JohnGrahamCumming - Slashdot User

Submission + - The Equationater (equationater.com)

Submitted by

JohnGrahamCumming

on Thursday October 02, 2008 @08:14AM

JohnGrahamCumming writes: "I had an itch that needed scratching... I needed to render equations on the web and I didn't want to rely on something like MathML because of poor browser coverage. So, I created The Equationater. Type in an equation in LaTeX format and it is instantly turned into a PNG file that you can download or link to."

Submission + - Detecting copy/paste and clone stamp image forgery (jgc.org)

Submitted by

JohnGrahamCumming

on Wednesday February 13, 2008 @07:01PM

JohnGrahamCumming writes: "Photoshop's clone tool provides a powerful way of covering up areas of an image. Uncovering those touched up areas can be done automatically using a recently published algorithm. This blog post describes the algorithm, with examples, and provides GPL licensed source code to image forgery detection."

Submission + - Cryptographically hiding TCP ports (sf.net)

Submitted by

JohnGrahamCumming

on Tuesday January 08, 2008 @10:02AM

JohnGrahamCumming writes: "The shimmer project implements a cryptographically-based system for hiding important (e.g. SSH) open ports in plain sight. By automatically forwarding from a range of ports all but one of which are honeypots and by changing the ports every minute only a user knowing a shared secret can determine the location of the real SSH server."

Submission + - 'Wildfire' brings social news to Facebook

Submitted by

JohnGrahamCumming

on Friday September 07, 2007 @08:33AM

JohnGrahamCumming writes: "My newly released Wildfire application brings social news to Facebook by exploiting Facebook's social graph. Instead of "digging" stories, or "voting up/down", stories gain credibility only if you deem them worthy of being passed onto your friends. Wildfire offers users three views of the news: the news you and your friends deem interesting, the news that the great unwashed deem interesting and a random view. Randomness means that the Wisdom of Crowds is harnessed without succumbing to mob rule. And RSS integration means you can automatically bring your feeds to Facebook and pass on a subset of the stories. Personally, I started with the Slashdot feed."

Submission + - The Long Tail of Facebook Applications

Submitted by

JohnGrahamCumming

on Monday July 02, 2007 @05:16PM

JohnGrahamCumming writes: "1,225 Facebook applications. 73,109,074 installed in profiles. Hence, the average application has 59,700 users. The problem with the average is that it hides a savage reality of Facebook applications: some have many users, most have almost none. 86% of applications on Facebook have less than 10,000 users, with 62% having less than 1,000."

Submission + - Generating a CAPTCHA of your email address (jgc.org)

Submitted by

JohnGrahamCumming

on Wednesday June 20, 2007 @08:26AM

JohnGrahamCumming writes: "Web crawlers that search for email addresses on web sites are a big problem. My simple and free email image generator service generates a randomized image containing your email adddress. Simply copy and paste the relevant HTML to your web site to get a human-readable image that contains your email address but hides it from web crawlers."

Submission + - UseTheSource: social web site for snippets of code

Submitted by

JohnGrahamCumming

on Friday April 20, 2007 @10:20AM

JohnGrahamCumming writes: "If you've got a snippet of source code, a neat algorithm, a cool mashup, or just an explanation of some awful Windows API you can share it with UseTheSource a new web site I've put together. Using the same 'voting' style as popular social news sites, and divided by language, you can vote on the best snippets of the day. And the entire source of the site is open too."

Submission + - Trusted Email Connection Signing

Submitted by

JohnGrahamCumming

on Wednesday February 07, 2007 @11:36AM

JohnGrahamCumming writes: "SPF, Sender-ID and DomainKeys all require that email messages be received before their validity can be checked, but SMTP servers are overloaded with SPF-compliant and DomainKeys-signed spam. Trusted Email Connection Signing is an approach that allows an SMTP server to decide before any email is delivered whether a connection is trustworthy or not saving bandwidth and CPU on overloaded mail servers."

Submission + - Why you shouldn't be using a debugger

Submitted by

JohnGrahamCumming

on Thursday January 25, 2007 @10:02AM

JohnGrahamCumming writes: "In this article I argue that you shouldn't be using a debugger. Instead you should be using your brain, printf and unit testing. After decades of improvement in programming languages, debuggers still suck. And they are not going to improve because the entire idea of breakpoints, single stepping and watching variables is the wrong way to debug."

Submission + - Strip mining spams: very clever use of animation

Submitted by

JohnGrahamCumming

on Monday October 16, 2006 @05:51AM

JohnGrahamCumming writes: "The ingenuity of spammers never ceases to amaze me. The latest attempt to evade smart spam filters is the use of an animated, transparent GIF that builds slowly to reveal its message. By cutting the image up the spammer hopes to evade spam filters that understand images; they've even thrown in random noise and frames that never get displayed to throw off filters."

Submission + - A simple service to overcome the Slashdot effect

Submitted by

JohnGrahamCumming

on Thursday October 05, 2006 @05:04AM

JohnGrahamCumming writes: "If the web page you want is overloaded because its Slashdotted, or it's just NSFW but you don't want to forget about it, the free service l8tr will send you an email reminder when the web page becomes available. Now if the site is Slashdotted, of course, it can't remind you of its own existence!"

Submission + - Doing research by borrowing from a blog post?

Submitted by

JohnGrahamCumming

on Tuesday September 12, 2006 @05:02AM

JohnGrahamCumming writes: "Last Monday my blog post on subliminal spam messages was posted on Slashdot's front page. In the days that followed three anti-spam firms reported the discovery of subliminal spam as their own work with no mention of my blog or Slashdot. One even appears to have lifted the examples straight from my blog without attribution. Is this how research is done, or was it just three coincidences?"

Submission + - Digg effect 1/3 of Slashdot effect

Submitted by

JohnGrahamCumming

on Wednesday September 06, 2006 @04:17PM

JohnGrahamCumming writes: "On Monday a blog entry on 'Subliminal spam GIFs' from my site appeared on the front page of Slashdot. On Tuesday the same story appeared on the front page of Digg. This gave me a chance to measure the Slashdot effect and Digg effect. The result: Slashdot brought 3.5x as many visitors as Digg."

Submission + - The first subliminal spam using animated GIFs

Submitted by

JohnGrahamCumming

on Monday September 04, 2006 @11:13AM

JohnGrahamCumming writes: "Everyone's noticed the recent flood of image spam (including the SpamAssassin developers who are working on an OCR-extension to beat it), but take a look at this spam containing a subliminal message flashed every 17seconds to try to entice you to buy the stock being pumped. Does this work? Warning: link shows the actual spam; don't blame me if you lose money on this stock!"

Submission + - AT&T crack was done by phishers

Submitted by

JohnGrahamCumming

on Friday September 01, 2006 @01:22PM

JohnGrahamCumming writes: "According to a story in the San Francisco Chronicle the AT&T store crack was the prelude to a very sophisticated phishing operation. The phishers were aiming to use the information from the store to fool existing customers into divulging SSNs and other personal information."

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