Mar
12
2009
On March 6th 2009 I went to the Future of Web Apps in Dublin! It was held at the Liberty Hall in Dublin city centre.
FOWA’s has never came to Ireland before so this was the first event of its kind. There was a good line-up of talented and expert speakers to entertain the crowd:
- Ryan Carson from Carsonified
- Blaine Cooke ex Twitter & Yahoo! Brickhouse
- David Heinemeier Hansson from 37 signals & Ruby on Rails
- Simon Willison, co-creator of the Django web framework
- Mike Butcher from TechCrunch UK
I met some really inspiring people such as Lee Munroe 
and got to see some great talks. The highlight of the day for me was Simon Willison who gave a very entertaining, scary and educational talk about website security issues and kinda opened my eyes to a few things.
The biggest disappointment with the event was the tiny social spaces available and complete lack of free refreshments. This meant that everyone disbanded during the breaks and unless you already knew people there were very very limited networking opportunities which wasnt good for my freelance career and making new friends, although I did hand out a few business cards!
However, in true FOWA style the event was followed by a few drinks and an after party!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kncmRMEakPU
I’m looking forward to FOWA returning next year.
2 comments | tags: Dublin, FOWA | posted in APIs, All Categories, Apple, Blogging, Conferences, Frameworks, Microsoft, Open Source, Programming, Security, Tools, Web Design, Web Standards
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Feb
3
2009
I’ve been using WordPress as my blogging platform for one month now and since then i’ve put alot of work into securing my blog from attacks by hackers. I am writing this blog post to just reiterate the importance of securing your admin area and forms. We all need to take precautions to prevent the security and data in our websites from being compromised.
I have found a WordPress plugin to test security by Michael Torbert which I found to be very good. I also found a whitepaper from MyBlogSecurity which looks into securing your blog even more and is worth a good read.
You can download WP Security Scan at wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-security-scan/
Download 
WP Secuirty Whitepaper
no comments | tags: Security, WordPress | posted in All Categories, Blogging, Security, Tools, WordPress
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Jan
14
2009
The US National Security Agency has helped put together a list of the world’s most dangerous coding mistakes.
- CWE-20:Improper Input Validation
- CWE-116:Improper Encoding or Escaping of Output
- CWE-89:Failure to Preserve SQL Query Structure
- CWE-79:Failure to Preserve Web Page Structure
- CWE-78:Failure to Preserve OS Command Structure
- CWE-319:Cleartext Transmission of Sensitive Information
- CWE-352:Cross-Site Request Forgery
- CWE-362:Race Condition
- CWE-209:Error Message Information Leak
- CWE-119:Failure to Constrain Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer
- CWE-642:External Control of Critical State Data
- CWE-73:External Control of File Name or Path
- CWE-426:Untrusted Search Path
- CWE-94:Failure to Control Generation of Code
- CWE-494:Download of Code Without Integrity Check
- CWE-404:Improper Resource Shutdown or Release
- CWE-665:Improper Initialization
- CWE-682:Incorrect Calculation
- CWE-285:Improper Access Control
- CWE-327:Use of a Broken or Risky Cryptographic Algorithm
- CWE-259:Hard-Coded Password
- CWE-732:Insecure Permission Assignment for Critical Resource
- CWE-330:Use of Insufficiently Random Values
- CWE-250:Execution with Unnecessary Privileges
- CWE-602:Client-Side Enforcement of Server-Side Security
no comments | tags: Coding, Cyber Criminals, Programming, Security, Vulnerables | posted in All Categories, Security, Tools, Web Design
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Sorry for butting in... but I have, a few actually when I was looking to buy last year. Cove is a nice area! 
