TWIL - Week #27

This Week I Learned:

Programming:

• ASP.NET's Request Validation feature is not enough to avoid XSS 
• It is possible to inject values in a drop down list.  Developers shouldn't trust input. Anything sent by the client should be suspect, there's no guarantee that it's what you expect, and it must be validated on the server before acceptance.

India:

• Commenting on the scale of biometric date captured for the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) program, Nandan Kilekani, the UIDAI head, calls India the tech capital for biometrics. UIDAI is yet to finalize breach of disclosure and liability policies in case Aadhar’s biometric data are compromised or stolen. The UIDAI is a lean organisation with less than 300 people (but lots of vendors).
• The voluntary use of public transport once in a week is part of Oil Minister Veerappa Moily's fuel conservation campaign launched this week, which aims to save $5 billion oil import bill.  Moily saved Rs 40,000 in fuel cost by taking public transport to office. One of the many perks that Members of Parliament and some Government "servants" enjoy is free fuel.
• Currently, of the 35 women in the Bihar Assembly of 243 members, roughly 70% have husbands who are politicians. The trend of politicians using their wives as a front to keep their seats safe started in 1997 when Bihar chief minister Lalu Prasad Yadav, facing arrest by the CBI in the fodder scam, stunned political circles and 'shocked' his wife Rabri Devi by asking her to step out of the kitchen and occupy the chair he was going to quit. A mother of nine, Rabri Devi was a housewife unlettered in politics until then, but continued in office for over seven years. Like Yadav, other politicians in Bihar see the elevation of their wives as the best way to keep the power in the family. (Source: Times of India)

Trivia:

• Benjamin Franklin swore by "air baths", which was his term for sitting around naked in the morning, whatever the weather. Franklin was chronically disorganised.

Everything else:

• FB Reader & Kindle are free Android apps that allow you to open both PDF & Mobi files.
• Google has developed cutting-edge face and license plate blurring technology that is applied to all Street View images. This means that if one of our images contains an identifiable face (for example that of a passer-by on the sidewalk) or an identifiable license plate, our technology will automatically blur it out, meaning that the individual or the vehicle cannot be identified. If our algorithms missed something, you can easily let us know.