I recently came across this rather nifty new service (called ICE for short) from Adobe, which essentially allows you to add basic content management facilities to any website with zero coding and allow your clients to manage it via their browser. You just take a simple flat HTML page, add in some markup to identify editable regions and your done. Granted it has very basic WYSIWYG capabilities, but it is perfect for those small clients who only want basic editing capabilities and don't have much money to spend on implementing a fully featured solution even with an open source CMS such as the very cool Mura CMS.

If you already use Dreamweaver then you already have everything you need to get started and easily create Incontext editable regions, but there are in fact no special requirements for using this service, you do not need to use Dreamweaver other than to create the javascript files, so you could in effect just download a Dreamweaver trial to see how it works and get the code then you can insert the required markup via notepad if you wish. To use the service all you need to do is sign up for an Adobe ID, and then login to the IncontextEditing Admin portal. From here you setup and manage your sites. Check out the getting started video below.

Currently the InContext Editing service is FREE and in the forums Adobe have quoted that it will remain free until 2011, after which it will be a subscription service costing $10-$20 per month. This information was actually quite hard to find, I tried calling Adobe to enquire about pricing, I spoke to customer services, sales and technical support and amazingly no-one had any idea what Incontext Editing was or that it was even an Adobe product.

To get started with ICE try out these tutorials.

If you ever read your bike or car manual you will note that is does advise you to regularly check your tire pressure, especially before a long trip. Like most people this is something I rarely remember to do, but now I wish I had.

My motorcycle had been sitting in the garage for a couple of months since I had last used it, so I thought it was time to take it out for a ride. The first thing I noticed was how hard it was to push it out of the garage, which I thought was due to the fact that pushing my bike about was the only exercise my poor legs got, so were now out of practice. Over the next few weeks there were other niggling things I noticed such as cornering and roundabouts being a little hard to handle and leaning the bike too far was starting to feel very uncomfortable, which I put down to having become used to driving a car the past months and not using my bike, yes believe it or not at almost 40 years old I only recently got my car license, but despite all the avoidance for all these the years I am now quite happy to be warm and dry in my car and not out on my bike most of the time :-)

Anyway while standing behind my bike one day I noticed that the rear tire looked a little flat, which again is in the manual, if you leave your bike unused for any length off time, this will happen and you are not supposed to leave it on the stand for long periods of time.

So I popped down to the garage to put some air in my tires, but what a difference it made to the bike performance. After I have increased both tires to the correct pressure it was like having a new bike. suddenly it was easy to manuvere again, gliding back and forwards with little effort, handling was also improved dramatically, with corners and roundabouts suddenly a synch again, and I was able to lean without feeling like I might lose the bike. So it seems my conversion to a car driver hadn't made me lose my bike riding skills at all, it was just down to the tires, and as well as spoiling the enjoyment of riding, it was also clealry quite dangerous as the ability to manuvere and handle the bike was dramatically decreased. While this situation is obviously a lot more drastic on 2 wheels, the same obviously must be true for your car as well, it also increases your fuel comsumption and wears your tires out quicker too, so the moral of the story, RTFM and REGULALRY CHECK YOUR TIRE PRESSURE.

The real bummer is that I now think this was the cause of my problems with my old Vulcan 1600 which caused me to sell me as I thought it was simply too big for my first bike.

SECURITY ALERT!

There has been an increase in the past few days of sites being hacked via file upload scripts, particularly a number of high profile ColdFusion based sites.

The hacker gets in by uploading a CFM, ASP, PHP or other supported file type to the server and executing the file, thus escalating his access.

If you have any publicly accessible areas of your site where files can be uploaded then you should make sure you are not vulnerable, make sure that you are validating allowed uploaded file types and not allowing executable files to be uploaded.

In particular you should pay attention to things like image uploads on forums or other applications which people seem to think are safe because it only allows images to be upload. Many scripts will actually accept the uploaded file to the final destination folder before validating it and then deleting it if it is not valid, thus giving a window of opportunity for the file to be executed.

What happens is that the hacker uses a load testing tool that constantly executes the URL on your site where he knows his file will be uploaded (e.g. mysite.com/files/xyz.cfm), this is done many times a second, so when he then uploads the file it will get executed in those few milliseconds before it is deleted.

To avoid this scenario you should perform checks prior to accepting the upload, or upload the file to a temp location first that the hacker cannot access and then move it to the destination folder once it has been verified.

I recently decided to save myself some money and switch over to Sky Talk and Sky Broadband at home. They were offering a pretty good package deal and sky seemed to be rated quite high on broadband review sites. Sadly this turned out to be a big mistake.

Read more...

I guess this has been inevitable for some time, but the the WPA wireless security protocol has now been effectively hacked. A Japanese group have developed a hack for the WPA protocol and will be presenting their findings in Hiroshima on Sept 25th (http://www.ieice.org/ken/paper/20090925faPH/eng/).

See here for their full report:

http://jwis2009.nsysu.edu.tw/location/paper/A%20Practical%20Message%20Falsification%20Attack%20on%20WPA.pdf

If you are using WEP(already hacked) or WPA, I would strongly encourage you to switch to the WPA2 protocol as soon as possible. If you are using WPA with AES, you should be fine, for now. This hack currently affects WPA using TKIP. But if you have to switch things up might as well go to WPA2 with its newer version of AES. It's only a matter of time before this exploit is actively used, so time is critical.

Here's also a report on this from Network World:

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/082709-new-attack-cracks-common-wi-fi.html