Cody Taylor

Web design has come a very long way since the days of tables and spacer .gifs, and when CSS finally got support from most browsers, a whole new world of options opened for web developers and designers

From content management systems to web portal creation tools, Linux has just about everything you need. Among those thousands of tools, a select few stand out as the best of the best. Listed below you will find my top 10 must-haves for Linux server/web/cloud-based tools.

An anonymous reader sends along a sharp and snarky article that takes Google to task for taking longer than expected to award M in its competition to find and fund world-bettering ideas. The submitter comments, “After using its tenth birthday as occasion to solicit philanthropic ideas from Web users through its Project 10^100, Google appears to have backed off from its commitment to provide million in funding to the winner. While the company was supposed to reveal the Project 10^100 winner in February, Google has since delayed the vote once and now suspended it indefinitely, due to the overwhelming response — Google says it received 150,000 entries. A Google spokeswoman wouldn’t commit to a new date, saying only it would be delayed ‘for a while longer.’ She further apologized for the company’s ‘over optimistic assumptions about how quickly we could analyze all the ideas that we’ve received.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mike writes “Law prof Eugene Volokh blogs about a US House of Representatives bill proposed by Rep. Linda T. Sanchez and 14 others that could make it a federal felony to use your blog, social media like MySpace and Facebook, or any other Web media ‘to cause substantial emotional distress through “severe, repeated, and hostile” speech.’ Rep. Sanchez and colleagues want to make it easier to prosecute any objectionable speech through a breathtakingly broad bill that would criminalize a wide range of speech protected by the First Amendment. The bill is called The Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act, and if passed into law (and if it survives constitutional challenge) it looks almost certain to be misused.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader notes that this weekend, ReadWriteWeb discovered a security hole on several McAfee sites, which lets any attacker piggyback on the company’s reputation and brand in order to distribute malware, Trojans, or anything else. The submitter adds an ironic coda to McAfee’s epic fail: “In the ‘how to HTML Injection’ section, the author provided the four steps needed to execute a simple, no-brainer injection, but unfortunately, exposed a hole in NY Times website when they republished the article. While the author changed the offending text to an image, the Times is still using the original story which redirects directly to ReadWriteWeb [via XSS].” From the RWW post: “During tests this weekend, we discovered the company who claims to ‘keep you safe from identity theft, credit card fraud…’ has several cross-site scripting vulnerabilities and provides the bad guys with a brilliant — albeit ironic — launching pad from which to unleash their attacks.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

KIDO’Z is a pretty nifty Adobe AIR-powered desktop browser app that gives kids a safe and fun environment to play games, watch videos and/or visit pre-approved websites. When you first install the AIR app as a parent, you can configure the age and gender of your offspring as well as your location and preferred language (there are 17 available).

Just a couple of days ago we reported that the MPAA’s website was vulnerable to an XSS attack, which left it displaying torrents from The Pirate Bay. This time a flaw has been discovered in the RIAA’s site, which now allows it to display TorrentFreak’s latest articles.

Plain old Web searching doesn’t do the trick anymore: It yields too much random data, or not what you need. Here’s how to get what you want when you want it—sometimes before you ask for it. Nobody “surfs” the Web anymore. Some 80 percent of all online sessions now begin with a search. Google proves the point by making over a billion dollars….