VishTecho

Here is a collection of cheat-sheets which I use. Believe me they are very handy and can save a lot of time while development.

Mootools 1.2 cheat sheet

Django 1.0 cheat sheet

CSS Shorthand cheat sheet

XHTML Character entities

HTML XHTML Quick Ref

HTML XHTML Characters

Browser W3C DOM Compatibility Modes

Users of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer are being urged by experts to switch to a rival until a serious security flaw has been fixed.

The flaw in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer could allow criminals to take control of people’s computers and steal their passwords, internet experts say.

Microsoft urged people to be vigilant while it investigated and prepared an emergency patch to resolve it.
Internet Explorer is used by the vast majority of the world’s computer users.

“Microsoft is continuing its investigation of public reports of attacks against a new vulnerability in Internet Explorer,” said the firm in a security advisory alert about the flaw.
Microsoft says it has detected attacks against IE 7.0 but said the “underlying vulnerability” was present in all versions of the browser.
Other browsers, such as Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari, are not vulnerable to the flaw Microsoft has identified.
Browser bait
“In this case, hackers found the hole before Microsoft did,” said Rick Ferguson, senior security advisor at Trend Micro. “This is never a good thing.”
As many as 10,000 websites have been compromised since the vulnerability was discovered, he said.
“What we’ve seen from the exploit so far is it stealing game passwords, but it’s inevitable that it will be adapted by criminals,” he said. “It’s just a question of modifying the payload the trojan installs.”

“I cannot recommend people switch due to this one flaw,” said John Curran, head of Microsoft UK’s Windows group.
He added: “We’re trying to get this resolved as soon as possible.
“At present, this exploit only seems to affect 0.02% of internet sites,” said Mr Curran. “In terms of vulnerability, it only seems to be affecting IE7 users at the moment, but could well encompass other versions in time.”
Richard Cox, chief information officer of anti-spam body The Spamhaus Project and an expert on privacy and cyber security, echoed Trend Micro’s warning.
“It won’t be long before someone reverse engineers this exploit for more fraudulent purposes. Trend Mico’s advice [of switching to an alternative web browser] is very sensible,” he said.

“The message needs to get out that this malicious code can be planted on any web site, so simple careful browsing isn’t enough.”
“It’s a shame Microsoft have not been able to fix this more quickly, but letting people know about this flaw was the right thing to do. If you keep flaws like this quiet, people are put at risk without knowing it.”
“Every browser is susceptible to vulnerabilities from time to time. It’s fine to say ‘don’t use Internet Explorer’ for now, but other browsers may well find themselves in a similar situation,”

Source:BBC NEWS

Is Aaron Sorkin getting his geek on?

The famous technophobe and Hollywood scribe is trading the “West Wing” and “Studio 60″ corridors for the graffiti-scrawled, software-developer-mobbed corridors of social networking upstart Facebook Inc.

The Palo Alto company says it has not signed on to a Sorkin film about its inception, but Sorkin has started a Facebook group (well, he says, his assistant did that) to gather color for a Facebook film he is writing for Sony and producer Scott Rudin.

A Sony Pictures spokesman confirmed the project but wouldn’t discuss details. Through a publicist, Sorkin declined to comment. 

Facebook spokeswoman Brandee Barker said: “We are routinely approached by writers and filmmakers interested in telling the Facebook story or the stories of the more than 100 million people who use Facebook to share and make the world more open and connected. At this point, we have not agreed to cooperate with any film project, but we are flattered by the interest.”

The Facebook group (where Sorkin groupies have already congregated to write on Sorkin’s wall) was first unearthed by the Defamer blog.

Sorkin’s Facebook group page reads:

“Welcome. I’m Aaron Sorkin. I understand there are a few other people using Facebook pages under my name — which I find more flattering than creepy — but this is me. I don’t know how I can prove that but feel free to test me.

“I’ve just agreed to write a movie for Sony and producer Scott Rudin about how Facebook was invented. I figured a good first step in my preparation would be finding out what Facebook is, so I’ve started this page. (Actually it was started by my researcher, Ian Reichbach, because my grandmother has more Internet savvy than I do and she’s been dead for 33 years.)”

So what will a movie about the messy beginnings of Facebook be called? “A Few Good Founders”? Or “Face Off,” complete with tense courtroom scenes from the legal battle over the company’s creation?

(Note to Sorkin: Aaron Greenspan — who attended Harvard with the founders, claims he came up with the idea for Facebook and recently penned a book on the subject — would like to share his two cents).

And just who will they find to play Mark Zuckerberg, the official Facebook founder and chief executive?

Source: LA Times

U.S. security experts have discovered a major flaw in the design of the Internet’s address system that affects virtually every corporate computer network. 

The flaw in the Domain Name System could allow hackers to steer most people using corporate networks to malicious Web sites, The Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday.

So far, hackers haven’t taken advantage of the flaw, and the security experts say every major software company affected is in the process of issuing patches to fix the problem.

The man who discovered the flaw, Dan Kaminsky of the Seattle-based security firm IOActive Inc., says he hopes the patches will be broad enough that hackers won’t be able to reverse-engineer them.

“We got lucky in this particular bug, because it’s a design flaw,” says Kaminsky. “It shows up in everyone’s network, but the fix is a design fix that doesn’t point directly at what we’re improving.”

Kaminsky says it took only a couple of hours to find the flaw but fixing it will take several months.

PRECAUTIONS:
-Make sure you keep all Internal DNS requests internal, block them at the firewall and use a DNS proxy/”external”DNS server to make requests on their behalf.
-There is little need to use recursion within the Internal network.
-if using 2003 server from microsoft, set up all Internal DNS servers as “secondaries”
-remove the DNS Root servers from your internal/secondary DNS server so they can not send requests out the firewall/dns proxy server. replace them with your last-”external” DNS server.
-point all internal DNS servers to the “external” DNS proxy server or DNS server instead of the root name servers.
-avoid using forwarders that point to external DNS servers like your ISP’s or the root DNS servers. Force the DNS clients and Internal DNS servers to make the request by forwarding directly to the DNS proxy or DNS server that is the “external” or last hop out.
-set up DHCP so that client computers use the appropriate Internal DNS server for their network/subnet.