the power of 0ne

Just saw a link to an interesting article on Slashdot. The article talks about using Port Knocking for added security. It's a neat idea, and it adds another level of defence to your server or network. But once you boil it down it's just an added password to your service. But instead of being a sequence of characters, it's a sequence of ports and is just as vulnerable to a man in the middle attack.

Just did some quick testing on one of my Manila site's and the timezone hack works! Looks like i'll be able to post the correct date when converting Radio Posts to Manila news items!

The hack will look something like this, for each post:

1. Calculate the offset in seconds from the current server time from the time the Radio post was made.
2. Call manila.sitePref.set for the timezone with that offset.
3. Call manila.newsItem.create to create the new post.

And that's it! Depending how long the call takes we might see a discrepency of a few seconds.

The reason this works at all is that Manila stores the timezone information as an offset in seconds. So eastern standard time is -18000 (-5 hours). We can take advantage of this to set the offset to whatever value we want. When Manila creates a new message it checks to see if the timezone exists, if it does it applies the offset to the current time and uses it as the post time for the message.

Other issues that need to be addressed to get Steve's the full conversion done:

1. Create departments on the Manila site based on Radio's categories.
   
2. Transfer all the subscriptions from Radio to the Manila Site.

I will probably start writing a Radio Tool for this sometime today.