Tobias Hoellrich

If you ever wanted to see the data that is being sent from yoru browser to a web server or wanted to the response coming back from the server, you previously needed to resort to proxy techniques like burpproxy, listed on an interface via tcpdump or use one of the commercial traffic analysis applications.

Thanks to Adam Judson you can now do this all from the comfort of your Firefox browser using his Tamper Data extension. Tamper Data installs a new sidebar that allows you to enable/disable “tampering”. When in tamper mode, you can intercept all requests and potentially modify them before they are being sent to the receiving web server.
Highly useful if you need to debug the traffic from/to your web application directly from within your browser.

Great job, Adam!

Technorati’s David Sifry posted his February 2006 State of the Blogosphere. There are some pretty incredible numbers in his report:

• The blogosphere is doubling in size every 5 and a half months

• On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
• 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created

Some of the graphs in David’s post show near exponential growth. Intersting stuff, thanks David.

A few days ago we received an email message which infromed us that Grant Munsey had passed away. I was deeply saddened by the news, but also happy to hear that his suffering had come to an end. You can read more about Grant’s 5 year struggle at http://www.punkalunka.org.

I think Grant started at Adobe in 1997 and I had the pleasure to know him for the last two years before a severe illness struck him in 2001. Grant was an immense pleasure to talk to and I’m a bit sad that I never really got to work with him on a project. Grant was also the one who convinced senior management at Adobe that it was time to give back to the Open Source community. The original http://opensource.adobe.com exists primarily because of his efforts.

Bye Grant – you’ll be missed a lot.

Over the last few days the PVR at home has recorded the latest episodes of Sleeper Cell on Showtime. For those of you who have not heard about it: the show is about a terrorist sleeper cell in the US which has been infiltrated by an FBI agent. You get to know the individuals and their motives why they have decided to become terrorists. This is not your run-of-the-mill CSI-type show, but an interesting concept that tries to provides inside into the terrorists minds.

Anyway, so yesterday I watched one of the episodes when it struck me how far Photoshop has come: During one of the episodes the sleeper cell members get information on how to receive further instructions for the upcoming big-bang. They are supposed to look for a certain auction on ebay for a rug, download the image associated with the auction, revert thorugh the “liquify” filter in photoshop to retrieve the password that allows them access to a secure web site on the internet. I kid you not.