Security Hole in IE Leads to Google Cyber Attack

The Financial Times is reporting that US investigators have identified an individual who contributed to cyber attacks on Google. The hack was said to be executed using a security exploit in Internet Explorer.

Frankly, the idea that any Google employee is using IE for something other than compatibility testing is much more alarming than the idea that China sponsored the attack.

Greasemonkey and Pseudo-Classes

While fiddling with a Greasemonkey script, I discovered an interesting little CSS tidbit today.

<div class="bookmark">
  <span class="balloon">...</span>
</div>

I have several divs with class="bookmark". Each div.bookmark contains a child, span.balloon. I was attempting to make .balloon hidden by default, and visible when I hovered over .bookmark.

.balloon {
  visibility: hidden;
}

.bookmark:hover .balloon {
  visibility: visible;
}

This didn't work for me. Scratching my head, I checked everything I could think of, and naturally came to the conclusion that the :hover pseudo-class simply doesn't work with Greasemonkey. Of course, such a conclusion didn't sit well, and I went back to the basics. I found that body:hover worked just fine. div:hover worked as well. Working from there, I tried div:hover.bookmark. Eureka! Apparently pseudo-classes in Greasemonkey need to be attached to an element in order to work.

Malware Writers Fail to Generate Clean, Reliable Code

According to Engadget:

Microsoft is now confirming that there's a little bit of malicious code sitting at the root of [blue screen of death errors and unwanted reboots]. A rootkit, to be specific, one called Alureon that compromises the atapi.sys file and others. This rootkit makes a system call via an address that, after the update, no longer corresponds to the particular call Alureon is trying to make.

Reflexes

In 1997 a friend of mine invited me to join a a co-ed volleyball team she was starting. I and most of my teammates had never played organized volleyball before, but we were all young, enthusiastic, athletic, and most importantly, competitive. As I recall, we lost our first match two games to one against marginal players who were collectively older than us. How did they beat us? It came down to reflexes. We were playing reflexively—when the ball came over, we tried to react. The problem with relying entirely on reflex is you tend to get out of position. The other team spaced the floor, watched each others' backs, and snapped back into place when they did get out of position.

That season was pretty rough. We certainly lost more than we won, but we did learn how to play. As a result, our next season was very successful. Part of the reason for it was acclimation to each other, the court, and the rules, but a large part was our ability and willingness to learn. We watched the good teams in our division, and we learned to play like they did. In doing so, we needed to rely less on reflexes, and lean more on each other.

Facebook Targeted Ad Spam

These days Facebook spam is even more fun than e-mail spam:

30 year old males: Your state is in desperate need of SWAT agents. Get a high paying degree and serve your country. Sign up now!

Kevin Smith is Too Fat to Fly

According to an L.A. Times article, Kevin Smith (yes, that Kevin Smith) was kicked off of a Southwest Airlines flight for being too fat. The news itself was a little surprising to me, but shocking was the existence of an organization called the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. Shock quickly gave way to humor when the phrase "people of size" was used near the end.

No Flash on Windows Mobile 7

Engadget is reporting that Windows Mobile 7 will ship without support for Adobe Flash. Depending, of course, on how popular Microsoft's new mobile OS proves to be, the war on Flash is really about to heat up.