Croudsourced botnets

December 8th, 2010

MasterCard and visa had been taken down by a group of volunteers operating a botnet operation, fascinating, disturbing.

http://verbophobia.blyon.com/mastercard-ddos/

google two-step authentication

October 3rd, 2010

A couple of weeks ago, google announced a 2-factor authentication system for its marketplace apps (for government and education only, just now)

in their statement Google said : “Two-step verification is built on an open standard designed to allow integration with other vendors’ authentication technologies in the future. We are also open sourcing our mobile authentication app so that companies can customize it as they see fit.”

so i was wondering where is the code for this open source project? yours truly buzzed the question to Ryan Boyd who blogged it at the Google Apps developer blog and he replied with an answer:

the open source project:
http://code.google.com/p/google-authenticator/

It’s based on OATH (unrelated to OAuth):
http://www.openauthentication.org/

Thanks Ryan

testing twitter oauth with twitter-tools

October 3rd, 2010

will it work?

playing with apigee

October 3rd, 2010

a really nice API platform
took me a few minutes to set up my (amazingly useful) API, check it out!

re:Windows phone better for enterprise development

September 11th, 2010

a colleague of mine sent me this post from Tim Huckaby

Tim says that Silverlight is a game changer in the application development arena.

I really hope so but I’m not so sure, heres why:

Every developer who wanted to go mobile could have done so (in tears) with iPhone OS and surely with android,

MS brings great *free* developer tools, Along with its well tested Silverlight/XNA platforms, this brings into the game tons of MS developers who stood on the sidelines in pain for the last few years. BTW, i wonder how many of them will bother to dip their tows now..

It also lowers the bar for entry point developers, we can also expect the likes of Google cool appinventor coming for the MS platform sooner rather than later.

regarding enterprise development, I don’t know, if your users use iPhone or android or blackberry, it doesn’t matter that your IT division is so keen on windows phone development, users often are just like your 17yo daughter, security and seamless LOB integration not always their top priority.

personally i cant wait to see the thing in the wild and maybe even own one, time will tell how it will sail the seas.

windows azure MMC wont install with multiple SDK versions

June 19th, 2010

if you cannot install the windows azure MMC check out this post:

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsazuremmc/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=3387

worked for me :)

test twit tools

May 11th, 2010

it is!

twitting the blog

May 11th, 2010

is it? is it?

Sanity

May 11th, 2010

updated to 2.9.2
what a great way to spend the evening~

Gmail offers free SMS messages

March 12th, 2010

Gmail just prompt me that it has a new offering,

it invites me to send SMS to my friends for free

this is a tempting offer from a for-profit organization and one might think what Google gets out of it?

considering the search business yields little potential, i do not often send valuable facts via SMS, i do make contact, confirm one or send small tokens of info valuable to none but the recipient.

the other much spoke about niche may be more interesting, it is the social networks of course, Google have been trying relentlessly to make headway in this area with little success. attaching a phone number to a contact will allow Google to expand its new buzz and wave efforts to the mobile world.

evaluating the traffic and data (they do process the messages you know) in these networks will for sure make for the money those SMS’s originally cost.

this is all very well, my issue, as in the buzz application, concerns with privacy, why, Google, do you think i will expose my friends phones to your network, as i see it, if i haven’t entered my phone number in my Google profile it means that I’m not interested in Google (or anyone else) knowing it. please don’t make my friend tell it.