Author Archives: Zack Weinberg

The ethics of preventing third-party net filtering

Posted on 12 December 2011 by Zack Weinberg

I haven’t posted anything research-related in a while because I’ve been on a project that I’m not supposed to talk about till it’s done, and it’s not done yet. I can say, though, that it’s about ways to get around … Continue reading →

Posted in Research | 14 Comments

unearthed arcana (music division)

Posted on 16 November 2011 by Zack Weinberg

Some time ago—I don’t remember how long precisely—I started working on a mixtape. I got as far as writing down a bunch of songs in categories, and then I lost interest, and the list has been cluttering up my desk … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

test your file locking

Posted on 14 October 2011 by Zack Weinberg

This PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT is brought to you by the I JUST WASTED AN HOUR ON THAT Foundation: Do you suffer from mysteriously hanging autotools processes? Or perhaps other mysteriously hanging processes? If so, you may have a problem with … Continue reading →

Posted in Possibly Useful | 1 Comment

Breaking things every six weeks

Posted on 19 September 2011 by Zack Weinberg

Attention conservation notice: 900 words of inside baseball about Mozilla. No security content whatsoever. The Mozilla Project has been taking a whole lot of flak recently over its new “rapid release cycle”, in which there is a new major version … Continue reading →

Posted in HTML &c | 25 Comments

Icons of the Future City

Posted on 10 July 2011 by Zack Weinberg

Way back at the 2010 Mozilla Summit, one of the keynote speakers showed us an amazing demo flythrough of a 3D-rendered futuristic city, with embedded video, tweets, and the like, all running live inside a Firefox 4 beta thanks to … Continue reading →

Posted in Fiction | 3 Comments

A Zany Scheme for Compact Secure Hashes

Posted on 17 June 2011 by Zack Weinberg

Lots of current and near-future tech relies heavily on secure hashes as identifiers; these are usually represented as hexadecimal strings. For instance, in a previous post I threw out the strawman h: URN scheme that looks like this: <!– jQuery … Continue reading →

Posted in HTML &c | 13 Comments

How To Choose Passwords

Posted on 25 May 2011 by Zack Weinberg

When I talk to people who aren’t security researchers about history sniffing, they want to know whether they should worry about it, and I say no: the only thing you can do to protect yourself is use the latest version … Continue reading →

Posted in Research | 8 Comments

PSA: “like” buttons

Posted on 8 May 2011 by Zack Weinberg

Because I hit “empty spam” just a little too fast, erasing the question about this: There are no Facebook “like” buttons on this site because I myself barely ever use Facebook and don’t really see the point; same same digg, … Continue reading →

Posted in Administrivia | Comments Off

Interactive history sniffing and its relatives

Posted on 2 May 2011 by Zack Weinberg

Readers of this blog will probably already know that, up till the middle of last year, it was possible to “sniff” browsing history by clever tricks involving CSS, JavaScript, and the venerable tradition of drawing hyperlinks to already-visited URLs in … Continue reading →

Posted in Research | 14 Comments

Classical Mechanics Interlude: Acceleration to stop in a constant distance

Posted on 19 April 2011 by Zack Weinberg

Over on twitter, @MegaManSE asked does anyone know the equation to find the acceleration to stop a moving object in a constant distance given some random starting velocity? I didn’t, at the time, know … but I do know how … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments