I've learned quite a bit over the past year or so that I've been developing darcness, but one lesson stands out above all others: It is just staggering how many ways there are to compromise the security of a dynamic website.

Making a website secure is a surprisingly non-trivial task that requires plenty of thought and discipline. What makes it worse is that it is all too easy to create gaping security holes without realizing it.

If you are around me often enough to hear my various pontifications, then you are no doubt already aware of my opinion regarding the excruciatingly popular social networking site MySpace. Today, I found the following bit of news from the washingtonpost.com:

An online banner advertisement that ran on MySpace.com and other sites over the past week used a Windows security flaw to infect more than a million users with spyware when people merely browsed the sites with unpatched versions of Windows, according to data collected by iDefense, a Verisign company.

Wow. In Tom we trust.

The "Keychain Access" application that comes with MacOS X is one of the most useful tools that come with Macintosh computers, but it is also one of the most neglected. If you are a Mac user and don't know what this tool is or how to use it, read on.