Quotes

Too many good docs are getting out of the business. Too many OB/GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across the country.

- George W. Bush, in Polar Bluff, Missouri, September 6, 2004

This quote has been randomly selected, I have no control over the quotes displayed here.

Luster over Functionality

The State of Delaware has released they’re new public sex offender’s registry. It is quite an improvement upon the antiquated registry they once displayed. However, I have quite a few reservations of my own. Apart from lacking any originality the registry is entirely written in Adobe Flex, a flash/AIR based product produced by Adobe. Now I agree that luster has it’s place in IT, however that place is far down at the bottom in the list of priorities. Functionality and security must always be the foremost concern in any application. Obviously my opinion is quite biased since I am the founder and developer of DelawareOffenders.org. But let me list a couple of reasons not to use flash for a production grade product.

• Accessibility – Good luck getting that screen reader to work with Adobe Flash (yes, it is possible if the site is designed well).
• Bandwidth – The registries application is over 1.9 megabytes. This does not take API communication into account!
• Browser interface interference, the user cannot use browser features like history, favorites, text based find tools, and of course the back button.
• Search engines – Flash applications are notorious for causing SEO problems.
• Printing – Many systems still have trouble printing flash based web sites.
• There is more, but my point is quite justified so far.

A sex offender’s registry is by far the least appropriate place for such an application. Unfortunately many things on this project were not implemented correctly, especially the mapping system. New information will soon become available to DelawareOffenders.org, including vehicular information for sex offender’s.

While DelawareOffenders.org currently cannot receive updates, rest assured a patch is on the way. Within hours the new registry’s flash application was reverse engineered and a new back end is in the works. Unfortunately I do not have as much time available as I would like to devote to this, so please bear with me for a little while.

The above article is strictly my opinion, if anybody has a problem with the above stated disagreements, feel free to leave a comment.

YubiKey Security Token

Yay, my Yubico security token finally came in the mail! I have been pouring over the developers documentation for this for quite some time now and am quite excited to see what this little guy has to offer. I’ll be sure to post more as development comes along. So far I am looking into writing a PAM module for secure XML-RPC requests for authentication to a secure back end. I am hoping to add support for both legacy authentication and more secure two factor authentication through XML-RPC. The XML-RPC will make use of RSA key pairs for negotiation and symmetric encryption (probably AES-128 or higher) for the actual authentication/session management data. In case anybody is wondering why I chose XML-RPC… I don’t really have a good answer, kind of an impulse. I am developing this module for personal reasons, but if it works out I will probably clean it up and (L)GPL it for the community, so wish me luck.

For those interested in two factor authentication, check out the Yubico technical manual, its a great read.