Spam Under Half of Email (PDF) — Symantec report: There is good news this month on the email-based front of the threat landscape. According to our metrics, the overall spam rate has dropped to 49.7%. This is the first time this rate has fallen below 50% of email for over a decade. The last time Symantec recorded a similar spam rate was clear back in September of 2003.
Dropdowns Should be the UI of Last Resort (Luke Wroblewski) — Well-designed forms make use of the most appropriate input control for each question they ask. Sometimes that’s a stepper, a radio group, or even a dropdown menu. But because they are hard to navigate, hide options by default, don’t support hierarchies, and only enable selection not editing, dropdowns shouldn’t be the first UI control you reach for. In today’s software designs, they often are. So instead, consider other input controls first and save the dropdown as a last resort.
Another Look at Provable Security — In our time, one of the dominant paradigms in cryptographic research goes by the name “provable security.” This is the notion that the best (or, some would say, the only) way to have confidence in the security of a cryptographic protocol is to have a mathematically rigorous theorem that establishes some sort of guarantee of security (defined in a suitable way) under certain conditions and given certain assumptions. The purpose of this website is to encourage the emergence of a more skeptical and less credulous attitude toward this notion and to contribute to a process of critical analysis of the positive and negative features of the “provable security” paradigm.
Pig (github) — a Linux packet crafting tool. You can use Pig to test your IDS/IPS among other stuffs.
