HTML5 Exploit Can Allow Websites To Fill Up Your Hard Drive

Browsing websites on the Internet could be a great experience, depending on what kind of content you’re searching for. Conducting research for a term paper may not be as rewarding as browsing Reddit, but the process is still the same: input a website address, get to said website. But a recently revealed HTML5 exploit shows some websites can fill your computer’s hard drive with junk data. A lot of junk data.

Web developer Feross Aboukhadijeh created FillDisk.com in order to demonstrate the exploit in HTML5. The Web Storage standard used in HTML5 allows any website to place large amounts of data on your computer’s drive, which could result in a lot of frustration as the user will probably continually wonder why their hard drives are completely out of disk space.

Web browsers have the ability to limit just how much space websites can dump onto your hard drive, with Mozilla Firefox being able to intelligently know how much a website should be loading onto the hard disk at a time. Other browsers, such as Google Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Apple Safari and Opera currently have no storage limits, although we hope now that this exploit has been publicized, the developers of these web browsers would look into patching their software so our computer hard disks can stay from being clogged up with junk data.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkScSMIr_00&feature=player_embedded

Firefox OS To Get Certification Program

 The recent introduction of the Firefox OS (a mobile operating system) by Mozilla certainly took the world by surprise, which means that the mobile operating system market will have yet another competitor, and Windows Phone 8 along with BlackBerry 10 might want to stop their scuffle for a moment and look behind their shoulders. Android and iOS need not fret, at least not at the moment, until we see just how well Firefox OS performs in the market. Word has it that Mozilla has put in place a bunch of requirements for developers to meet, sort of fleshing out a certification program for Firefox OS.

For starters, it seems that a Firefox OS phone will need to have both the Firefox web browser and Firefox Marketplace app store pre-loaded, in addition to basic hardware specifications that include an 800MHz processor, at least 256MB RAM, and a 320 x 240 pixel or higher resolution display, which are child’s play in this day and age. Such a low entry level bar might see more low end and mid-range Firefox OS devices introduced rather than having companies take a gamble with a high end flagship, don’t you think so?