Me
My name is Mark Doliner. I’m a computer software engineer living and working in North Carolina, USA. I worked in the San Francisco Bay area for 13 years before moving back East in 2019. My email address is mark@kingant.net.
Pages
Me, Elsewhere
Other Stuff
Categories
Archives
Category Archives: Computers
No Summer of Code for Pidgin This Year
Pidgin/Finch/libpurple/Instant Messaging Freedom, Inc. didn’t apply to be an organization in Google’s Summer of Code (GSoC) this year. Why not? The short answer is that I didn’t feel we had enough developers willing to mentor students for it to be … Continue reading
HTTPS User Guide
In light of my previous post where I talk about how it’s relatively easy to commit a man-in-the-middle attack, I feel like I should explain how people can protect themselves. If you’re typing information that you consider private (typing your … Continue reading
Posted in All, Computers
Leave a comment
Man-in-the-Middle Attacking
Fair warning: This is somewhat technical. Introduction I recently wondered how hard it is to perform a man-in-the-middle attack. The login forms for Facebook, Twitter, Pandora and countless others submit login credentials using HTTPS, however, the forms themselves are served … Continue reading
Posted in All, Computers
Leave a comment
Using Amazon Mechanical Turk for Translating Computer Software
Summary It’s possible to translate software using Amazon Mechanical Turk, but it’s not ideal. What is Amazon Mechanical Turk? It’s a web site run by Amazon (yes, the shopping company). Anyone can create an account and post some questions or … Continue reading
Posted in All, Computers
4 Comments
Planned One Laptop Per Child Tablet
I’ve mentioned the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project before. It’s very interesting to me. Originally the project set out to create a $100 laptop (that may have even been the original name of the project?). They did manage to … Continue reading
Posted in All, Computers
Leave a comment
Meebo Announces XAuth
On Monday Meebo announced something called XAuth (not to be confused with the X Windows authorization program). What is it? It’s a small JavaScript library intended to be used by website developers to tailor a web page to a specific … Continue reading
Posted in All, Computers
Leave a comment
AOL, AIM and Openness
When I started working on Pidgin eight years ago (eight years‽ holy crap!) my main focus was the code used to connect to AIM and ICQ. The protocol is called ‘OSCAR,’ and it is a proprietary protocol created by AOL. … Continue reading
Posted in All, Computers, Pidgin
7 Comments
Google and China
(This is probably old news for anyone who stays abreast of tech news, but for everyone else…) A while ago I complained about China’s draconian censorship laws. In 2006 Google launched google.cn, a China-based google.cn search page with censored results. … Continue reading
Posted in All, Computers
Leave a comment