Tag Archives: web

commerce geek

Reasons to use a web proxy in a production environment

July 29, 2008 – 6:52 pm

NOTE: at work I installed a web proxy to separate internal user traffic from external traffic hitting our production servers.  While I’m not part of the network team, they asked me to do this because of my prior experience and interest in such things.  The idea of this was to be a temporary fix until they get a new line installed providing greater bandwidth, but my argument is for the continuation of this segmentation even after the new line is installed.  Below is a slightly sanitized version of my arguments for this. Note that my thoughts and comments are driven by years of running networks, thus it is something I care about and have spent years thinking about, so it is wordy.  I’d be very happy to discuss this, or other solutions, via the comments below because I never want to stop learning.

I’d like to share my thoughts in as to why I think the network is better served with keeping internal traffic and public traffic separate.  Regardless of if you use the existing web proxy server, or another one with different network topology, I care less about the tool, and more about making the network and user experience better for both internal and external users

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geek

Use a safer browser!

July 16, 2008 – 2:20 pm
Most secure browser versions

If anything, that should be the message to all Internet surfers out there.  This graphic shows the danger, the percentage of users who have their browsers at their most secure, in regards to patches/updates being applied. Clearly people running IE aren’t going through the trouble of updating, while Firefox has updates built in that you can even automate.  Another thing to keep in mind is plugins; Firefox has millions of those, and now it takes care of keeping those updated, and disabling ones that aren’t.  So just from a software security point of view, Firefox is just a no-brainer.  The report concludes with, “Although Web browser users wish perfect software that will never have any exploitable software vulnerabilities, the nearest they can realistically hope for is that any vulnerabilities are promptly fixed by the software vendors and instantly applied to their browser. Critical to this instantaneous patching process is the mechanism of auto-update. Our measurement confirmed that Web browsers which implement an internal autoupdate patching mechanism do much better in terms of faster update adoption rates than those without.”

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commerce geek

Zoomii – a new kind of online bookstore

July 8, 2008 – 7:51 am

Half the fun of the Internet (capital ‘I’ please) is discovering new things, but it’s rare that you see something new that really changes your perception of things. For me that happened when I came across the online bookstore Zoomii.com, which sells books via Amazon; think of it as a new front-end to the Amazon book site. You really have to try it out to understand it, but in a nutshell you navigate the ‘store’ via a huge overview of all the ‘books’ with an interface that feels quite a bit like Google maps since you can click and ‘drag’ the background. You can use your mousewheel to ‘zoom’ in on particular sections, all the way down to a particular book, which you can then click on to get all the info you normally get on a Amazon page. This is a cool UI, I’d like it if they released some source or a framework for this.

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commerce rant

The importance of understanding net netrality

June 1, 2008 – 11:24 pm

To understand how importance net neutrality is you need to watch the following video.  Think about the freedom that the Internet allows you, now think about how you are limited to certain ‘packages’ when you pay for cable or satellite access to watch TV. This is exactly how the corporate behemoths want to make your choices for the Internet. It makes sense, they’re not stupid, they see the opportunity to make money, and making your freedom into the proverbial carrot and stick makes perfect sense…for them.

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