Martin @ Blog

Today, VNU announced that Business Media Europe has been sold to a British company called 3i. Since my employer, Tweakers.net, is part of VNU Business Publications Benelux, which on its turn is part of VNU Business Media, this means that Tweakers.net is also sold. Interesting. (more…)

On Slashdot and Groklaw, there is a news item about forking of OpenOffice.org by Novell. When reading an article, there is no prove for an actual fork, an as is pointed out by Jono Bacon, it seems that Groklaw is just using a sensational heading. As Andries Brouwer points out, the news at Groklaw is probably inspired by the disklike of Microsoft by PF.

Today I came across a weblog entry of Jorge O. Castro
(whiprush) on Planet Gnome which mentions Google Reader. While I didn’t know this service of Google, I decided to give it a try. I must say, it is a very nice AJAX-based webapplication for following various websites. There are several ‘packages’ available, such as photography (see screenshot below) and Technology (which consits of sites such as Slashdot, Digg, Wired, etc.). It is possible to add other RSS-feeds to the list as well, and you even don’t have to look them up yourself, because you can easily search for them using Google. Even the Tweakers.net RSS-feeds are known by Google. I think this may be the first RSS-reader I will use regularly in the feature because of the ease of use (and also because of the nice pre-package feed-packages).

Google recently introduced Google Codesearch, a search engine for programming code. While Google was already a valuable source of information for hackers (it could be used to find passwords, usernames and so on), Codesearch enables even more possibilities. Obviously, it is quite easy to find patterns of potential vulnerable code, like buffer overflows, backdoor passwords and even proprietary code which is unintentionally published on public accessible websites.

One can think this is ‘bad’ or something, but I think it is very good that flaws in programs are easy to find and exposed to the entire world. This is the only way to prevent companies and individuals from relying on ‘security by obscurity’. And it is good for ‘closed source’ companies to realise that even while there program sources are not widely available, it is very hard to prevent people from getting it anyway. As some people say: ‘there are no secrets, only information you do not have yet’.

A nice list of stuff which can be found using Google Codesearch can be found on a weblog called kottke.org.