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Comment Re:Really? (Score 4, Informative) 251

If you knew anything about this story, which has been running since 2006, you'd know that it isn't about the actions of one individual; it's about a culture of using illegal techniques to obtain access to private information that has been rife at the News of the World (NotW) for years.

Rebekah Brooks, editor of the NotW at the time Milly Dowler's voicemail was hacked, accidentally admitted to a House of Commons committee a few years ago that the paper bribed police officers for information, though she later claimed that she didn't know the details of specific instances. As knowing the specifics would have left her open to prosecution, we can form an opinion of the merits of her claims of ignorance of what those she employed and directly supervised were doing on a regular basis.

Two people, one a NotW editor and the other a private investigator employed by the NotW, have served prison sentences for hacking the voicemail messages of members of the royal household.

The voicemail messages of senior politicians, including the former Deputy Prime Minister, and of senior military officers have been hacked, and this has been admitted by News International.

So far, News International has paid out more than £2million in out-of-court settlements, and it is believed they may have to pay as much as £40million to deal with all the claims against them by individuals whose privacy has been invaded.

This isn't the actions of one individual: it is a corporate policy of deliberate illegality for the sake of profit.

Comment Re:html and xhtml (Score 1) 222

Unfortunately, IE sends an Accept header which doesn't include text/html but does include */*, thereby ruling out content negotiation in the case of text/html versus application/xhtml+xml.

Comment Re:Old stuff (Score 1) 216

The IE click effect on TFA is a side-effect of the demo, not of the fundamental technique. If the original page markup includes a hidden iframe containing all the links of interest there will be no reloading and no click. It would look as if the page is taking a long time to finish loading because of the size of the iframe contents for any usefully large set of links, but a lot of sites seem to get that effect just by using Google Analytics, so the average user wouldn't notice any difference ;-)

Comment Re:Regexp-based address validation (Score 1) 516

There's more to it than that, as you'll find if you look at RFC 822 (part 6). For example, you need to check for conformance with the following syntax:

domain-literal =  "[" *(dtext / quoted-pair) "]"
atom        =  1*<any CHAR except specials, SPACE and CTLs>
quoted-pair =  "\" CHAR                     ; may quote any char
phrase      =  1*word                       ; Sequence of words
word        =  atom / quoted-string
address     =  mailbox                      ; one addressee
            /  group                        ; named list
group       =  phrase ":" [#mailbox] ";"
mailbox     =  addr-spec                    ; simple address
            /  phrase route-addr            ; name & addr-spec
route-addr  =  "<" [route] addr-spec ">"
route       =  1#("@" domain) ":"           ; path-relative
addr-spec   =  local-part "@" domain        ; global address
local-part  =  word *("." word)             ; uninterpreted
                                            ; case-preserved
domain      =  sub-domain *("." sub-domain)
sub-domain  =  domain-ref / domain-literal
quoted-string = <"> *(qtext/quoted-pair) <">; Regular qtext or
                                            ;   quoted chars.
qtext       =  <any CHAR excepting <">,     ; => may be folded
                "\" & CR, and including
                linear-white-space>
domain-ref  =  atom                         ; symbolic reference

(... and so on in enormous detail - I've definitely missed a few bits.)

Email address validation isn't as simple as people think ;-)

(OT: why does /.'s filter mistake a quote from an RFC for ASCII art, forcing me to post in Code mode?)
GNU is Not Unix

Richard Stallman Proclaims Don't Follow Linus Torvalds 965

StonyandCher writes "Here is an interview with Richard Stallman about a range of free software topics including GPLv3 and comment on the Microsoft patent issue. Stallman has a go at Linus Torvalds even suggesting that if people want to keep their freedom they better not follow Torvalds. From the interview 'Stallman: The fact that Torvalds says "open source" instead of "free software" shows where he is coming from. I wrote the GNU GPL to defend freedom for all users of all versions of a program. I developed version 3 to do that job better and protect against new threats. Torvalds says he rejects this goal; that's probably why he doesn't appreciate GPL version 3. I respect his right to express his views, even though I think they are foolish. However, if you don't want to lose your freedom, you had better not follow him.'"
Security

Web 2.0 Under Siege 170

Robert writes "Security researchers have found what they say is an entirely new kind of web-based attack, and it only targets the Ajax applications so beloved of the 'Web 2.0' movement. Fortify Software, which said it discovered the new class of vulnerability and has named it 'JavaScript hijacking', said that almost all the major Ajax toolkits have been found vulnerable. 'JavaScript Hijacking allows an unauthorized attacker to read sensitive data from a vulnerable application using a technique similar to the one commonly used to create mashups'"
Windows

Submission + - Pegasus mail client discontinued after seven years

bbc writes: "David Harris announced today that both development and distribution of Pegasus Mail will be discontinued starting immediately. Hardly any good e-mail clients exist, but Pegasus has consistently belonged to that club for 17 years. Its worst offenses are its quirkyness, and the strange preference of its developer to work on expanding HTML support instead of working on real features. For the past 9 years I have been able to live with that. It's been awhile since I lamented the death of a computer program."

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