Author: Moch. Luthfi Rahmadi

Last week, there was a security risk for all the MySpace users that had their profiles set to “Private” because somebody found a way to view their photos without having to be in the friend list. Several YouTube videos on how to do that were quickly uploaded and the photo downloads soon took wings.

A 17 GB file containing almost half a million of these photos has recently been found available for download
with BitTorrent. That’s not going to be easy on the social network, as it is the proof needed that it has security liabilities which can be exploited. I’m not sure how many of the users affected by the photo theft will be coming back to the site if the pictures were indeed personal. Not many, I wager.

What’s most interesting is that the company does not admit to having suffered the breach in its security system, but it did plug it. It came at a most unfortunate time for the social network, as it had just announced the initiative to crack down on sexual predators by adding new options to enhance the security level and working together with attorneys general from 45 states in the U.S.

The creator of the file told Wired.com that the sole purpose of his action was to prove that it could be done, while acknowledging that others might use the backdoor he found for “nefarious reasons.” Going under the name of DMaul, he ran an automated script on almost 44,000 profiles and said that the process took nearly 94 hours.

The file was already downloaded by a second person, so now there are 2 seeders and 40 leechers. I bet that in a week the ratio will be a lot bigger on the seeder part, so it will have a wider spread because of the increase in speed for download. Nevertheless, I only wonder why somebody would want to see 500,000 pictures of unknown people. Other than a symbol of what can be done, I cannot think of another reason.

Sorce : Softpedia

A short while ago, the Gmail team decided that the way they kept the motivational stories that users sent in was obsolete. In other words, they couldn’t carpet their walls a second time with the letters, over the first. The solution, in touch with modern times, was to ask fans of the email service to make a video of themselves telling the story and send it the team’s way.

About a month and 1,500 videos later, somebody had an idea about putting together a video from some of
the best received and thanking the community in that way. That’s the video embedded below, watch it because although it doesn’t feature a complete story from a person, it’s realized out of cuts in a way to make it both funny and serious at the same time. It’s the “kick back and relax” kind of video that you could watch in a break, most relaxing.

If you want, you could still send videos to the team because it wasn’t a contest and there was no deadline. You can actually say anything, if Gmail helps you with it, it’s ok. Well, not exactly everything, please refrain yourself if you use it to send erotic pictures or set up erotic dates. Not that I’d mind watching that, at any rate, but I doubt you’ll be making it in the next “Gmail All-Stars” video that the dev team might put together.

I would send one myself, but I don’t really want to show my face, so if you see somebody in a video wearing a Darth Vader mask that’s way too big and writing ‘Gmail’ in a robot’s chest piece with a two handed light saber in a Zorro-like manner, that’s probably me trying to look inconspicuous. Don’t think I’d manage that very well, though.

Source : Softpedia

The images used on the web can have various types of files formats, like GIF, PNG or JPEG. The advantages
of every type of image file format are clearly presented in many articles.

Regarding GIF images limitations, it is well known the superiority of PNG images over GIFs. Due to the fact that PNG image file format can be employed in animated images creation, the GIF animated images could stop to exist on web pages, even web browsers still have rendering support for them.

In a previous article there are shown the advantages of PNG images in comparison to GIFs, like full alpha channel, support for millions of colors, lossless compression capabilities and more. Mozilla Firefox browser can render PNG animations, which are created in the new APNG (animated PNG) format. This type of format represent an extension to PNG, providing the possibility of animated images creation in PNG. As a consequence, the PNG does not replace only the static GIF images, but the animated ones too, which could mean the end of animated GIFs decade.

In a basic manner, the animated PNG images can be created with the help of on line scripts or by using Firefox add-on APNG Edit. This add-on is practically an editor for APNG images and it works by assembling individual images into a given animation. Also, with the help of scripts (Javascript), you can manage the building of an animation with custom elements or directives.

Another tool to create animated PNG images is APNG Assembler, an online application that allows you to make animations in PNG file format by using your web browser. With the help of an image editor or processing software, you must prepare the static PNG or individual animation frames, then with an archiving utility, all images having identical meta-data must be packed in a single zip archive. The creation of your animation is a step away from the touch of a button.

This line of evolution in quality and advantages of animated PNG images will definitely determine the implementation of APNG specific rendering support in case of many other popular web browsers.

Source : Softpedia