Like online games? Beware of ClickJacking

Written on 8th October 2008                                                                                                              2 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Most web-based games might appear innocent, but a blogger from GUYA.NET proves that they can function as a way for the web’s bad guys to take over your webcam. When this blogger first heard about this phenomenon clickjacking, he tried to develop a game that could do the same thing. He discovered that the Achilles heel of Flash was the Flash Player Setting Manager. Nice piece of citizen journalism.

By creating some sort of overlay in a Javascript Game, users just think they’re trying to click a button as fast as possible. What they really do, is granting some voyeur access to their web cam. Check it out:

Kudos for Adobe, who fixed this problem by “framebusting the Setting Manager pages“. Supposedly, 99.9% of the users are protected from spies, pervs, or whatnot. The issue still exists for Java, SilverLight, DHTML games and applications though. For details on this I gladly refer to ha.ckers.org.

adobe, adobe flash, Adobe Flash Player, clickjacking, DHTML, Java, javascript, security, Silverlight

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Dailymotion tries to solve problems instead of complaining: brings video to the OLPC laptop

Written on 6th September 2008                                                                                                              0 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

THe OLPC laptop, developed for people from third-world countries, isn’t very popular in the blogosphere. Despite it’s noble goal, bloggers hate the facts that the development goes so slow and that its price is still higher than $100. Apart from some funny news – people paying €500 for a graffiti version -, there’s hardly any positive news surrounding the green laptop.

Well, there is now. Paris-based video service Dailymotion has decided to take on another problem of the OLPC. The $100 laptop is unfortunately not compatible with the Adobe Flash player that Dailymotion and other video sharing sites rely on. So the enormous video site has decided to start a project which will make a large amount of videos accessible for people browsing on the OLPC computer.

The project consists of a special group where users can upload videos that are in fact compatible with the toylike-looking laptop. These videos are encoded in free standards, provided by the Xiph.Org Foundation: Ogg (container), Vorbis (audio) and Theora (compression).

Although Flash-compatibility would be the ultimate solution – like they say on ReadWriteWeb: “that’s just how it goes” – I like the fact Dailymotion is actually doing something to turn the OLPC laptop in a success. Because a project with such an ambitious and world-improving goal can use some respect. So that, in a while, (flash-based) videos of people kicking around with the laptop (believe it or not, there’s actually a man who did such a pathetic thing) will become absolutely intolerable and unheard of.

adobe flash, Adobe Flash Player, dailymotion, OLPC, One Laptop per Child, Theora, Vorbis, Xiph.Org Foundation

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