a.k.a Elpie

April 23rd, today, is UNESCO's World Book and Copyright Day. We should all be celebrating reading, publishing, and the protection of intellectual property through copyright. The problem is - looking at what is happening with copyright and its protection does not give rise to any feeling of celebration.

Every day, we deal with copyright. We probably have all infringed copyright too - when was the last time you sang, "Happy Birthday" in a public place? Did you get a license first? Copyright is no longer a cut-and-dried issue but after looking at the news on this World Book and Copyright Day, its hard to find reason to celebrate.

Twitter is once again battling with a variant of the Mikeyy cross-site scripting worm. The injection was once again into the profile CSS and indicates that Twitter has not yet managed to close these security holes. Today's attack is a mutation of the earlier scripts and poses a potentially serious danger to users of Internet Explorer.

The tips I gave for the earlier StalkDaily XSS worm are relevant to the latest incarnation as well.

This post has been updated since yet another variant of the Mikeyy worm appeared on Twitter the day after I wrote this post.

For three days over Easter Twitter was battling a wave of cross-site scripting attacks. Some news media sites are reporting that the worm is dead and Twitter is now in the clear. Twitter, however, has not yet made a status update or blog post to tell users that the site is now secured.

These XSS attacks were neither new or unexpected. Can Twitter users feel reassured that the holes have been plugged?

Internet Explorer 8 is going out for mass distribution through Windows Update very soon. IE8 is a good step forward for the popular browser but it raises issues that web site designers and developers need to be aware of.

In this first article in a series, I explain IE8's Compatibility View, X-UA-Compatible meta tags, and the Master List - what these mean for site developers.

In future articles I am covering some of the most problematic known bugs and rendering issues that are unique to IE8.

The cross-site scripting attacks are continuing on Twitter. A 4th or 5th generation of the XSS attacks that caused such concern among Twitter users two days ago has appeared. Learn what the JavaScript attack is doing and how to clean out your profile if you are unfortunate enough to have an infected account.