Dodgy NZ E-Commerce Sites - Your details can be stolen

Today there is a report in the paper that the NZ Hunting and Fishing shop's website was hacked and customers' credit card details were stolen. Customers had noticed unusual activity on their credit cards.

I have personally used a number of e-commerce sites operated by bonafide New Zealand businesses. In the rush for these businesses to open up online shops to cash in on the Internet trade, it is very important to note that there is no guarantee that your credit card details will be collected or stored in a safe manner.

It is important to note that there are different ways in which e-commerce sites can process your order. This can be either online or offline. The online processing should happen through a secure website and usually will make use of a reputable third-party payment processing site. For example, PayPal offers such a service internationally, and there are sites of this nature operated in New Zealand.

Offline processing is entirely different and is, in fact, used by a lot of shops which do not have the money to spend on an online site. These sites in my experience are engineered more cheaply and are the ones to watch out for, as some of them do not even use security certificates, and since they collect your credit card details on their own site, you have no guarantees that the site is engineered to resist hacking and stores those details with a high degree of security.

We of course do not know the details of the Hunting and Fishing hack but some kind of security flaw is a likely scenario and there are many possible exploits such as SQL injection or server vulnerabilities that can be used to get into a site and steal details. The concern is that people are still engineering and deploying insecure websites or that companies that own them are not spending money on making sure their site is kept secure and all necessary updates and patches are applied in a timely way.

I think that the Government should look at regulating online trading so that people can have confidence that their personal details are being kept safe when they make purchases from a New Zealand e-commerce site. 

• http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/82268552/hunting-and-fishing-website-hacked

Today's Linux Experience - Choosing a Web Browser [2]

Last week I wrote about choosing a browser for Linux. Today I put my thoughts into effect and set up Firefox Developer by importing bookmarks from Opera into it and syncing them. However it hasn't taken long to discover problems with using Firefox for all the stuff I used Opera for.

First problem is for pasting images from the Clipboard into a Facebook post. Out of the box FFDE does not allow you to do this. Each time I had to save the snapshot to a disk file and then add the photo from the the file.

Second problem: although FFDE was quite usable at work on Lubuntu, a lot of problems developed when I tried to use it at home. I would keep seeing messages about scripts slowing down webpages, and then when one web page was slow to load, none of the other tabs would be visible while this was happening.

It may be the case that this is some kind of issue with Mint rather than FFDE in general, however I haven't noticed problems with FFDE on this system before. I am puzzled by these situations, but overall what this adds up to is I can't recommend Firefox as a viable replacement for these proprietary browsers just now.

The problem is that Mozilla has failed to keep up with the pace set by the proprietary browsers, particularly Chrome, and millions of users have voted with their feet. Having fallen off the pace, Mozilla now seems unable to regain the lead they once had. It's a long time since I seriously used Firefox for anything other than some undemanding situations where knowing it wasn't leaking data to a vendor was the most important consideration. It is still my browser of choice for installing on servers, and does get used as a "spare" browser quite often in work and home situations (I tend to have dedicated Opera and Chrome to specific tasks, each with its own set of synchronised bookmarks customised to that set of tasks). 

FFDE has been good as a work browser with its own bookmark set as well, with undemanding web pages that don't take up a lot of resources. It seems, in a nutshell, that there is a tradeoff between FFDE's resource usage efficiency and performance. In other words you don't get something for nothing. The much vaunted memory usage efficiency that Mozilla touts as an advantage for FFDE means it doesn't always perform very well. On the other hand I have seen exceptional performance from FFDE when dealing with large numbers of thumbnails on Tumblr picture blogs, and on test it was able to handle hundreds of tabs open at a time displaying images without missing any of them. Regular Firefox, under the same circumstances, would have dropped quite a few thumbnails. So it seems FFDE electrolysis is good for some things, but still has a long way to go before it has excellent all-round performance.

Today's Linux Experience - Choosing a Web Browser [1]

When it comes to web browsing, there is surprisingly good support from the big players. My favourite browsers, which are all installed and used simultaneously on Windows, Mint and Lubuntu, are Chrome/Chromium, Firefox and Opera, and all of them work well subject to certain considerations. 

With Chrome you can install the proprietary Google package of that name, or the open-source equivalent, Chromium (just as you can in Windows, except I never installed Chromium onto it). The important difference on Linux is that Chrome's built in Pepper Flash player, which is not available in Chromium, is a must-have because Adobe stopped updating their stand-alone Flash installers for Linux some time ago. Chrome is easy to install directly from Google's site, while Chromium is included in some distros (including Mint).

Opera is my choice of a WebKit compatible browser since Safari stopped being produced for Windows. It is easy to install directly from Opera's site. It is a very good browser with the main limitation being the lack of Flash updates mentioned above. I haven't got much more to say about it because it hasn't had the same amount of issues as some of the other browsers.

Firefox, which used to be my browser of first preference until Mozilla stumbled over multi-process tab support, has started to regain my confidence since they mastered the development of the Electrolysis extension, which is now part of the core package. This brings the much needed multi-process design to Firefox. One of the issues I had noted with the older design of Firefox was when browsing Tumblr image blog sites, a lot of images would not be displayed by FF because it struggled with large numbers of images on a page. Electrolysis fixed this problem and now that it has made it into the base Firefox product, not just the Developer edition, it has become a much better product. On most of my computers I have both the base and Developer editions installed. The base is incorporated into many Linux distributions, including Debian where it has been renamed Iceweasel, while the developer edition can be easily installed from the Mozilla website. Note that with Developer, the installer only extracts the image to a file path; you must still move the folder to a location on your PC and create the start menu shortcut (or x.desktop file for Ubuntu-based distros) to make it go.

Although the Flash issue will keep me from switching back to FF as my primary browser of choice, it is possible it might regain that status in the future. One reason for this is that both Opera and Chrome are massive resource hogs when multiple tabs are opened. Another annoyance is that the latest version of Opera will only run a single instance, which is hard when you have multiple desktops. Even on the computer which I am writing on, which has 12 GB of RAM, I have quite a few tabs open in Opera and almost all of them have a memory footprint of around 800 MB. That's one of the reasons I don't use either it or Chrome much on a Lubuntu system; on something with only 4 GB of RAM there wouldn't be much left for other applications and the CPU would bog down with all the disk swapping. It is possible for Firefox to have an extension installed that can leverage the Flash player in Chrome to get around the lack of Adobe support. As Mozilla says, FF e10s uses way less memory than Chrome, so it is really going to be just a matter of time before I switch to using it instead of Opera for a lot of my stuff. Right now e10s isn't truly process-per-tab, but Mozilla is working on this goal. The bottom line for me has always been the superior extension support in Firefox and with this and the improvements in stability, it looks like a good time to switch back to it big time, perhaps without even worrying about Flash.