Barklund.org

The twenty-seventh idea for my 365 social ideas is an idea which has spun off my “investigation” of the SnapABug service: create a bookmarklet, that when clicked let’s you mark a section of the current webpage you are viewing (in it’s current state etc.) and then snapshots this and uploads the image to your image sharing service of choice – popular choices being flickr or more shoot-from-the-hip style services like tinypic.

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After having written about the inner workings of SnapABug, I have now looked a bit further into signed applets and their permission levels. And the conclusion is, that the trust question is stupid.

SnapABug did the right thing, the only thing they could do. Untrusted (unsigned) code lives in a special sandbox and cannot use functions outside of this sandbox. The end user can change how much this sandbox has access to, but it is not trivial and the normal user would never touch that with a pitch fork. Trusted code lives in another sandbox with almost infinite possibilities. The end user can limit this sandbox too, but again almost no end user does that.

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I just saw the SnapABug website, and was quite impressed, until I actually tried to submit a bug. Unrestricted access to my computer, why would I grant that to an unknown applet? And why do you even require unrestricted access to all files etc. on my computer to create a screenshot?

Well, I delved into the application and found the answers – they could of course have done with a more restrictive permission.

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It took me quite a while, but I finally managed.

On IRC, the Danish Wikipedia channel on freenode, we have a bot running (built on Linky again built on PircBot). This bot’s primary purpose is to extend socalled wikilinks. That is, when someone writes Someone wrote silly stuff in the [[USA]] article again the bot replies http://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA – it expands the bracket-style links to proper URL’s.

The problem was the character encodings. Some use UTF-8 in this channel and others use ISO 8859-1. And how can you make the bot expand links for the Danish term [[Kødpålæg]] when written in either of the two encodings? The correct URL for this word is K%C3%B8dp%C3%A5l%C3%A6g The built-in UTF-8-decoder in Java will replace the “bad characters” with the Unicode replacement character U+FFFD, and thus the previous term written sent by a ISO 8859-1 client with Linky in UTF-8 mode would become K%EF%BF%BDdp%EF%BF%BDl%EF%BF%BDg, and in the reverse situation with Linky in ISO 8859-1 mode, the UTF-8 clients messages would be interpreted to K%C3%83%C2%B8dp%C3%83%C2%A5l%C3%83%C2%A6g. Both are very wrong.

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