Category: Review

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Review

Hak5, what happened?

Hak5 is an internet TV show about “everything from network security, open source and forensics, to DIY modding and the homebrew scene.” In some ways it’s the spiritual successor to The Broken. I was a big fan of thes how when they first started releasing episodes 4 3 years ago.  But for one reason or another, I stopped following the show sometime near the end of the first season.

Needless to say, I was pretty excited when I heard that Hak5 had been signed to Revision 3 earlier this summer. I watched the first and second episodes as soon as I found them available on tivo. To my dismay, the show has gone down hill. The episodes were not at all up to par with the production quality of most other shows on the revision 3 network. 

First of all, the show did not seem to be edited or rehearsed. The hosts were literally reading off scripts in front of them and they still managed to make mistakes! A couple of times the shot quickly switched between the 3 sets for no apparent reason. In some cases the hosts had trouble demoing the software they were talking about. I don’t get why they did not take the time to edit out any of these error and/or reshoot scenes. I’d assume that Revision 3 would be giving them a budget or direct accept to their editing infrastructure, so that amateur mistakes like this don’t make it to air. 

Second, the new hosts are really unpolished and awkward. There’s a weird (lack of) chemistry between the 3 of them. Also, the topics they talk about are fairly complex and the hosts aren’t able to strike a good balance between explaining the complexities in a way that’s understandable by a wider range of people. For example, in episode one, mubix tried explain a piece of “forensics” software called Maltego. I spent the entire 10 minute segment wondering when he was going to actually explain the software, benefits of using and how there was anything “forensic” about the software. Even though he gave a couple of use-cases, I didn’t understand what he was talking about. He just said the word “transforms” a lot. 

The other software that they talked about in the two episodes I watched was all fairly irrelevant. Covering openDNS in a show that also covers fairly advanced network management tools and hacking concept seems a little backwards. And why would you have a guy try to explain decompiling windows programs and hexediting when he admits that he’s not even a programmer.

The overal format of the show has just become very confusing.

Other than that, the show still has a couple of good things going for it.
The microshaft ads are still hilarious.
The old host Darrent is still good.
It seems like they are focus on some more pratical “hacking” technics, DIY and other stupid nerd tricks.
Even though I’m not involved in it, it does seem like the show has a good community, that’s always a good thing.

Links to the episodes: 
Episode 1
Episode 2

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Review Websites

Canadian Policty Party Websites Report Card

With the looming Canadian federal election, I thought I’d take a look at the federal party websites. I’ll be rating them on 5 characteristics, on a 5 point scale:

  • Design: How much I like the look and feel.
  • User Interface: How well does the site layout work
  • Candidate Info: How good is the info on the candidate in my riding. 
  • Web 2.0: How well are they pimping themselves on the social networks, are they including a lot of media, etc. 
  • Ease of contributing: Online donations have been a major part of the current US Presidential election. I took a quick look at their contribution processes to see if there were any obvious problems. I didn’t actually donate.

 

NDP – 92%

  • Design: 5. My favorite site. Nice and tidy, good use of orange. Cute icons.
  • UI: 4.5. The index page is really well organized. The drop down menus are a little redundant, since most of them only contain 1 elements. The use of flash on the for the candidate finder is unfortunate that page should really be accessible to everyone.
  • Candidate Info: 4.5. The bio is a little sparse.
  • Web2.0: 4. Twitter, facebook. Their site looks the most web 2.0.
  • Donation: 5. The most straightforward process of them all.

 

Conservatives – 90%

  • Design: 4. Decent overall. Some weird layout and graphic choices. 
  • UI: 4.5. Dropdown menus are familiar, nice series of quicklinks on the right nav. 
  • Candidate Info: 4.5. Has everything I could want except for his mailing address.
  • Web2.0: 5. They’re on the ball, flickr account, friend feed, twitter, myspace, facebook. And all their ads are online. 
  • Contributions: 4.5. Giant donation buttons everywhere. They’re already required to collect a lot of info already, they could have at least made it a one step process. 

 

Green – 76%

  • Design: 4. Pretty good. Albeit a little uninspired and sloppy. Probably designed by a volunteer.
  • UI: 4.5. Bonus marks for using a drilldown information structure and NOT using dropdown menus.
  • Candidate Info: 4. Long Bio. No mailing address.
  • Web2.0: 2.5. They have blogs and a youtube channel.
  • Contributions: 4. Nice and easy.

 

Liberal – 52%

  • Design: 3.5. Simple. Just a little too simple. Too much white. 
  • UI: 3. Use of flash on the index for something that could’ve been easily done in javascript was a bad choice. Other than that, it’s pretty run of the mill. 
  • Candidate Info: 0! No picture! No personal contact info! No permalink. Unacceptable. 
  • Web2.0: 3.5. Facebook, youtube, some video and pictures. Seems like an afterthought. 
  • Contributions: 3. The page is quite cluttered and a little confusing. The page contains elements outside of the secured site, causing a certificate error that will probably scare of some potential contributors. 

 

Bloc Québécois – 47.5%

  • Design: 2.5. Looks like puke, but it could be worse.
  • UI: 3. Mediocre. 
  • Candidate Info: N/A. They only run candidates in Quebec.
  • Web2.0: 1. They have a “blogue” I guess that’s worth something.
  • Contributions: 3. The online form is only available in french (isn’t that against some law?!). It appears to be pretty straightforward.

 

Libertarian – 23%

  • Design: 0. My 7 month old son could design a better site. 
  • UI: 3. It’s oldschool, but effective.
  • Candidate Info: N/A. None in my riding.
  • Web2.0: 0.5. They have a forum *shrug*.
  • Contributions: N/A. I think they’re still too small to be accepting donations on a large scale. 

 
There you have it, if you want to vote based on my opinion of the party’s website, you’ll have to vote NDP.
I took a look at the rest of the minor parties for any standouts. The Canadian Action Party has a surprisingly good website. The West Block Party‘s site is easily the worst, it has an under construction diggerman.

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Review

Low-Tech Todo List

I’ve been trying to find a good todo list keeping method for years. I’ve tried online services like tadalist, i’ve tried using a moleskine. Nothing seems to work for me.

Internet Super Mom bought me this combination mouse-pad, todo list about a week ago. So far it seems to have solved my todo list woes. 

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Google Review

Google Chrome: I’m In L-O-V-E

I’m sure these sentiments will be echoed around the around the blogosphere (including 4 posts on GigaOm…seriously) over the next couple of days, but I just can’t contain myself. I think I now know what it feels like to be an Apple fanboy when Steve Jobs announces one more thing. I haven’t been this excited about a browser since NCSA Mosaic. 

Hearts 

  • It’s fast! Really fast! I haven’t bother running any benchmarks, it’s not necessary. This browser is quite obviously insanely faster than any other browser I’ve ever tried. Pages load instantly. Any and all javascript elements load and react noticably faster. 
  • The striped down UI is a nice change from the odd UI choices in IE 7&8 and what now seems like an extremely bloated FF 3. The tab animations are nice and smooth. The ability to detach tabs is a great addition. 
  • Site search. Chrome remembers when you used the search inside a site and then allows you to use the search from the “omni bar.” So, if I type “wik+tab” it will bring up a “Search Wikipedia search:” labe, then any keywords I type get routed to wikipedia’s search engine. This works with amazon, ebay, blogs, anywhere Chrome can recognize a site search field. 
  • Developer tools! Chrome includes tools similar to Firefox’s firebug plugin, including an HTML/CSS element inspector, javascript debugger and a native, colour-coded, line-numbered HTML viewer. 
  • The default start page is innovative. In addition to showing my 9 most visited sites, it also shows my top site searches, recent bookmarks and recently closed tabs. In theory, this is super useful, but it’s one of those features that takes some getting use to. It would be kind of neat to pull RSS feeds or other widgets into this. 
  • Ability to resize textboxes. It’s minor, but useful. 

 

Hates 

  • Doesn’t resize properly on my second monitor.
  • Opening and closing tabs is sometime sluggish – especially when there is a large flash element on the page being opened or closed. When this happens it actually causes the entire browser to be unusable. 
  • Flash sometimes loads noticably slower than the rest of the page – even on youtube. This could be due to my older cpu. 
  • Browser become slow when I’ve got 10+ tabs open. Again, could be due to my machine. 
  • The task manager is a GREAT idea. I haven’t had to use it yet. But, if a tab or a pluggin is ever so slow that it’s affecting my ability to browse, my machine is probably going to be too bogged down to actually use Chrome’s task manager. So it might actually be useless. Now, each tab does still appear as a seperate windows task, so I should still be able to close them that way. We’ll see. 
  • Missing extensions. It’d be nice if Chrome included an implementation of XUL and directly import Firefox exentions. 

Bits & Bobs

  • ctrl+k brings you directly to a search in the OmniBar – using your default search engine. 
  • Matt Cutts has a blog post addressing some privacy concerns: Link
  • It’s interesting that every major browser except Firefox now has a private browsing mode.
  • The options menu is divided in a really clever way, 3 tabs: basic, minor tweaks, under the hood
  • There’s a “stats for nerds” button

Suffice it to say. Chrome is my primary browser. I’ll still use Firefox when I need the web dev toolbar or some other extension. Mozilla and Microsoft have some serious catching up to do.

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Random Review Tips & How To's

iPhone Tethering, Not As Hard As It Looks

In a flip-flop move reminisant of John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign, Rogers Wireless has reversed it’s policy regarding smart phone tethering. I’m not even going to try to speculate what’s going on internally with this company. Buried in this CBC article about Rogers’ (baffling) new data plans is this nugget:

Unlike other cellphone carriers, Rogers is allowing customers to “tether” their smartphones, or connect them to a computer and use them as a modem.

This new policy was one of the reasons I decided to jailbreak my iPhone earlier this week.

Finally got around to trying it out tonight. A quick google pulled up a very ominous looking 9 step How To. In actuality there are only 3 things you really have to set up. 1) ad-hoc network on the pc, 2) run ‘socks’ on iPhone, 3) set up SOCKS proxy connection in your browser

First Impressions:

  • 3G is fast! Speedtest.net gave me 2742 kb/s down and 246 kb/s up. That was with full bars of reception, during off-peak. This is definitely fast enough for standard browsing and not too bad for file downloads. I’ve gotten worse connections with paid wifi.
  • Because it’s a browser based solution, it’s somewhat limiting. I suspect there’s some software available that would hook into a proxy server at on a lower level, it might even be a standard configuration setting in windows. I didn’t look into it.
  • Either the socks app stopped working and/or firefox randomly forgot my proxy settings. Over the course of my 15 minute trial, I had to reset firefox’s proxy settings 5 or 6 times.
  • Battery drain on the iPhone is high. You probably only have an hour max.

Overall, it’s pretty cool.
That said, I’m not entirely sure where I’d use this. Most of the time the iPhone is going to be as much internet as I need. I might use it at an airport, if I wanted to sync some podcasts before a long flight or something. I may use it if I wanted to work in a wifi-less location. Other than that, it’s a good backup incase the cable ever goes down.