers. Nasty and too bad. I have grown to like Twitter and other similar services as yet another networking medium. After seeing several hundred tweets (I’m up to 700-plus followers on @sysrisk), lo and behold, I received one … Continue reading Twitter Phishing Rampant – Today’s Flavor

This is big news on a cyberattack…. 75,000 Systems Breached!

This is big news on a cyberattack…. 75,000 Systems Breached! This Washington Post article just released details one of the biggest cyber attacks in history that has been recently revealed. The attack started in late 2008, but was just discovered last month. Again, highlighting the sophistication of hacker groups, demonstrating that they are gaining power equivalent or greater than nation states ability to protect themselves from such attacks.Read more at the link above. Continue reading This is big news on a cyberattack…. 75,000 Systems Breached!

Facebook, Social Networking, and Spammers

TechCrunch has an interesting article that claims Facebook drives 44% of social networking. This is very interesting to me in the sense that a lot has recently been chronicled about how hackers and spammers are targeting social networks more, for a couple of reasons – recent new computer users are introduced to social networks as a method of keeping interest in computing. Some even purchase computers just to social network and keep up with peer conversations. Those newer users are prime targets. Another reason is that all the user profiles are there for exploitation without a phisher, hacker, or spammer … Continue reading Facebook, Social Networking, and Spammers

GMail/Picasa Identity Leakage

Be careful when using Picasa and other Google applications with default nickname and web address settings, since the number that Google assigns to your ID in those cases is easily decipherable. The number is just a replacement for your ID and is consistent, not random. This is not a new issue, and rather old, but I still see a lot of Picasa links that have those numbers in them. Without changing the defaults, an attacker can replace the URL in a page with javascript:alert(_user.name) to obtain the relevant ID. Read more in this Lifehacker article. Continue reading GMail/Picasa Identity Leakage

Anti-Piracy – First Internet Cafe Arrest In Japan

This Japanese news article reports the first “internet cafe” arrest in Japan since the anti-piracy download law went into effect on Jan. 1, 2010. However, I am fairly certain that this is the first such arrest altogether – somebody please comment if I am wrong. Toward the end of last year and the first days of the new year, many blogs and statistic sites were reporting on the number of shares on peer-to-peer software available on the internet. Remarkably, most of the numbers did not change a bit. I find this unusual since Japanese go to great lengths to stay … Continue reading Anti-Piracy – First Internet Cafe Arrest In Japan

Facebook As Biggest Security Threat

Yes, I know… ‘Another Network World article’, you say. Yes, because lately they have been hitting trends fairly accurately…. read on!This article outlines a Sophos survey of businesses that  ranks Facebook as the biggest threat simply (at 60% surveyed) because it has become the biggest social network, followed by MySpace (t 18%, then Twitter at17%. Well, I tend to agree with that reasoning, but think the threat is somewhat limited on a couple of levels. In more secure environments in the financial industry, we have seen much broader implementation of Websense that keeps employees out of such sites through filtering … Continue reading Facebook As Biggest Security Threat