I handed in my last assignment on Wednesday and it’s a good feeling. I have finally finished my second year at University.
The work load was about what I expected but, as I found the first year quite easy it made me cocky with assignments which showed in my grades this year. The problems was also in some of the units which we were made to take which in all honest opinion were completely unrelated to my course or any of the technologies I plan on using in the future. Especially on the career path I want to take.
I have felt that this year University has inhibited my learning process for the area I want to be working in. I understand that it’s good to have a variety of skills but getting Web Technology students to take 2 full units (24 weeks) on Macromedia Director is completely pointless. We did however put pressure on the course leaders to let us use Macromedia/Adobe Flash for the 2nd unit as it is an application which we will come across in the jobs related to the course we are taking.
Summer is going to be very productive. I am going to be doing as much freelance work as possible to pull in some money and gain some more credible clients and experience. I am also going to be working on a few applications which I have been planning with one of the people on my course for the past 10 months. Finally I am going to be working on my dissertation and final year project. At the moment is looking towards being a wiki based code sharing facility for web programming. But summer is a long time and I have a few holidays planned which will create inspirational thinking time for where I want to be going with the final year project.
Also on the agenda is to finish learning how to drive and to pass my driving test if possible by the end of the summer.
As you may have noticed if you look at my site from time to time the design changes every so often. This is about my 8th re-design since getting the domain name a few years ago.
A few factors get me to change my site mainly boredom is the strongest of them. Last night I was working on one of my assignments and got bored and found some inspiration to re-design my site so I went to work hammering away at the HTML/CSS and some of the PHP which was customised for my last design.
I like to keep my sites looking fresh and give people something new to look at every so often. Not that this site is a haven for return visitors.
You may look at the current logo and despise it as much as I do. I am going to have to start playing about with a few ideas for a standard logo which will be consistent across new designs. Which is harder than it sounds especially artistic isn’t a word found often in my vocabulary.
My last assignment is due in tomorrow and I have one exam next week which will bring my 2nd year at university to a welcomed end. For the summer I have a few projects which will hopefully be up by the end of August. I also need to write the first draft of me dissertation on accessibility and plan my final year project.
MySpace is known for it’s ability to let it’s users edit their profiles to look how they want with CSS and HTML. Today I walked right into a phishing attack and if I didn’t get looped on the login and actually think to check the source my MySpace would be open to a phishing attack.
The way it works is a phisher changes someones profile to look like a Myspace login page. From here your email address is already filled in on the email box which will be got from the cookie MySpace saves if you ask it to remember you. As the cookie is designed to work on the MySpace website it allows this information to be passed into this input field. You then enter your password into what looks like a 100% authentic MySpace login page with a MySpace URL.
When you submit your login it diverts to a PHP script hosted on another website which then relocates you back to the login page again. When I did this the first 3 times I just thought MySpace was just doing it’s usual and not working. But I then thought it was a little fishy and viewed the source.
Heres where I found the flaws the images are hosted on ImageShack and PhotoBucket and I then found the action for the login form which was a website which is nothing to do with MySpace. From here I went into my account settings and changed my password and hopefully won’t get stung.
This is a new level of phishing it even caught me out. We can’t even trust our friends with the way the internet is today.