Firesheep. Possibly the best web security learning tool!

So many other people have written about this new simple application that I won't go into detail. TechCrunch do that much better than me anyway. If you've managed to miss the news then there's a simple little tool available that will not only show you who in your vicinity is using an open wireless network but enable you to log in to their facebook, twitter, amazon accounts using their log-in (and there's a massively long list of more).

If you fancy trying it out the you need Firefox 3.6+ as Firesheep is an extension to that browser. The extension doesn't appear obvious in a search for Firefox extensions which is probably wise and I'm not going to publish it here. It isn't that difficult to find, though. Windows users will also need to install Winpcap first. Once you've installed the Firefox extension a sidebar is available which displays all the icons and screen names of people using unsecured sites around you. Click on one and you're free to run around their pages! Hacking my youngest could manage while reading Noddy Goes Shopping.

Being unusually responsible, here's a link to suggestions for another Firefox extension Force-TLS which will help you protect several (but not all!) of your accounts. The TechCrunch article author, Alexia Tsotsis accepts that this is of no help to the vast majority who'll be using Internet Explorer (or Google Chrome, Opera, Safari etc. etc.) but promises to publish more on that soon. Watch that space.

graphic by Dave Hoffman

Perhaps this will be the wake-up call we all need to be more careful about our on-line activity. I have no doubt that there will be patches and adjustments galore in the background, even attempts not to frighten us all with this story in mainstream news items, and a lot of people are very concerned to fix things today and it will all go quiet soon enough. In the meantime, though, just give it a try and I promise you it will be the most effective learning experience on the topic of internet security short of being fleeced for a few grand by a dodgy Luton fuel station till operator.

Links to free images

OK, so you've probably seen these before because I tell everyone I know about them. The point of including this is to try out something that I need to present at a forthcoming workshop. This new version of Blogger has some cool features that make customising the template - that's the bit that controls how everything appears on your screen - very simple. I guess I ought to do some instructions for that - maybe in the next few entries. Anyway, for now, you'll see a bundle of links to free image resources included in the panel to the left. If I've got them right, you can just click on them to go to the various galleries and, provided you don't do silly things with the images that offend the pretty generous usage terms, and you tell visitors or readers where you got them, you should find some brilliant images to meet even the most odd requirements.

For the workshop, my idea is that people can slide one of the LSN Q Project DVDs into their computer, find something they want to use and copy the links into a web log like this. This addition and posting took about 10 minutes and it could be a nice addition to any lesson concerning something like where to find images.

Obviously, for other subjects, you might not have as many links immediately to hand in the materials but even a couple of useful links in a place like this can be useful. Especially when you remember that your web log has an RSS feed that can create an automatic addition of headlines or 'news' to a course page in Moodle or Pageflakes (and no doubt several other sites you can edit yourself).

All I need to do now is add a picture to this entry to make it look a bit more interesting and, 12 minutes later, we're there.

Wrong size letters

I don't know whether Americans are shorter and fatter than the British but their default paper sizes are. Microsoft Office default installation provides American settings - so often that's what you'll find in Word, Excel etc. unless whoever installed it made some better selections at the start. Letter size documents can cause trouble for the rest of us when trying to print them, some printers refusing to budge until you feed them Letter size paper. The size also will cause problems for you, with footers appearing higher than they should, lines ending in different places to what you'd expected and, in multi-page documents, pages may start or end with an extra line or two.

So please fix your Office programs. In Word, use File | Page Setup and change the paper size to A4. Click on Default and agree to that size for all documents. In Excel there's no Default button so Save that file as book1.xls in your XLSTART directory. Close Excel, reopen, future files should always be A4.

That may not solve your own printing problem though - the printer default settings may also need to be changed. For most printers you can do this from the Control Panel and Printer properties. Set these to A4 and they should remain that way.

How can I do a list like this?

There's a good question to start this off. I used to gaze in wonder as students merrily added a bundle of code to otherwise usually poorly designed web sites and created these lists of headings, some moving too. No idea how they did it then. Anyway, a couple of new web tools do it all for you - the smart bit is linking them together.

First create a web log like this. In Blogger there is an automatic production of what is called an RSS Feed. You don't need to know what that is but you can impress some friends by explaining that RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Somehow all your headings and entries, or part of them, get bundled into some code that lurks at an address like http://faqica.blogspot.com/atom.xml - the faqica bit will change for your own list but the rest will be the same.

Now go to http://www.rss-to-javascript.com and, after a suitable title, there's a box where you can enter that 'atom.xml' address. You can leave all the other settings as they are, or experiment with changes if you're brave / know what you're doing. Click on Generate . . . and there'll be a small box of code that you need to highlight and copy.

Paste the code into a web page where you want the list to appear. In Dreamweaver you'll need to use code view to do this. In Moodle it could go into an html box, or you can even enter the atom.xml address directly into an 'Insert newsfeed' resource but that won't scroll.

Save the page and publish it. Now I'll see if I can follow my own instructions!