Porn domain not that sexy: no rush to have .xxx

While their is a huge hype surrounding .xxx domains and companies rushing to buy them to protect their brand, it seems that registration data disagree with this.  My analysis of the 50000 most popular websites in the world shows that only 24% of them actually registered their .xxx domain.

Display your latest Foursquare checkins on your blog using Foursquare API v2 and PHP

In this post I will show you how to use my updated version of the foursquare-php class to display your latest foursquare on your page and blog. I will go through the changes induced by using Foursquare API v2 and what are the new awesome features introduced in this version: getting previous checkins and using the lib as the JSON backend.

Analyzing web application performance

The website performance blog posts series focuses on the techniques and tools that can be use to improve a website’s performance.

Optimizing  web application performance is all about numbers and metrics so, before delving into optimization techniques, it is essential to understand what can be optimized and how to measure improvements in performance. In this post, we will review the five areas where website performance can be improved, how to establish a performance baseline, and how to measure progress.

Five Surprising CAPTCHA Schemes

Since I started doing research on CAPTCHA security two years ago, I have relentlessly collected samples of all the different schemes I have encountered.  In this blog post, I want to share with you five of the most crazy, funny, and interesting schemes I collected.

Identifying Internet Explorer User with a SMB Query

As part of our research on browser private mode that I presents this morning at Usenix Security, I took a look at how Internet Explorer handles SMB (Server Message Block) query. Turns out that because Internet Explorer (IE) processes SMB (Windows file sharing URL) automatically  it is possible to use the SMB protocol to identify the Internet Explorer User with 100% accuracy.