Mike’s ramblings

Today I’ve installed Defensio because the spam was getting a little bit too much to deal with by hand. I chose Defensio over Akismet mainly because I did not want to create a Wordpress.com account to get an API key.

To use Defensio you can register on their site to get a free API key. The installation is as easy as it could be. I did not run into any problems. I’ll see over time how good it is doing its job.

Does anyone have any numbers for comparison of the two competitors?

This image resizing technique is absolutely amazing. It is actually not only a technique to resize images, but also makes it possible to make objects (or people) in a picture disappear. What it does is basically take out parts of the image which it thinks are not important. The real difficulty obviously lies in finding the right part of the image to take out.
Once again an image (this time a video) is worth more than a thousand words. Check it out. Your jaw will drop.You can find more on the technology here: http://www.faculty.idc.ac.il/arik/Source: Techcrunch

Nik Cubrilovic, occasional writer for Techcrunch, has published a good article concerning source code security in response to the Facebook code leakage I hope none of you missed.
Short summary:

• Use mod_security
• Put all of your code except index.php outside of your web root
• Change the default file type in the Apache (or whatever you use) configuration
• Use ‘Deny all’ to prevent access to folders outside the web root

For more in-depth information and guidelines how to implement these security measures check out Nik’s blog.