Dan Price’s blog
Weblog of a cyber-geek

According to a recent development with PS3 processor chips, hackers may well soon be able to hack 8-character passwords in a matter of hours.

This is certainly a startling development. Personally, I had no idea that PS3 CPUs were even this powerful anyway - supposedly much more powerful than a regular home computer when it comes to processing power.

However, this development won’t affect my choice of games console! For those not in the know, I hope to very soon be getting an Xbox 360! Might be a while off yet though…

OK we’ve been learning about Operating Systems and more recently, security on computers at college. We installed firewall software (ZoneAlarm to be precise) which was a new experience for some of the class members, although not myself.

Afterwards, we were told to open the Telnet service by going to Start, right clicking My Computer > Manage, then Services and then  turning it on from there. We pinged a few people’s IP address in the classroom and had great fun creating new folders etc. by typing “telnet [IP address]” and then the chosen command. The whole purpose of this was to see what the firewall would block and what it wouldn’t. The ping tests we usually blocked off (timed out) but the telnet thing wasn’t as long as the service was activated.

Anyway, I wanted to try this back home with my bros PC. Sadly, he’s running XP Home and telnet doesn’t come included with it. I tried going from his computer to mine as I’m running XP MCE 2005 but the router probably blocked it since I couldn’t connect. (more…)

Before today, I knew that Google gave Mozilla, the corporation behind the Firefox browser, a reasonable amount of it’s money. However, I had no idea it was as high as 85% - this begs the question that if there was a conflict of interest between Google and Firefox, would Google use it’s power to manipulate the browser to it’s own gains? According to Christopher Soghoian’s article, Google has already been playing with Fire.

You’re probably wondering why Google is even interested in promoting Firefox.

Here’s a couple of quick facts regarding the browser and the search engine: (more…)

I’ve been reading Stu Nicholl’s CSS Play article recently, entitled “Back To Basics” - I know some of this, but some of it I didn’t know. I’ve been searching for a fix to ensure that the background of my site fills the screen on IE from the top to the bottom, whether or not there is that much content. It’s definitely worth a read in my opinion.

It’s that time again - Wikipedia is begging for finance publicly, but this time their campaign is being commanded by an illiterate monkey. The notice is on a rotated basis, but this is the message I received when visiting the site:

The site is already getting a bad reputation, and some have nicknamed it “Wreckipedia” so this isn’t the perfect time to start employing a primemate to run the publicity campaign!

For those members on Webmaster-Talk, you may have noticed I’ve been a bit quiet during the past couple of days. No I haven’t gone mute or lost 3 fingers on each hand, I’ve been busy with a new project.

This ambitious project is a new template download service, Whym Templates, where I hope to upload free templates designed by yours truly for public use. It’s not an original idea, but one difference is that I’m not forcing anyone to place links in the footer.

I hope you’ll all support me with this - it’ll only be useful if people actually download something!

Dan

A while ago, I signed a petition on the Prime Minister’s web site regarding forcing BT to upgrade to a fibre optic network. As I was browsing and the issue of broadband speed crept back into my mind, I decided to check it out again.

BT (British Telecom) is scheduling an overhaul of it’s services, which will finish by 2011. The current plan is to upgrade all homes to using IP telephones and cables which should bring broadband speeds up to a reasonable 24mbps.

However, Japan and other countries are already using broadband speeds which are considerably faster than this! 2011 is over 3 years away still so the speed gap will continue to grow between now and then.

I urge every British person reading this to sign the petition on the Prime Minister’s site - it only takes a minute and I think it’s worth it! Do you want to be using 24mbps in 2011 when Japan amongst other countries are using something like 150mbps?! Sign it now!

I’ve been searching around for a long time to find a solution to IE6’s stupid lack of support for transparent PNGs. I read numerous tutorials to find hacks for IE6, with methods including Javascript, HTC files and the official Microsoft hack. However, I repeatedly disappointingly found I could get none of these working (I’m aware some people did get them to work, but I couldn’t).

Then thanks to a genius on the Webmaster-Talk forums, Adam Senour, I found a fantastic way to get these working on my site. The solution is actually very simply, is purely CSS based and doesn’t involve making any new images! Here we go:

1) Rather than using the img tag in your HTML file, make an empty div tag and give it an ID. For this tutorial, I’ll call it “logo”. (more…)

After finding out that my cPanel mail ports are blocked at college, I decided to set up a proxy to work around this (I can use both sides of my brain you know! :D)

This however proved harder than I thought it would be. I started off with cPanel proxy, and uploadable file that uses subdomains to hide the port numbers. However, after installing and testing, I found all this actually did was redirect to the port after login, which is basically what I’ve already done - therefore, I doubt this will work at college (haven’t yet tested).

I therefore decided to go for another proxy option - using CGI scripts. I chose CGIProxy as it says you can also login to other sites without restriction (other GCI/PHP scripts probably do this too, but oh well…) So it’s all installe, and I’ve set up a the address as a password protected directory from inside cPanel, but once I actually get down to what I want to do, check email through the proxy, I find it is incredibly slow at loading the inbox so this probably isn’t such a fantastic idea as it seemed.
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That’s the claim by Steven Frank in his article on the subject. OK so he’s even more of a Mac-addict than myself and he’s completely biased on the subject - this quote says it all:

“It’s important for me as a Mac developer to use Windows once in a while, because it’s a fantastic lesson on how do absolutely everything wrong when designing software.”

Despite this, the article is worth a read, for both Mac and Windows fans - Mac fans to nod “I agree” at the end of every line of the rant, Windows fans to desperately disagree with every dig he makes against their beloved virus-infested, crash-prone pile of junk. Anyway…. (more…)