Twitter had some issues this weekend with folks sneaking Javascript code into profiles to effectively create self-replicating Twitter worms. These worms were exploiting a hole in which Twitter was not doing enough scrubbing of user inputs for the CSS customization of a profile page. While this was clearly a security flaw and had to be fixed, it does result from a basic philosophy which aims at maximum flexibility in how people use Twitter. This stands in fairly stark contrast with the very ti...

Twitter had some issues this weekend with folks sneaking Javascript code into profiles to effectively create self-replicating Twitter worms. These worms were exploiting a hole in which Twitter was not doing enough scrubbing of user inputs for the CSS customization of a profile page. While this was clearly a security flaw and had to be fixed, it does result from a basic philosophy which aims at maximum flexibility in how people use Twitter. This stands in fairly stark contrast with the very ti...

For the New Year, I tweeted that we should “ll work together in 2014 to keep the Internet open for the benefit of humankind everywhere." That couldn’t be any more pressing as there is a full scale assault under way and we don’t seem to be doing much about it. First, thanks to Edward Snowden we have a much better view into the extent of domestic and international surveillance activities. The non-democratic ultra-secret and blackhat based approach taken by the NSA has done much to undermine the...

For the New Year, I tweeted that we should “ll work together in 2014 to keep the Internet open for the benefit of humankind everywhere." That couldn’t be any more pressing as there is a full scale assault under way and we don’t seem to be doing much about it. First, thanks to Edward Snowden we have a much better view into the extent of domestic and international surveillance activities. The non-democratic ultra-secret and blackhat based approach taken by the NSA has done much to undermine the...