The second idea for my 365 social ideas is news aggregation-based as well as usability-oriented. The idea is a cross between the fascinatingly simple Readability bookmarklet and the recently launched Danish online newspaper “Ugen” (Eng: “The Week”), which is a downloadable AIR-application for news reading.
We got the XKCD book “volume 0″ here at work yesterday, and I have of course skimmed through it many times already. I quickly found the solution to the page numbering scheme, but wanted to see if I could find a simple conversion formula from real number to XKCD page number and vice versa.
I just saw a link on Facebook, that I somehow had to interact with – it featured a not-that-dressed girl and said “Wanna C Something Hot?”/”Want 2 C Something Hot?” or variations of this. Well, clicking the link sent to me to an external site featuring a single button and the same image urging me to click it. When clicked, I came to some porn site. But why would several of my friends post links to this site, which incidentally sent me to a porn site? Well, as I soon after saw on Facebook, I had just posted the same link on my wall for all my friends to see. How?
It is a “simple” case of “click-jacking” and the site tricks you to click a Facebook share button, but disguises this as some other button. Please read on for full description.
UPDATE 2009-12-2: “Press the button or dog dies”/”Push the button or this dog dies” (located at pressthebuttonordogdies.com, but don’t go there) is a new such site. The target website is “thisblogrules.com” and the measures used are a little different but all in all the same anyway.
Furthermore, I have used bit.ly for tracking how much these links have been used so far on Facebook – it is pretty inflicting: The “hot” girl has been shared almost 59,000 times and the poor dog has been shared 5,309 times as of this writing. You can see the direct stats from the Facebook link.getStats API here: Somthing Hot and Or Dog Dies
Being a set of talented web developers in a trendy, cutting-edge digital agency, we have wanted to create and thus pitched on many an iPhone application – as the iPhone is just the slickest, meanest, coolest, hottest and most alluring device on the market. It has been so for a long time and it will be so for some time to come (but not that long).
But that craving for getting hands on building something for the iPhone is gone – completely. I’m sorry Apple, you might not miss me, but as things stand right now, I won’t miss you either. And I am certainly not alone – there is a large front in the developer community building up resentment against the policy of the App Store review process. A veritable boycott is brewing.
I was playing around with E4X last night working on an upcoming blog post about the capabilities of E4X. While playing, I was thoroughly reading the ECMA-357 standard, and found that there are some special rules about assignment and compound assignment, that produce truely unexpected results.
I will try to summarize common pitfalls and provide valid work-arounds.
As part of a larger project, I noticed an annoying thing, that kept consequently crashing Flash CS4 (on a Mac OS X Intel 10.6.1): Whenever I tried to copy or cut this one symbol from the stage (to place it in another layer), Flash crashed completely.
There were many conditions, that could have been the cause of this, but I managed to boil it down to something reportable.
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.
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.
I finally got the time to clean up the code for MXHR4AS3 – an implementation of the Digg-introduced concept of requesting several files from the server in one request and returning it as a multipart/mixed http response to reduce overhead. The original was implemented in JS, and I have further re-implemented it in AS3.
As promised, the code has been uploaded to Bitbucket. Please enjoy and by all means request access if necessary. Please refer to the new project page here for details.
Having found an interest in the DOM Level 2 Traversal and Range specification I will try to gather information about implementations first.
Before even testing whether implementations are conformant and/or where their differences lie, I will try simply to list all implementations.