Dev::Blog

I swear, I was about to buy a new motherboard and/or reinstall everything. Firefox was working fine except for one tiny problem. Just a little one. Not a big deal. Every minute or so, it would hang. No click response, no keyboard recognition, the digital equivalent of a chunk of rock.

Yeah, only a little annoying when you’re, say, typing. Or testing a web app. Or, you know, using the Internet.

I tried everything - reinstalled, disabled all of my beloved plugins, nothing would work.

Until I disabled Norton Antivirus.

The app hasn’t stalled in hours.

What good is a security product when it prevents you from enjoying the stuff it’s protecting? I could make an antivirus product like that - I’ll call it “big tank of water” and it’ll be just what it sounds like. You won’t be able to do much, but you’ll be safe from viruses.

I’ve been running pretty much unprotected for years, and this is the only computer that has antivirus software installed (sorry, “had”). I did it in a moment of weakness when this was my primary company computer, but you know what, I think I’ll take my chances with regular backups from now on.

Update: well, my success was short-lived, and the problems have returned. Thankfully, it looks like Flock doesn’t have any of these problems, and I’ve been looking for an excuse to play with it since I saw Will present at a DemoCamp eons ago, so I win!

Technorati Tags: Norton, Firefox, bugs

I got a WTF in the mail yesterday:

We recently noticed that you may have had trouble using your password to sign in and administer your site.

We’ve fixed a glitch that affected your account, and have temporarily reset your password to “123456″.

Please log in to your site and reset your password to something that only you will remember.

It had the look of a form letter, so it appears like there’s a good chance that I now know a significant number of passwords for this service. Of course, the login is the email address, so I’d have to know that, but for this particular site I don’t think it’d be too hard to figure a few out… Guys, a simple “click here to get a link that’ll take you to a reset password page” would’ve probably done the job a little better…

Oh, and when I did log in? It took me 5 minutes to find the place where I change my password.

Web 3.0 is gonna be all about openness. No passwords for anything, I tell you.

On the same week as it’s revealed that Vista users have to worry about audio files trashing their machines, we get this quote from Bill Gates:

“Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.”

That’s almost as amazing as Microsoft’s response to the speech thing. I mean, “well, it only affects users with speakers and microphones”? Yeesh…

(quote via Simon Willison)

This is great - Bruce Schneier’s got an article on choosing good passwords, and a lot of it is about some product called the Password Recovery Toolkit, which according to Schneier’s article can guess passwords at a phenomenal rate. I wanted to know more about the tool, but their site was down with an SQL error: “Required user name is missing.”

It would have been awesome if it was a password problem, but this is pretty good too.

Technorati Tags: funny errors, passwords