Infinity-Infinity

Making the Internet faster in 5 minutes (?)

Everyday there are millions of web page requests. Each request should hypothetically (and can) be simple; but, for some reason, pointless, redundant data is sent between machines, wasting bandwidth and time. The idea, which reduces this pointlessness, has the potential to save bandwidth across the Internet. It will reduce the amount of data sent with HTTP requests, which may in turn reduce the number of packets having to be sent.

After making a HTTP request for http://infinity-infinity.com/, this is the response you get back:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2009 11:08:46 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.54
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.4.8
X-Pingback: http://infinity-infinity.com/xmlrpc.php
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Connection: close
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

Following this, you get some data — the “thing” you requested. I am concerned with the above. These headers are not the content; they describe the content. It actually makes sense to ordinary people: even if you have no experience with this, you can deduce some of its meaning — Date: tells us a date, Server: describes the server and Connection: Close literally means “Close the connection”. READ MORE

Sniffing Browser History with CSS

Have a look at this page: http://making-the-web.com/misc/sites-you-visit/nojs/. It will fairly quickly and effectively generate a list of sites that you have visited.

This proof of concept demonstrates how basic logic in CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) can be used to query a browser to whether a visitor has visited another web page. More generally, it shows that even simple logic in technology has the possibility of being exploited. Although the data used in this example seems rather unimportant, when used to profile a user’s likes and dislikes, for example, it quickly turns from “data” to personal information. READ MORE

Why I do not like you on StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is one of the best sites on the Internet, in my opinion. But, this is why I do not like you (in no particular order): READ MORE

Welcome to Infinity−Infinity

Hello!

Welcome to my new blog, Infinity−Infinity (“Infinity Minus Infinity” or “∞−∞”). ∞−∞ is a blog about website development, including scripting and programming, security, design and a little blogging. My plan is to post some useful information, questions and insights, and then fill the rest with near-worthless, random ramblings. READ MORE