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Not all "defects" are security bugs

Today's slashdot is linking to an interesting article on Information Week, the analyzed took the results of an DHS (Department of Homeland Security) Scan about some used FOSS-Software.

Its especially interesting for me, as they used Coverity, a static code analyzing tool, which I came across not long ago during the Embedded World last year A like system is used in our company for automotive embedded software analyzises, so I know how these software works and how the reports looks like. .

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ReCaptcha Plugin updated

First of all, I wish you A happy new year.

Now to the message: I updated the recaptcha lifetype plugin to address this issue: (More)

Just another entry for the todo list

Stumbled upon another interseting link, so there is another "Draft-Post" in the queue. Doing that, I just looked at the "(Manage) Posts" tab on my lifetype installation.  *Bff*. Currently, the posts marked "draft" are realy piling up, and on the other side the posts-per-week-counter is going down.

Mmmh, at the moment, there is just too less time for all the stuff: The day job, my master thesis, my hobbies, the holidays are not far away (and still presensts to get) etc, etc...

But there is some really interesting stuff. I really have to find an quiet hour to dig into it.

This is usually the way I write my articles. I find something that is (at least) interesting to me. And if I am on the way digging into it, I usually think: That would be some material I'd like to blog about. Of course, with the hope, that some wanderes will land on my blog and find it also interesting.

So maybe, I gonna make a list of the -- say -- top five topics I'd like to post about, and let you decide, which one I should cope?

I'll think about that. 

Apples and Oranges, Firefox and Internet-Explorer

There is a saying: Never thrust statistics, that you didn't manipulate yourself. Basically, if read some report comparing something, you better make sure to analyize the funding of these reports.

Especially if the results are clearly favouring a specific product, and you find out, that the manufactor of this product sponsored the research report, than a red flag should rise. Well, this is common sense, and there is another thing people say in such situation: Whose bread I eat, whose song I sing.

This behavoiur is seen in every industrial sector. But there is definitly a master out there, especially in the IT sector, and very especially it comes to Open Source. Other tell, that probably, they patented this scheme. If you search for MS vs Linux or MS vs FLOSS in generall, you will find many reports telling that the commerical product is much better, cheaper, safer, more reliable, and probably also makes better coffee.

But this time, IMHO, they gone further if not too far: This time, they did not really try to outsource the opinion making, this time the report in question actually made by Jeff Jones, Security Strategy Director, Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Group.

Okay, it is actually not "this time", as Jeff already showed his unbiased view this summer, when he compared Vista with Linux and MacOS. This articles are interesting, as they give a glimpse on the sophisticated science of adding and omitting information to biasing the outcome. But please read one example-reaction on this by yourself, as I wanted to focus on the Firefox-IE-rant.

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YAML Template

Today, I reworked my article about the template set. I hope, it better understandable now. Enjoy!

However, I am currently looking into YAML3, so I hope that I soon can present an update to the "bullet browserproof" template set.

BTW: If someone is using my templates, I would like to make a small gallery... So please post your link!

FinePix 9600

Now, some thousand pictures (10 Gigabytes) later, it is time for a first resume.

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Lifetype file version check after upgrade

In case you updated to 1.2.5, and the File Version Check fails : The upgrade package 1.2.4 - 1.2.5 misses the file files/files_properties.php, where all the md5s are stored.

To fix, get the full package and just additionally install this file afte applying the upgrade.