A few interesting articles from ReadWriteWeb published in the last week or two:
Related to Google Chrome:
Also of interest, from Google’s Chromium Blog:
On Ars Technica, Dave Moyer writes:
Recently published Market Share statistics show the browser down almost 7% from the beginning of last year, continuing to slide down as time goes on. On the other hand, open source browsers such as Firefox and Google Chrome are constantly increasing.
This isn’t exactly news, and IE still has nearly 70% of the market, but it’s a positive sign. Serious competition between Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, and others will not only force Microsoft to fix IE’s problems, but serve to promote innovation, rather than stagnation, in the whole browser marketplace.
Yesterday, Alex Payne (API lead at Twitter) tweeted about the security issues that reared their ugly heads on Twitter a week or so ago:
PROTIP: if you don’t take the time to do periodic security reviews, you WILL get called out by Bruce Schneier. http://bit.ly/DwGr
He later tweeted a link to his blog post on the subject:
The Thing About Security: http://bit.ly/3gwR
Twitter user bonsai (Keith Williams) responded to Alex’s blog post:
@al3x It’s preposterous to think that your threat model didn’t include auth/msg-bot issues unless you simply didn’t have ANY models at all.
Alex replied:
@bonsai Indeed, we’ve never talked about threat models in a holistic way here. It’s gotta change.
No kidding. The moral of the story is: If you have no internal or external security policy whatsoever and enforce no minimum password strength (i.e., allow admin users to set their passwords to dictionary words), and allow unlimited login attempts, your system WILL be breached; it’s simply a matter of time.
Via social|median, ZDNet’s Phil Wainewright notes an uptick in attacks on Web-based software (Software-as-a-Service, or SaaS):
I welcomed Harry Debes’ outburst against SaaS last summer, because being attacked is always better than being ignored. After years of indifference to SaaS, the conventional software world has suddenly woken up to the threat and started attacking it in the hope it will all go away. …
[T]he harder these holdouts rage against SaaS, the more steadily it advances. Today, Evans Data released the results of a developer survey that found almost a third of developers in North America are already working on SaaS projects, and more than half worldwide expect they’ll be doing so in 2009. …
Faced with such a relentless surge, the anti-SaaS chorus is hitting ever more frenetic notes. …
When the attacks become this desperate, you know you’re onto a winner.
Well, we at redPear certainly hope we’re onto a winner — namely, our new SaaS CRM application, redPear|Core. Core is the first in a line of SaaS applications to come.
My sense is that this is only the beginning of the end for old, dinosaur, legacy software and media. Those Old Software and Old Media companies who are capable of changing, of adapting to and embracing this New Software and New (+Social) Media environment, are those who will survive. Those who are only capable of desperately clinging to the Old models and launching baseless attacks on the New will not.
What is the best integrated development environment (IDE) out there for Ajax application development? Among the choices:
No doubt there are others, but I shall have to investigate these and report my findings.