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Help with version 0.1.7 of Zipios (CVE-2019-13453)

Here is yet another example of why opensource is a really good way of getting things fixed.

Assuming you have a project that is getting used by many, you are likely to see people post issues about bugs and possible enhancements. Your software is even very likely to get improved on its own by enthousiast users. On Github, for example, it is very easy to fork a project (make a copy) and then work on your version of the software. You can then offer a fix to the main authors of the project with a near one to one copy of the project.

In our case, a security professional, Mike Salvatore, was asked ...

Best C++ Books

Once in a while someone will ask me which book is best to start learning programming. The fact is that I do not know because I'm already an advanced programmer and it's rather difficult for me to get back to the basics (it feels like a waste of my time, sorry...)

That being said, at Made to Order Software, we've mainly been a C++ shop. We also do a lot of C, PHP, JavaScript and touch many other languages as required by the tasks we perform (bash, cmake, perl, C#, Java, etc.)

That being said, I wanted to underline some of the best C++ books available today. Especially, in the last ...

Put the label of an HTML Input inside the Input element

Reflection of trees in a mountain lake.

Update:

With HTML5 running on pretty much all platforms, you want to use the placeholder attribute instead of any sort of tricks to place a label inside your input widgets.

This is done like this:

<input type="text" placeholder="Phone Number"/>

This example will show "Phone Number" inside the input box until the user types some text in that box.

You can test with the box right here. This is just that one <input .../> tag I placed in my page HTML. (It is not in a form, but the widget itself will work as expected.)

For additional details, I ...

No more excuses! Protect your passwords on your computer with strong encryption.

More and more, we hear talks about hackers entering personal accounts on systems such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and many others. There are many reasons why someone's account will be hacked. One of them is the lack of imagination for their password. Plus, some people use the same password for all of their accounts.

So, if you do it right, you will end up with many passwords. On my end, I have one password per account and that means about 400 passwords... That's totally unmanageable in a fairly standard human brain. For this reason, you end up writing down all your passwords on ...

Massive Bug in Intel, AMD, ARM and other Processors in Handling VM Memory

In the last few days, we started hearing about a massive bug in the implementation of the VM memory handling.

Intel has been frantically working on fixing host machines kernels in order to prevent one VM from accessing the memory of other VMs that run on the same machine.

Of course, most users are not going to attempt to read someone else memory so in that sense, most of us are relatively safe. But all of those who are not so lucky and have uninvited guests on their systems are running at very high risk. The information available from Intel says the memory is accessible only in Read mode. ...

Getting Rid of Deactivated Facebook Friends

Last updated in Dec 31, 2017 as many things have changed.
Not only that, I also noticed that "dead" accounts are not always really dead.
Read below to learn more.

I was slowly nearing 5,000 friends when all of a sudden I had 5,089!

Wondering what was happening, a post on the Blackhat World forum caught my eye as someone mentioned the fact that he had 5,700 friends. The answer was that deactivated friends do count against your 5,000 friends limit. They are counted as part of your friends even though they do not have an account anymore and they don't get automatically removed ...

The set_fax_id() function PHP e-Fax must be given unique IDs, each time.

Fax button on an old type of fax machine

The PHP eFax system uses a class that ease the communication between your software and eFax. The developer system is not too complicated, but there are tricks to it and the class hides most of them.

Today a customer contacted us as they just purchased a copy of our PHP library and had problems sending faxes. The fact is that they used the set_fax_id() function with a hard coded string. Imagine doing something like:

$efax->set_fax_id("Test Fax");

This looks pretty good, only after the second time the sending of the fax will fail because eFax considers that it was already ...

PHP e-Fax requires valid SSL certificates (failed with code 1)

As e-Fax is updating their systems further to be compliant with various security systems, some new problems may arise on your servers.

The main one is an SSL error that is quite unclear.

Warning: stream_socket_client(): SSL operation failed with code 1. OpenSSL Error messages: error:14090086:SSL routines:ssl3_get_server_certificate:certificate verify failed in /path-to-php-efax/http_request.php on line 294

As we can see, the error mentions a server certificate function and says it could not verify a certificate.

If your server is not 100% up to date with newest SSL versions or your web ...

Make sure your Thunderbird does not use SSL to avoid POODLE attack

A few days ago the news that SSLv3 was no good came out. The protocol allows for patterns that can be used by a hacker to decipher an encrypted message without the need for the private key. In other words, encryption using SSLv3 is no good (anymore--it never was, but we know this only now.)

We fixed our Apache2 settings, for those interested, you just have to turn off SSLv3 with the following setting:

SSLProtocol all -SSLv2 -SSLv3

Although to really remove all the encryption methods that are not that secure (can easily be cracked) you also want to change the list of ciphers with:

 ...

Another reason to like SeaMonkey!

As I mentioned before, I like to use SeaMonkey. In general, browsing wise, it is very much like Firefox so that's good for those people who like Firefox, they can switch without losing much else than the location where the toolbar buttons are (Quite a few are in different places).

The thing I discovered today, though, is really cool. I put a path to an email saved on my disk to see whether the HTML in that email was valid or not and it loaded at once. Just before hitting Enter I though, wait... I probably should remove the email header. Nope. No need. It actually recognized the data and ...