Flash and Joomla News by Eyezberg

Custom iPods and MacBooks with Laser Engravings: I want one!

Now I bought my Dell Inspiron 9300 just 8 months ago, and I love it so far. But I've always admired the looks of all Apple products, and wanted an iPod for a  long time now, a PowerBook maybe longer. I just love OS X and everything Aqua.

I haven't made the move because I'm so used to the Win world, have all the app's I need and use, because I find it much easier to buy spare parts and replacements etc etc.. And Vista is supposed to get the "looks" part done.

But now.. I stumbled upon these very! cool photos, and have already contacted Etchamac about the iPod (because as most cheap Apple products online, what you guys pay in the US in $$, we overpay here in Europe in Euros -1 euro = $1.28 currently)!

A teaser first:

Now this Etchamac site has a very cool Flash Designer to make your very own design for your Apple product: any Pod, and the Laptops!

This RIA is very easy to use: select the product and options, upload your own images, logos, add text etc, and really customize the Pod Book as you want it, and go get it! 

Hacked, Cracked, whatever

In light of all the recent attacks on Joomla! and its extensions, new ways of securing sites need to be found quickly.
This very site was hacked (or cracked, as apparently it's now called -who cares) while still running 1.0.10 a week ago, while I was on hollidays without internet access.

To the hackers

Thanks for only changing the one frontpage article and not making a mess of all the rest.
This is the second time this site got hacked.
I offer tutorials and ressources about Flash and Joomla for free.
I really do not understand: how can anyone take pride in defacing or hacking such a site?
If someone can explain the mind and thoughts of such people to me?
In my opinion, it is as if a gangster walks around bragging how he robbed $0.50 from the homeless guy out in the street!
Shame on you. Just because you can, doesn't make it right, cool, or whatever.
Exploiting one single security hole on as many sites as possible is just plain stupid, waste of time and energy, anyone can.
If you got skillZ, contribute to the code. If not, you're a looser!

To the Joomla! developers and extension contributors

The current "stable" version 1.0.11 introduces recommendations for some settings to make sites more secure.
It seems strange to only have one (1) person working on the current version's SVN: Rey?! Is there still a team around?
It also seems strange, reading the purpose of the stability releases such as .11:

Maintenance Release Number (1.1.X)

An increment of the maintenance number usually indicates bug fixing within the minor release and possibly small enhancements and limited new features.

to see code and recommendations introduced which (would) make this version not backwards compatible with previous versions at all, as it breaks some widely used extensions.

The last few updates have almost always introduced as many new bugs as they fixed bugs. It might be in the best interest of future users to focuse all efforts on making 1.5 beta / Stable, but as I said before, at the moment, millions of sites run on 1.0.x. This code needs better updates. Not new features, just all bugs fixed / no new ones introduced.

Once a site gets hacked, from the users perspective it doesn't make ANY difference if it's Joomla core or an extension at fault, the result is the same: site gone. Of course, it is easy to say, as during the last weeks, "Joomla 1.0.10 is secure, there are no known issues" and "only use trusted extensions". But looking at the changelog, it appears there were holes in the Core (ok, related to specific server settings, but not all users can change these, and "change host" is no real answer either..).