Good news for all you crazy kids waiting in eager anticipation for the Nintendo DSi’s Stateside release. According to very scientistic benchmarks conducted by the folks over at N+, the up-and-coming handheld’s Opera browser not only loads the New York Times website much faster than the DS Lite does, but it’s clever enough to start with the text — giving you something to read while you wait for pictures of the war torn Gaza Strip to materialize (and bum you out on an otherwise beautiful Monday afternoon). Unlike the DS Lite, Opera for the DSi is free, and it can be saved directly to the device’s internal memory. No fuss, no muss — right? But don’t take our word for it, we’ve been kind enough to provide a video for your after the break.
This article was written on August 08, 2007 by CyberNet.
Web Browser Wednesday
Opera is a free web browser that is available for the Windows, Linux, and Mac operating systems. One of the things that Opera is best known for is being highly customizable out-of-the-box, but I think that some people overlook how customizable the toolbars are.
I’ve seen quite a few people using Opera before, and almost none of them move thye toolbars or buttons around. I’m not sure if that’s because they don’t know how, or whether they love the default layout that much. On the other hand, almost all Firefox installations that I ever see have customized toolbars, and a good example of that can be seen at Lifehacker’s “Show Us Your Firefox“.
I thought about making this your typical tutorial that walks you through all of the different steps, but it would be extremely long and hard to explain. For that reason I’ve assembled a video demonstration that starts with a fresh installation of Opera, and shows you how I go about positioning things.
–Customize the Toolbars–
In the video demonstration I show you how to customize the look and position of any toolbar in Opera. Even the bar with the tabs and the sidebar are included in this category, and changing their location is as simple as right-clicking on them and choosing the Customize option. Then there is a drop-down menu next to a label called “Placement,” and that is what you’ll need to adjust to move toolbars around Opera.
–Tab Bar–
One of my favorite things in Opera is that you can move the tab bar to the bottom of the browser, or to one of the sides. Seeing that I have a widescreen monitor, I prefer to utilize the extra screen width by placing my tabs on the right-side, which is also nice because your tabs don’t get so small that they are unreadable.
In the video I’ll also show you how to move the tab bar below the address bar without any hacks or inconvenient tricks. By default the tab bar is above the address bar with Opera, which is something Firefox and Internet Explorer users might have a hard time getting used to.
–Sidebar–
I like to view myself as a minimalist when it comes to icons and clutter, but there are some things that I do simply because it makes me more productive, and the sidebar is one of those things. It takes up way too much room out-of-the-box, and I was anxious to find a way to condense it down. The reason why this is important to me is that I have hundreds of bookmarks that I frequently access, so to allow me to be as productive as possible, I need to leave the bookmarks sidebar open at all times. As you’ll see in the video, there is a surprising amount of customization options that pertain to the sidebar.
–Video–
Are you ready for the video? I spent a lot of time making sure that, despite the low-resolution, you can still clearly see everything that I’m doing. So without further ado…
–Overview–
Opera is about as powerful as you want it to be. Once you get diggin’ under the hood you’ll find all kinds of surprises that you didn’t know existed, and that’s one of the joys with using it as your browser. Play around, mess with the options, and don’t be afraid to screw something up…that’s my motto!
This article was written on August 03, 2007 by CyberNet.
Cookies are used in your web browser to store information, but have you ever thought about how easy it would be for a hacker to quickly gain access to them? It is actually frighteningly easy as Robert Graham, the CEO of errata security, demonstrated at the Black Hat security convention. All it really takes is a point-and-click of the mouse:
First Graham needs to be able to sniff data packets and in our case the open Wi-Fi network at the convention fulfilled that requirement. He then ran Ferret to copy all the cookies flying through the air. Finally, Graham cloned those cookies into his browser – in easy point-and-click fashion – with a home-grown tool called Hamster.
The attack can hijack sessions in almost any cookie-based web application and Graham has tested it successfully against popular webmail programs like Google’s Gmail, Microsoft’s Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. He stressed that since the program just uses cookies, he only needs an IP address and usernames and passwords aren’t required.
In front of everyone at the convention Graham demonstrated how he could intercept the cookies from a person sending an email. He had someone creat a Gmail account, and in no time at all Graham had intercepted the cookies therefore enabling him to send an email disguised as the victim. As mentioned in the above quote, there were no usernames or passwords needed.
–Secure Yourself–
One of the easiest things that you can do to secure yourself from such an easy attack is to use https:// instead of http:// whenever it is available. Some services like Gmail offer this alternative, and using it encrypts your session using SSL so that these types of attacks don’t happen.
Firefox users (with Greasemonkey), Internet Explorer users (with IE7 Pro or Turnabout), and Opera users can use a script such as this one that is setup to automatically replace the http:// with https:// anytime that you visit Gmail. That way you never have to think about doing it yourself.
You should also try not to visit sites that use sensitive information while connected to a public hotspot, but I think we all know that by now.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
Opera
Cookies are used in your web browser to store information, but have you ever thought about how easy it would be for a hacker to quickly gain access to them? It is actually frighteningly easy as Robert Graham, the CEO of errata security, demonstrated at the Black Hat security convention. All it really takes is a point-and-click of the mouse: