Tag Archives: security

Why I Don’t Self-Host Anymore

I’m at An Event Apart and have just listened to a great presentation by Jeremy Keith on data permanency. He touched on many issues, from technical ones regarding physical recording media and logical file formats, to digital rights management, legal … Continue reading

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Getting Around Same-Origin Policy in Web Browsers

Web browsers enforce a security policy called “Same Origin Policy” in order to protect their users from attacks by malicious web sites. The “Same Origin” policy requires that any attempt by Javascript on a web page to access a web … Continue reading

Posted in Ajax, Code, Security | Tagged , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Fixing Perl after MacOS X Security Update 2009-001

Apple's first security update of 2009 for MacOS X may solve some security issues in the OS but it also seriously breaks Perl by installing old versions of some modules along with Perl. It looks like Perl works okay for things that MacOS X uses it for, but if you do development using it or have installed other modules than what it came bundled with you may find that it no longer works.

…You'll probably need to download it from CPAN by hand as the CPAN shell itself is broken by the update.

The current version (as of the time I'm writing this article) is 1.2301 – you can find it at http://search.cpan.org/~gbarr/IO-1.2301/IO.pm
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Use sudo Without a Password on Your Mac

Usually you’ll use it to execute a single command: sudo dmesg or to start a shell: sudo -s sudo is similar to the su command – the su command also allows you to become another user (most likely root). … Next, load /etc/sudoers in your favorite text editor, and add a line to it that looks like this: USERNAME ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL Replace USERNAME with your short username (so in my case, my username is romkey or johnromkey rather than ‘John Romkey’ ). You can find your username with the who command – but if you don’t already know what it is or who to find it, you probably shouldn’t be disabling passwords on sudo in the first place. … There are other ways to do this (in particular, there are ways to say that anyone in a particular UNIX group can become use sudo without a password), but this is the simplest way to let a single user do this. Continue reading

Posted in Computers, Macintosh | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments