Bar codes and Cardbox

Cardbox can print bar codes in various formats: what about reading them?

There are many barcode readers on the market in a variety of shapes and sizes, and we can't really advise you which one to buy (you have to choose what suits you best), but as far as Cardbox is concerned, they all work in essentially the same way. You scan a code, and the reader interprets the code and "types" it in to your computer just as if you had typed it on the keyboard yourself.

One feature that is definitely worth looking for is the ability for the reader to type extra keystrokes before and after the actual interpreted barcode. Manufacturers often refer to these as "preamble" and "postamble" keystrokes.

Amazon S3 and Cardbox

Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. Secure, reliable and cheap, it can be used to store any amount of data, at any time, and retrieve it from anywhere on the web. There is no sign-up fee and you pay only for the storage you actually use.

This posting describes how we are enhancing Cardbox to take advantage of the facilities that Amazon S3 offers.

If you don’t already know Cardbox, it’s a fast, straightforward database designed for end users. Anything you can list, Cardbox can store. Its particular strengths are powerful text indexing and the ability to attach photographs and scanned documents to every record. Cardbox is used by everyone from individuals and small businesses to multinationals and United Nations agencies, and there are Cardbox users on every continent including Antarctica. The Cardbox web site tells you more.

Denial-of-service attack: executive summary

Here is a summary of the attack described in detail in our previous post.

Denial-of-service attack on Amazon S3

You can see a non-technical summary of this article here.

Amazon S3 is a new service which uses Amazon’s world-wide network of computers to provide fast, secure, and essentially infinite data storage on the Internet, metered and paid for according to usage. It is beautifully implemented and it is the kind of elegant technology that makes you want to need it.

We are working on a new Cardbox feature that will use Amazon S3 and we’ll announce it as soon as it’s ready for people to test. But in the course of development we’ve come across a vulnerability. An attack aimed at this vulnerability makes Amazon S3 (and any data stored on it) completely unusable by the victim. Note: the vulnerability is not inherent to Amazon S3 itself and the attack would work against any similar service.

Interestingly, the attack only works if you are using security software to protect yourself from computer worms and viruses: it is your computer’s own immune response that does the damage.