Microsoft Silverlight

Silverlight was a browser extension that was backed by Microsoft’s .NET product on many platforms, it provided media capabilities similar to Macromedia/Adobe Flash.  Similar to Flash, it has had it’s own share of security problems over the years.

Introduced in 2007 and currently in a deprecated state. Once supported on Windows XP (IE6) to Windows 10 (IE11), MacOS and Ubuntu. Now only supported in MSIE. Edge never provided support. Modern versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera no longer support.

HTML Markup example:

<object data="data:application/x-silverlight-2," type="application/x-silverlight-2" width="100%" height="100%">
<param name="source" value="MySilverLightControl.xap"/>
</object>

REFERENCES:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Silverlight

https://www.microsoft.com/Silverlight/

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/silverlight/dotnet-windows-silverlight/mt788654(v=msdn.10)

Google and Facebook bypassing P3P User Privacy Settings

I wrote about P3P a very long time ago, and have implemented it on several websites. Some history, the W3C crafted the P3P policy.
Microsoft introduced P3P support in IE6 (in 2001) and it remains implemented in all current versions of the browser. The primary intended use is to block 3rd party cookies within the browser on behalf of the user.

Interesting enough, Microsoft has had been a bit of a struggle with Google and Facebook, which send the following HTTP response headers.

Google’s Response:

P3P: CP="This is not a P3P policy! See http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=151657 for more info."

Facebook’s response:

P3P: CP="Facebook does not have a P3P policy. Learn why here: http://fb.me/p3p"

REFERENCES:

Open Source Office Suite

I am surprised that I have failed to neglect this topic for such a long time.

Some of the most common business applications in use are in the Microsoft Office suite, notably Word, Excel and PowerPoint. If you’ve ever had to purchase this package at retail prices, you were probably amazed at just how expensive this package is, particularly when you only use a small portion of the functionality that they each provide.

The alternative is to use compatible software; originally this meant that you relied on one of many packages that were available in the free-domain. Sun has it’s StarOffice suite which was later released as OpenOffice which over several releases has become the Gold Standard for office suites. It is available on most platforms and is regularly updated. Many features even outperform the Microsoft offerings, my favorite of which is to save just about any document in PDF format.

Cheers