(Why) Are you still using Internet Explorer?

If you have yet to switch from the security-challenged Internet Explorer (IE) browser, a mid-week demonstration of a new vulnerability in Internet Explorer might serve to persuade you. In the live demonstration at Black Hat, Security consultant Jorge Luis Alvarez showed how an attacker who manages to direct a user to a specially crafted site is able to read files off their hard disk with impunity.

You can read more about it here, but because it has to do with how IE handles webpages as opposed to an outright security problem, it would appear that this flaw is not subject to the usual vulnerability patching. Personally, I've already switched to Mozilla Firefox years ago, and more recently, to Google Chrome.

On another topic that interests me personally, Facebook engineer Haiping Zhao has unveiled a project that a small team of engineers has been working on over the last two years. Already implemented over at the world's largest social networking site, the HipHop for PHP platform yields an average of 50 percent improvement in CPU utilization.

This is a lot for a site that sees 400 million pageviews per month, based on what Zhao told Computerworld. That's a lot of pageviews, more so given the highly customized nature of each Facebook view--everyone's view is different based on their privacy settings, customizations and friends etc. Indeed, rumor is that Facebook runs a farm of web servers numbering in the tens of thousands in order to serve its users.

The beauty of the HipHop for PHP solution is that since it essentially transforms the PHP source code, PHP programmers can continue with their coding in pretty much the same way. The trick is probably in implementing it properly on web servers, but the huge performance gains will only make it worth the trouble for most large sites.

And since the source code for the project has been released under an open source license, perhaps the technology will become incorporated at the web server level eventually. - Paul Mah