Freeculture.org is pleased to announce the contest winners for our Down With DRM video contest. We had a lot of great entries, and want to thank *all* of the participants for their submissions. They’ve all contributed greatly to raising awareness in the fight against DRM.

Down With DRM Video Contest Winners Announced!

Hey. This is a handy reference for all the various getElementsBy*() JavaScript functions that are out there, from the DOM standard getElementById to the very advanced getElementsBySelector functions. I've put this together because it's near impossible to write any useful scripts that use the DOM without these functions, and its nice to know the different methods available.

getElement(s)By... reference

QuirksMode.org is the personal and professional site of Peter-Paul Koch, freelance web developer in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. It contains more than 150 pages with CSS and JavaScript tips and tricks, and is one of the best sources on the WWW for studying and defeating browser incompatibilities.
It is free of charge and ads, and largely free of copyrights.

I've been living on this site today, trying to write some complex cross-browser event handlers for javascript.

QuirksMode - for all your browser quirks

Looking for a simple and fast way to indent and export your HTML code into various file formats? Look no further than HTML Code Export, a unique and easy to use software to quickly and easily reindent, export (10+ formats supported) and print your HTML documents, convert them to PDF, RTF, images and more!

I'm working with some very messy HTML output, produced by JSP from some messy data that I can't change. This program has proved invaluable for helping me work out what's actually going on in the generated HTML.

HTML Code Export - HTML Tidy for Windows

For more than a decade, amateur and professional cryptographers have been trying to decipher an encrypted sculpture that sits on the grounds of the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Three-fourths of the sculpture has already been solved.

But now Jim Sanborn, the artist who created the Kryptos sculpture, says he made a mistake and a previously solved part of the puzzle that sleuths assumed for years was correct isn't.

Big big news: Everybody who thought they knew the answer to K2, check again. Instead of ending "...seconds west. ID by rows", the correct plaintext is "...seconds west. X Layer Two".

More details at our Kryptos Group announcement.

Heading back to watch the webcounter spin,

Elonka :)

Wired News: Kryptos Part 2 Was Wrong

At a time of intense debate about the prospect of a two-tier internet, America Online and Yahoo say they intend to introduce a system that would guarantee speedier delivery to companies that pay between 0.25 and one US cent (0.15p to 0.5p) for each message. The internet service providers would still accept email from senders who do not pay for preferential treatment, but the paid messages would bypass spam filters and other barriers which strip off pictures and other images to land more quickly in in-boxes.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this sounds like they are planning a service where the big spam companies pay money so that their spam emails do not get filtered any more. Just what the customer has always wanted...

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Internet giants announce plans to charge for speedier emails

Microsoft rolled out a test version of its upgraded Internet Explorer browser Tuesday, marking the biggest change to IE in more than half a decade and sending a message to competitors that the software giant isn’t ignoring the browser market.

In the latest version, the Redmond giant built in a search box, enhanced the browser’s security, and introduced new features like tabbed browsing, which allows users to better manage simultaneous surfing of a number of web sites.

From reading this and various other bits on the new IE7 browser, it sounds like it's finally catching up with what I would consider standard features in a web browser. It is still missing the one "hook" that would make me want to convert to it away from my current browser though - all the features in it are mainstream in almost all browsers these days so it would feel like a downgrade to move from my current browser to IE7.

It is certainly a huge leap forwards for Internet Explorer, but I'm not convinced it's enough of a leap to slow people down from converting away from it.

RED HERRING | Microsoft Releases IE Preview

StopBadware.org is a "Neighborhood Watch" campaign aimed at fighting badware. We will seek to provide reliable, objective information about downloadable applications in order to help consumers to make better choices about what they download on to their computers. We aim to become a central clearinghouse for research on badware and the bad actors who spread it, and to become a focal point for developing collaborative, community-minded approaches to stopping badware.

StopBadware.org

Leo and I carefully examine the operation of the recently patched Windows MetaFile vulnerability. I describe exactly how it works in an effort to explain why it doesn't have the feeling of another Microsoft "coding error." It has the feeling of something that Microsoft deliberately designed into Windows. Given the nature of what it is, this would make it a remote code execution "backdoor." We will likely never know if this was the case, but the forensic evidence appears to be quite compelling.

Recent podcast from GRC's Steve Gibson. If this is correct (And I'm not saying that it is - just thinking that is too scary), then it means that the WMF exploit was actually a deliberatly coded backdoor in the windows operating system. Surely this is the ultimate proof of why a closed source operating system can not be a safe one.

The Windows MetaFile Backdoor?

Unofficial patch and vulnerability checker for the recent WMF exploit on Windows. (No official patch from Microsoft yet as of Jan 4th 2006)

The patch is being mirrored at:
http://www.grc.com/miscfiles/wmffix_hexblog14.exe
http://handlers.sans.org/tliston/wmffix_hexblog14.exe
http://castlecops.com/modules.php?name=Downloads&d_op=getit&lid=496
http://csc.sunbelt-software.com/wmf/wmffix_hexblog14.exe
http://www.antisource.com/download/wmffix_hexblog14.exe
The MD5 checksum of the file is 15f0a36ea33f39c1bcf5a98e51d4f4f6.

And the vulnerability checker at:
http://csc.sunbelt-software.com/wmf/wmf_checker_hexblog.exe
http://castlecops.com/modules.php?name=Downloads&d_op=getit&lid=495
http://www.antisource.com/download/wmf_checker_hexblog.exe
The MD5 checksum of the file is ba65e1954070074ea634308f2bab0f6a.

Download WMF vulnerability hotfix