These are the 58 best quotes from day 2 of MicroConf as tweeted by the attendees. MicroConf is a conference focused on self-funded startups and single founder software companies. The speakers were Patrick McKenzie, Amy Hoy, Adii Pienaar, Dave Collins, Sarah Hatter, and Bill Bither.
This is a summary of MicroConf 2012 day 1 as shared on Twitter by the attendees. MicroConf is a conference focused on self-funded startups and single founder software companies. I hope you enjoy the insightful quotes from the speakers as much as I did.
Jason Gill disclosed a bug in the WooThemes WooFramework that allows any website visitor to run and see the output of any shortcode.
This gives unauthenticated visitors the same power to execute code on the server as regular publishers have. WordPress installations with unsecured shortcodes (such as [php] which allows raw PHP code to be run) are vulnerable to serious attacks if WooThemes are installed, even if they are not the selected theme for the site. It would be trivial to identify common insecure shortcodes and then attempt them against common WooThemes to attempt to run malicious code on the remote server.
The response from the WooThemes folks to this security vulnerability was less than stellar. This is a case study into the mistakes made by WooThemes during this incident that should hopefully serve as a model for what not to do.
The IRS announced that it is actively investigating a tax scam seen in recent weeks related to the filing of tax returns claiming fraudulent refunds.
The scammers claim they can obtain for the victims a tax refund based on the American Opportunity Tax Credit, even if the victim was not enrolled in college. The scammers claim that refunds are available even if the victim went to school decades ago. There is also a variation of this scheme that claims the college credit is available to compensate people for paying taxes on groceries.
Light Point Security has just released Light Point Web 1.2. The main focus of this update was the addition of client-side scrolling. Additionally, there were some improvements involving the keyboard focus when switching between tabs.
Oftentimes we look to other startups’ successes and failures as a roadmap for our own ventures. While that’s a smart strategy, I think much can also be learned from outside the startup scene – something we rarely consider. This is an unconventional case study that looks outside of startups to gather useful lessons learned.
Politics aside, Rick Santorum’s recent rise in popularity has been a great feat, and one that deserves a closer analysis. There are three important lessons for bootstrapped startups in Santorum’s story.
I came across a Verizon email warning customers about phishing scams, and decided to share it. I found it interesting since a lot of companies don’t take such proactive measures to warn their customers of the dangers of online scams. Most of the time these emails are sent after the fact – after a company is aware of an ongoing phishing scam. So here’s an attaboy to Verizon!
Continue reading to see the Verizon email, in its entirety.
Today, I’m going to walk you through the process of being able to browse the web in complete safety. The title of this post explicitly mentions “viruses”, but I’m using this as a more well-known moniker for the term “malware”. Malware is a more generic term which encompasses viruses, spyware, trojans, etc.
What I mean by “complete safety”, is that you do not have to worry about malware infecting your computer. It does not mean you are safe from being tricked into giving your banking passwords to a site that is only pretending to be your bank.
Does Light Point Security track our users’ browsing? I get this question a lot, so I’d like to clarify this in a blog post. We absolutely do not track our users’ activities online. In fact, that goes totally against what we stand for – to protect you while on the web.
I held a workshop on Managing Software Projects with Subversion and Trac. I designed the workshop so that it would be easy for novices to follow, but it also contains some advanced topics. I created a simple eBook for the workshop that walks you through step by step on setting up Subversion and Trac. You can download the Managing Software Projects with Subversion and Trac eBook for free.