Danny's Space

This is a copy of Thomas Plunkett's memo to Gawker Staff regarding the security breach that happened to its databases containing commenter's passwords.  I am posting it to my blog because it reveals a lot about the current security implementation in Web 2.0 sites.  I have highlighted some parts which I think are important.  Except for the highlights, I have not modified it. From: Thomas Plunkett Subject: The Gawker Media security breach — status and moving forward To: [Gawker staff] Date: Friday, December 17, 2010, 4:43 PM Everyone - As you know, this has been the Gawker tech team’s most difficult week ever. This note has been too long coming, but the following is meant to communicate several things: what happened, our current activities, and our plans for moving forward. I suggest you read all of this as I am making several recommendations below, and we are implementing some changes that will affect all of you. What Happened Gawker Media servers and some compan...

Nature does hate a straight line.

This item went passed me, I don't know how.  According to the April-May 2009 Eclipse Survey of mostly Java IDE programmers in that open source community, Ubuntu is the most used linux distro in their desktops. Eclipse  is an open source community of software developers originally created by IBM.  The survey they conducted May 2009 was completed by 1,365 respondents who identified themselves as programmers. These are some of the highlights of the survey. The respondents were asked what operating system their software are being deployed on. It is interesting to note that Ubuntu accounts for clearly half of the linux developer desktops.  This just blows away the myth that Ubuntu is a distro for beginners in linux.  Another surprise is the fact that Red Hat and Ubuntu are sharing the server deployments equally.