Written on October 8, 2008 – 11:45 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Most web-based games might appear innocent, but a blogger from GUYA.NET proves that they can function as a way for the web’s bad guys to take over your webcam. When this blogger first heard about this phenomenon clickjacking, he tried to develop a game that could do the same thing. He discovered that the Achilles heel of Flash was the Flash Player Setting Manager. Nice piece of citizen journalism.
By creating some sort of overlay in a Javascript Game, users just think they’re trying to click a button as fast as possible. What they really do, is granting some voyeur access to their web cam. Check it out:
Kudos for Adobe, who fixed this problem by “framebusting the Setting Manager pages“. Supposedly, 99.9% of the users are protected from spies, pervs, or whatnot. The issue still exists for Java, SilverLight, DHTML games and applications though. For details on this I gladly refer to ha.ckers.org.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on September 5, 2008 – 3:52 pm
Guest blogger, sharing views on The Next Web
This is a guest post by Kilian Valkhof, co-organizer of Fronteers
The web is divided, there are people that adhere to the international standards and have their websites work in all browsers, and cowboy coders, called that way because they ‘code without rules’. Unfortunately, cowboy coders far outnumber real web developers. It’s time to change that.
Fronteers is the dutch branch organization for front-end developers (the people that write CSS, HTML, JavaScript and AJAX) and the first of it’s kind internationally. It was set up last year in September and is run completely by volunteers. Within a year, they already have around 120 members, a figure that continues to grow.
Why is this good? Members of Fronteers are actively working on making their websites better, and making them work for more people. A wholly different world from the “it works in my browser”-excuses of old. As more people start working like this, the web will become better for everyone.
That is why Fronteers is organizing a two day conference on the 11th and 12th of September. With a heavy focus on CSS and JavaScript, it’s sure to be of interest for anyone working with the web. During those two days, industry heavyweights such as Dean Edwards, Andy Clarke, Bert Bos (W3C), Christian Heilmann (Yahoo!) and Stuart Langridge (Lugradio) will talk about topics ranging from Maintainable CSS to JavaScript closures and from the CSS box-model to the HTML5 video elements.
As is the case in so many professions, there is not just one good way to build websites. That’s why the conference also has a secondary track where there will be in-depth discussions on topics such as CSS, SEO, and Accessibility. A perfect opportunity to ask Christian Heilmann of Yahoo! about their website, or the makers of the Dutch Web Accessibility Guidelines about said guidelines.
Of interest to many web workers will also be a presentation held by Pete LePage. LePage is a member of the Microsoft Internet Explorer team and currently works on their new browser, Internet Explorer 8. The presentation is said to provide insight into the browsers’ improvements that are yet to come.
The two-day conference costs 250 euros. Members of the Fronteers organization get a discount. For more information about the congress, visit the congress website.
Written on June 6, 2008 – 5:01 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Netvibes’ chief architect François Hodierne announced the opening of netvibes.org, a website dedicated to Netvibes’ Open Source projects: “By giving away our technology, we hope to foster innovations in the widget and personal-page space, and launch a discussion about their wide implementation.” Netvibes widgets are based on UWA, the Netvibes Universal Widget API. ‘Universal’ since UWA-based widgets run on any platform that supports common Web standards (HTML/JavaScript/CSS). That means iGoogle too.
Netvibes.org is basically a sneak-preview of what’s really coming as the Netvibes developers need some more feedback before the project officially launches. Developers who want to give UWA a try, can work on three projects now:
- The UWA JavaScript Runtime: JavaScript libraries that make it possible to run UWA widgets
- The PHP Exposition libraries: make it possible to parse and compile UWA widgets
- The Exposition widget server: makes it possible to serve widgets to users, notably within an iframe.
I love the paradox of open source. Netvibes says it “gives away” their technology, yet they will probably never turn the personalized homepage into a open source project. Thus what Netvibes (and most other web companies do), is giving away little pieces of the technology - almost everything but the core technology -, so more service-related widgets will flood the web. That gives them a) a better image and b) more functionality.
adobe, adobe flash, Adobe Flash Player, clickjacking, DHTML, Java, javascript, security, Silverlight
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The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show of, the future of the Web. (
