How to Break Web Software

How to Break Web Software is a great (if a little old) google tech talk by Mike Andrews about web security with a good demo of some exploits and tools. If you are writing web based software it is certainly worth the 90 minutes. The exploits shown are all to common and the tools and techniques shown are again useful for testing your own scripts.


TED Talks - Susan Blackmore on Memes and Temes

Another excellent talk from TED, I think the best snippet of the talk comes quite early on, about 3 minutes in, when she talks about the evolutionary algorithm and quote Dan Dennet.

If you have

  • Variation
  • Selection
  • Heredity

You MUST get evolution.Dennet sums this up nicely with

“Design out of Chaos Without the Aid of Mind”

Unfortunately after a great start the rest of the talk seems very rushed and speculative, ideas are not introduced and explored properly as if she has taken a 3 hour lecture and culled it down to 20 minutes without dropping any concepts.

Worth the 20 minutes even so :)