A stub is a short article which rounds up little bits of information that I’ve found throughout the week. These may be web or computer related, or they may be more general things. It’s more a personal log than an actual article, reminding me of things that I may’ve forgotten, but some of it may be of help to someone else!
February rolls on (and my workload picks up!) another week of news has passed by!
This week:
- A limited, but “serious weakness” has been uncovered in the TLS (Transport Layer Security) protocol used by sites ranging from Facebook and Twitter right up to banks and email accounts. It’s not a huge risk and can only be carried out on the same network, but it’s still a surprising flaw to be uncovered! Popular platforms are already preparing patches.
- Twitter looks to be planning on following suit by beginning “multi-factor” authentication to access your account…
- …and Amazon looks to be following suit by beginning to offer it’s own virtual currency for the Kindle Fire, similar to Microsoft Points.
- A bit of fun – What your Twitter bio says about you.
- Apple may have let slip that Siri may feature in a coming version of OS X.
- An article looking at the core performance of some of the animation methods in CSS3. Interesting!
- Sometimes Twitter can make you quite blunt, and in some cases just plain mean! Not a good way to go when you’re commenting on someone else’s work!
- Kirby looks to be a brilliantly powerful, easy-to-set-up, no DB CMS. Take a look!
- A situation that few are in – you’ve got all the devices for a mobile testing lab, you just don’t want to have to navigate to the same page 30 times. If you are in that situation, there’s a script that can help!
- You don’t often think about designing your UI to look nice without content, but you should! Here are some ideas.
- A very impressive app which uses augmented reality for something other than waving your phone around like a maniac. Now Japanese children can use an app to get content from a regular, adult newspaper in a children target tone. Nice.
- Wrongly reported by the article (and myself on Twitter) as in-game cheats, instead a glitch is allowing gamers to get paid for upgrades for free, throwing those that partake in this glitch into a “legal grey-area”.
- Microsoft continues to push it’s new iteration of webmail, Outlook mail. It’s doing this by attacking it’s competitors, while it’s not a new tactic, it’s unfortunately making them look rather desperate…
- A hilariously wide spanning (and now fixed) bug was unearthed where the string “File:///” typed into any Apple made Mac program would crash that program. Apparently it was an issue with a core library!
- It seems Facebook is so set on giving emoticons more emotion, they’ve begun collaborating with someone from Pixar to reinvent the emoticon.
- A strange bug in Google throws up porn in the search results of certain, impossible equations.
- If you’re interested in the nitty gritty of how Javascript works, this article will be just right for you. All about why the delete function works in the way it does.
- It looks like carousels simply add to the visual fluff of a page, these figures show that they are not at all useful. Further to this, some user testing has been carried out which has shown that auto-advancing a carousel will probably hide what you want users to see before they see it!
- I found a small but interesting snippet of code which implements Java’s hashCode function in Javascript.
- In Beta #35 looked into learning code by yourself using online resources as well as the anxiety of people laughing at your code if you upload it (and how that is stifling some from getting involved in open source). 5By5 | In Beta #35: Hammers of the Beards
- And finally, I never had any idea about the drastic difference there is between Japanese pop and Western pop. It certainly made for a good read. The Verge | Dating AKB48: the J-pop cult banned from falling in love
andrewBridge 