It's Like Déjà Vu All Over Again
"You could probably waste an entire day on the preceding links alone. But why take chances? We also give you Paul Snively..." — John Wiseman, lemonodor
Oh my. This could be the short-term answer to my work-blogging needs until Radio 8 serves natively again without leaving a gaping security hole.
8:04:39 PM
*sigh*. I'm going to have to break down and build this for the MacOS for my stepson, who's quite the Abuse fan. And I guess it wouldn't kill me to take a closer look at SDL, either.
7:33:15 PM
Dan Gillmor: "Sometimes I think the technology industry's attitude toward product quality goes roughly like this: ''If you knew how hard this is to do, you'd be thrilled that it ever works.'" [Scripting News]
I guess there are still some Real Programmers out there after all.
In the same piece, Dan also writes: "As I mentioned the other day, security should be the number-one priority for much of the software we use. If it's connected to the Net, which is becoming pretty much the case for everything we use, security should come first." To really do this, developers will have to make some radical changes that might even extend to the languages we use. A language that makes it much easier to develop secure software—although it doesn't yet make it as hard as it should be to develop insecure software—is Oz. In addition to supporting a correct security model, Oz is a far easier to use and more efficient language for concurrency and distribution than its most popular competitor, Java.
A language that goes further than Oz currently does in security while building on Java's strengths (specifically, while running atop the Java Virtual Machine) is E. E has recently received DARPA funding and that funding has recently started to demonstrate results in the form of an initial cut of a secure desktop environment and web browser. There is also a first cut at "taming" the Java API's from a security perspective. This is probably the most important security work being done today.
E's competitor in importance is the EROS project. A system is only as secure as its hardware and most-foundational software environment. While E brings best-of-breed security practices to object-oriented programming, EROS brings them to the operating system.
I can't emphasize enough how important these systems are. They render entire classes of hacks, viri, worms, trojan horses, etc. impossible. As if that weren't enough, they also allow mutually-suspicious computational processes to cooperate without vulnerability. The implications are awe-inspiring. Now the industry needs to develop the maturity and the will to recognize that the concepts these systems implement are not merely sufficient, but necessary, to adopt in order to fully deliver on the promises of machines acting on behalf of humans via the Internet.
7:27:26 PM
Mark Paschal: Stapler 1.7.0 is a Radio 8 tool that "creates web syndication feeds from web sites. These feeds can be used with Radio UserLand's News Aggregator, or other XML syndication software. Flexible scripts for scraping with CSS-like selectors and regular expressions are included as well as several special purpose scrapers, but Stapler is expandable with your own scraping scripts written in Radio's UserTalk language." [Scripting News]
I definitely want to get this to work so that I can blog responses to David McCusker's weblog, which doesn't seem to have an RSS feed. I'm sure I'll find other sources to use it for, too.
7:07:40 PM
