In modern computer systems, the biggest bottleneck of information tends to be in communicating with the hard disks. High seek times and relatively slow transmission rates when compared to RAM speeds can add up quickly. This was a necessary evil back when RAM space and costs were at a premium, but now it is not uncommon to see 4GB of RAM on laptops, and even 12GB on desktops. For  users whose primary computer use is browsing the internet (either for work, writing articles, or lolcats) and have some extra RAM, moving the browser cache to the RAM from the hard disk is a definite option for increasing speed.

In Linux systems (specifically Fedora and Ubuntu systems), this can be achieved for Chrome and Firefox by creating a larger ramdisk, mounting the ramdisk after boot, and then setting the browser of choice to use that ramdisk as a cache. The necessary commands to do this are readily available on the internet, which makes life easy. Using ramdisks for performance boosts are not exclusive to browsers, and can be used for other software such as Nagios for example.

We have previously covered a tool called Espérance DV for moving cache to RAM in Mac OSX, and for any Windows users feeling left out, there are ways of making Firefox bend to your will. Obviously you will see an increase in RAM use (duh), but this shouldn’t be a problem unless you are running out of free RAM on your system. Remember, free RAM is wasted RAM.

We couldn’t help but poke a little fun in the headline. This is [Alex Miller], a twelve year old who claimed a $3000 bounty from Mozilla. See, [Alex] is a self-taught security guru. When Mozilla upped the reward for discovering and reporting critical security flaws in their software he went to work searching for one. He estimates that he spent an hour and a half a day for ten days to find the hole. Fifteen hours of work for $3000? That’s pretty good!

Is it good or bad to pay for these kind of submissions? The real question: Is the bounty high enough to get blackhats to report vulnerabilities, rather than selling software that exploits them? Let us know what you think in the comments.

[via Zero Day]

Often, software hackers are the activists that push software giants towards updating vulnerable applications. In todays example, [Eric Butler] is pushing Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and more all at the same time. By creating a user script-kiddie friendly extension for Firefox, he has allowed just about anyone to sniff unsecured connections on public Wi-Fi access points and log into these unprotected accounts.

Right now the extension is available for Windows and Mac, with a Linux port coming soon. Temporarily, the best way for a user to avoid getting taken advantage of would be to not use these social networking sites on a public connection, or to implement a secure proxy for these connections that would keep your data safe. Hopefully these websites will have a quick rebuttal that allows for security without workarounds. With all of the bad press they are recieving, they certainly have incentive to.

Are there any software or security buffs out there? We would love to see someone port this to an iPhone or Android app that could check and log open Wi-Fi points. We’ll leave the foot work to the experts out there, but do be sure to give us a heads up if anyone manages to make it happen, okay?

Does anyone else find it a little ironic the electronic retailer SparkFun is advocating scripts to help Digikey have a Sort By Price function? Regardless, to reiterate now Firefox (and we hear Google Chrome too) users with the Greasemonkey plugin can sort Digikey items. Personally, some of us here are just Mouser fans at heart.

[Thanks Charper and Mohonri and Satiagraha, image credit Make]

Today we’re going to take a look at writing scripts for the Greasemonkey add-on for Firefox. This add-on allows us to use JavaScript to make changes to the way webpages are displayed on our browser. These changes can only be seen by a copy of Firefox that is running a particular script. As an example, we’re going to write a script that adds a border to the banner image of each article on Hack a Day by overlaying the image you see above. Find out how it’s done after the break.

Our Goal:

We want to make the top image for each article look like it has been printed with a white border and then taped on each corner to the page. This is an effect that we used to use on our posts and a Greasemonkey script is a good way to re-implement the effect if you miss that image style.

What You Need:

1. Install Firefox
2. Install the Greasemonkey add-on.
3. Download and install our script: hackaday_nostalgia.user.js

How It Works:

Greasemonkey runs JavaScript on top of the pages that have been loaded by Firefox. The first part of the file is a set of comments that tell Greasemonkey what it’s dealing with:

// ==UserScript== // @name           Hackaday Nostalgia // @namespace      http://hackaday.com // @description    Overlay photograph border and taped corners for article images at Hack a Day. // @include        http://hackaday.com/* // ==/UserScript==

The name, namespace, and include lines are all required for the script to work. Name is what you want to call your script. Namespace is a URL that identifies the script uniquely in case there are two scripts with the same name. Include tells Greasemonkey what pages this script should be applied to. In our case we only want to monkey with the images on hackaday.com so we’ve included all addresses from that domain.

Now that we’ve identified what pages we want to alter, we can parse the document and pull out the elements we want ot change. The first thing to do is examine the page source of our target:

<div class='snap_preview'><p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-17747" title="plotter-with-300w-laser" src="http://hackadaycom.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/plotter-with-300w-laser.jpg?w=470&h=313" alt="plotter-with-300w-laser" width="470" height="313" /></p>

With a little digging we can find the line you see above that includes the IMG element for the title of a post. We’re in luck, the page builds each post wrapped in a DIV of the Class ‘snap-preview’. We can use Greasemonkey to parse the page looking for these DIVs and then alter the first IMG element in each one:

//get all DIVs of the snap_preview class
var allDivs, thisDiv;
allDivs = document.evaluate(
 "//div[@class='snap_preview']",
 document,
 null,
 XPathResult.UNORDERED_NODE_SNAPSHOT_TYPE,
 null);

In the code above we are using the evaluate function to pick out DIVs that are in the ‘snap-preview’ class. We load them into an array called allDivs which we can then step through:

//step through each DIV
for (var i=0; i<allDivs.snapshotLength; i++) {
 thisDiv = allDivs.snapshotItem(i);

 //Alter the first img of each DIV
 var image = thisDiv.getElementsByTagName('img');

 //Make sure we've got an IMG in this DIV
 if (image[0]) {

 //Save original source URL
 var orig_src = image[0].src;
 //Concatenate for CSS use
 orig_src = 'url(' + orig_src + ')';
 //Set original as background
 image[0].style.background = orig_src;

 //Set Hack a Day overlay as image
 image[0].src = 'http://hackadaycom.wordpress.com/files/2009/10/had_frame.png';
 }
}

This block of code is where the magic happens. A loop is used to step through each DIV we grabbed in the previous code snippet. We grab the IMG element by using the getElementsByTagName function. All IMG elements are put into an array called ‘image’, but we only want to alter the first image in each post so we’ll always reference image[0].

For the image border and tape effect, we used the GIMP to create a PNG file that has transparency where we want the original picture to show through. We need the original picture to be behind the overlay so we’re making it a background image using the CSS property ‘background’. The PNG overlay is then set as the new SRC for the IMG element.

That’s all it takes, now images will be overlayed with the border image you see at the top of this post.

Benefits and Drawbacks:

There are some drawbacks to using this system; the overlay covers up the borders of the original image, older posts that already have this image effect will have it applied again, the overlay will be stretched to match each original image which can look weird depending on image height, and the overlay image we’ve provide is of rather low quality (you can probably do better yourself).

Our method uses a very small amount of code and doesn’t require the original image size to be recalculated.

The Next Step:

Now that we’ve showed you how to do this much, you may want to take it one step further. The original picture style also made the images black and white. Can you make the script do this as well? To get started in the right direction, you might want to look at the Pixastic JavaScript image manipulation library and its desaturate function.

Overwhelmed?

If you need some help deciphering what we did here just use your online resources:

• Dive into Greasemonkey: An online book to help you learn greasemonkey scripting
• HTML Dog: A best practices guide to HTML and CSS

We picked up a great Firefox bookmark tip from [Colin]. He wanted an easier way to look up bug numbers on the launchpad bug tracker. Because the url is always the same with the bug number at the end of the address, he replaced the final portion of the url with %s. Now, when he types the keyword followed by the bug number in the address bar the bug page loads right up.

We don’t do all that many bug searches but it’s immediately obvious that this can be useful in a lot of ways. In the photo above you can see we’ve set up a shortcut to the tag pages for hackaday.com. Now we just type “hack” with the tag we want after it. Add this to your bookmarks and try typing “hack firefox” into the address bar.

Google’s Gmail is a highly viable option for email. With numerous features and options like widgets, a task list, labels, and chat, Gmail has a slight tendency to get overwhelming and might force us to loose focus on what it is really all about: email.

What can make Gmail better? For starters, how about no ads; they are cluttering and distracting. What about getting rid of the widgets and unnecessary features like labels and chat that we think are supposed to make us more productive but really only make us lose our focus to send, read and reply to email? Nobody knows Zen better than [Leo] at Zen Habits. We weren’t surprised that he and his friends (with Firefox and Greasemonkey) have found a way to trim all the unnecessary elements from Gmail and make it into an email powerhouse that focuses on a basic productive email client. The minimalist inbox for Gmail consists of Greasemonkey scripts for:

• Removing gadgets
• Hiding labels, chat and footer
• Removing ads
• Removing stars
• Getting rid of the Gmail logo and searchbar
• Removing menu navigation bar
• Cleaning up and removing unnecessary buttons

To get started focusing on email, and only email, head on over to ZenHabits for a list of associated scripts and what exactly they can do to help you on your road to the minimalist Gmail.

[Ryan] posted a writeup on developing extensions for Google Chrome. The extension system utilizes HTML with a JavaScript API which is still sparsely documented. After taking us through his twitter bar extension project, he concludes that the Chrome extensions are not nearly as versatile as what we’re used to seeing with Firefox. That being said, this is a move in the right direction for the young browser.

[related: Google Chrome roundup]

Why settle for the standard home icon on your browser? If your home button brings you to hackaday.com, why not make the icon reflect that destination? This hack is quick and simple. We’ll take you through it using Firefox 3 and the default theme with standard sized icons.

We start by using our favorite graphics program to make an icon that is 24×24 pixels, and then saved is as a PNG file without compression.

To use the new image as a home icon, we edited a Cascading Style Sheet which is stored in the file classic.jar. On Ubuntu 9.04, this was found in /usr/lib/firefox-3.0.13/chrome/ but the file will be located elsewhere on other operating systems. We made a backup of classic.jar and then unzipped the contents (JARs are basically the same as zip files).

In the unzipped archive, we navigated to the folder /skin/classic/browser/ and opened browser.css using a text editor. This is where the magic happens and although we only changed the home button icon, there’s a lot more possibilities you should look into. We changed the #home-button entry so that the image URL pointed to our new file using the file:/// format. Here’s what ours looked like after the change:

#home-button {
 list-style-image: url("file:///path_to_our_icon/hackaday-icon.png");
}

We saved this file, then zipped up the file structure back into a file called classic.jar and copied it to the same location we originally found it. A quick restart of Firefox showed the new icon. Let us know your other Firefox tweaks in the comments!

Update: [Colby] pointed out that this type of CSS change should be made in the “userChrome.css” file. He’s right and here’s how:

Find your user profile directory and go to the “chrome” sub-directory inside of it. Create the file “userChrome.css”;  there may already be an example file that you can just rename.  The important bit of this CSS file is the namespace line that tells Firefox how to use it.  Here is what ours looks like:

@namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul"); /* set default namespace to XUL */

#home-button {
 list-style-image: url("file:///path_to_our_icon/hackaday-icon.png") !important;
}

In order to get Firefox to listen to our new icon we had to had the “!important” keyword. Now just restart firefox and bask in the glory of your new home icon.

It’s great in this day and age that browsers can remember our passwords for us, allowing us cross-site security without the hassle of memorizing a million different random passwords. It’s great, that is, until we forget our master password. Fret not, though; there is a solution. The folks over at Lifehacker show us how to use FireMaster to recover forgotten or misplaced Firefox master passwords. Perhaps a better solution is to just store those tricky passwords where nobody will find them.

Update: The video of [Moxie]‘s presentation is now online.

[Moxie Marlinspike] appeared on our radar back in February when he showed sslstrip at Black Hat DC. It was an amazing piece of software that could hijack and rewrite all SSL connections. The differences between a legitimate site and the hijacked ones were very hard to notice. He recently stumbled across something thing that makes the attack even more effective.

If you apply for a certificate, the certificate authority looks at the common name on the form and contacts the domain owner. The CA ignores the subdomain. The trick is to drop in a null character in the subdomain. If you register, www.paypal.com[null character].thoughtcrime.org, the CA will contact the owner of thoughtcrime.org and issue the cert. When clients like Firefox use NSS to verify the cert, the null character causes them to think the certficate is valid for www.paypal.com because they stop at the null character. Even if the person examines the cert in their browser, it will show www.paypal.com.

Wildcards work as well. You could get a certificate for *[null character].thoughtcrime.org and appear as any site you want. [Moxie] has worked out ways to prevent certificate revocation and browser updates too. This new code will be part of sslsniff 0.6.

[Apologies for the odd notation. WordPress apparently strips null characters...]

Lifehacker has published an overview of some of the many ways you can secure your data. The post was prompted by recently released browser vulnerabilities: first IE, then Firefox. They cover techniques far beyond just browser security, like how to properly wipe your iPhone. They mention disk encryption go-to TrueCrypt along with password management tools like KeePass. They also suggest using temporary credit cards to mitigate the impact of fraud.

[photo: Rija 2.0]

A coworker approached us today wondering if they could get a performance boost using Samsung’s newly announced 256GB SSD. Most of their work is done in browser, so we said “no”. They’d only see benefit if they were reading/writing large files. Their system has plenty of RAM, and we decided to take a different approach. By creating a filesystem in RAM, you can read and write files much faster than on a typical hard drive. We decided to put the browser’s file cache into RAM.

We installed the Espérance DV preference pane in OSX to facilitate RAM disk creation. It’s really simple to setup. Just select how much space you want to dedicate to the disk and create it. You can have Espérance DV recreate the RAM disk on start and even have it automatically restore from a disk image. There is a check box for moving Safari’s Web Cache to the RAM disk, which creates the necessary symlink. You can also use it to speed up Xcode builds. Moving Firefox’s cache is fairly simple:

$ rm -r ~/Library/Caches/Firefox
$ ln -s /Volumes/RamDisk/Firefox ~/Library/Caches/Firefox

Since the browser isn’t having to hit the hard disk on every page load anymore, the performance is much snappier. Xbench says our random reads from RAM are now 86.19MB/sec instead of 0.61MB/sec when the cache was on the hard drive.

We immediately began looking for ways to get the entire OS into RAM; Tin Hat is a version of Linux that does that.

We’re very happy with the results of our RAM disk browser upgrade. Let us know in the comments if you’ve had a similar experience doing this in Windows.

With new betas for both Firefox and Chrome being released, CNET decided to find out how good their JavaScript performance was. Both browsers got a performance boost with Firefox slightly edging out Chrome. You have to turn on TraceMonkey, Firefox’s new Javascript engine in 3.1b1, to get the improvement. We never thought Google was that serious about building a new browser. They just want wanted Firefox to get their act together and suck less. It seems to be working.

[via Lifehacker]