On Reddit.com, there’s a phenomenon known as the “Cake Day“, which is the yearly anniversary of a member’s original sign-up date. When this magical day rolls around, a little cake icon appears next to your name, and people usually tend to be more generous with their up-votes towards your content.

Unfortunately, if you are a member of Reddit.com, you will probably notice that it’s actually rather difficult to determine the exact date of your “Cake Day” (unless you actually marked your calendar when you created your account). Instead of showing your actual, exact sign-up date on your profile, Reddit just tells you a vague figure something along the lines of, “you’ve been a member for 10 months”. The actual day is hidden, which means that the only way to know if it’s your cake day is to log in every single day that month, post a comment on something, and look for the cake icon to show up.

I got to thinking, and I realized there had to be a better way! Surely the sign-up information for a member could be found somewhere and exposed?

Sure enough, I tracked down a dynamic JSON file on the Reddit servers which could be accessed remotely. The JSON file path is: http://www.reddit.com/user/johnsmith/about.json (where you can replace “johnsmith” in the URL with whatever user you were trying to look up).

This JSON file contains a number of information items about the particular user, one of which is titled “created_utc” and happens to be a Unix timestamp (a date format which uses the number of seconds since the Unix “epoch”, or January 1, 1970, to represent an exact point in time). PHP has a number of built-in functions which can easily translate Unix timestamps into human readable formats (such as Sunday, October 31, 2010, at 22:54:24 UTC), and PHP also has some nice built-in functions for grabbing and parsing remote JSON files.

Using all of this knowledge, I whipped together a quick tool for looking up reddit user information (including their exact Cake Day). This web-based tool is free to use and can be found at http://www.redditcakeday.com.

1. Variable brake lights that inform following cars as to how light/heavy you are actually pressing your brake pedal.

2. Sensors on the front of the car which monitor how closely you are following the car in front of you. When this information is combined with your current speed and the knowledge of average braking distances and human response time, a buzzer or dashboard light could notify you to increase your following distance.

If you have upgraded to Firefox 6.0 recently, you might have noticed a change in your URL address bar.

Now, instead of the web address being in all black like you might have grown accustomed to over the past 10 years, the powers that be have decided it would be better to color all of the URL gray (except for the primary domain name, which still appears in black).

I can see how this could be helpful to the ignorant masses who get scammed by phishing emails, but I’m a relatively intelligent internet user, and I have been browsing the net long enough to know what the primary domain name is in the URL without needing to have it colored different.

If you are like me and wish to set the address bar colors back to the way they used to be in prior versions of Firefox, simply follow these easy steps:

1. In your Firefox address bar, type “about:config” (sans quotes), and press enter.
2. In the filter search box, enter “browser.urlbar.formatting.enabled“
3. Right-click on the “browser.urlbar.formatting.enabled” line item in the listing and select “Toggle” to switch it to false

The idea of a “universal login” is not new by any means. Since the early days of the internet, many people have longed for the ease of having to only remember one login and password to access all of their favorite member-based sites.

Over the years, there have been a number of companies/organizations that have tackled this problem, and recently a couple of solutions have bubbled to the top in popularity. OpenID, Google Friend Connect, MySpaceID, and even the Twitter Login API have all been used as “universal login” methods which can be integrated with a web site.

None of these solutions, however, have even come close to the adoption rate boasted by the Facebook Authentication system. Practically everyone has a Facebook account these days, regardless of age, gender, education level, location, favorite web browser, email address, or internet provider! Facebook embraced this fact and built a nicely packaged authentication system which enables developers to integrate Facebook Authentication into pretty much any app or web site they can imagine. You can now find the Facebook universal login method in everything from iphone apps and desktop applications, to normal run-of-the-mill web sites.

This brings me to my point: Potential Security Risks

While logging into my Facebook account via all the different web sites and various applications which I use on a daily basis, I became acutely aware of a glaring security risk with the Facebook Authentication system. Basically, the way how Facebook instills a sense of security is via a recognizable blue bar which has a gray bar and diagonal stripes underneath it. This familiar imagery is displayed whenever you are asked to provide your Facebook login information. The idea that is consequently trained and reinforced in end-users’ minds is that the familiar imagery represents a genuine Facebook login screen. As such, if you are being asked for your Facebook information in a login popup, but the unique blue and gray bar is missing, you would immediately suspect that something was wrong.

Notice, however, that the Facebook URL is nowhere to be seen in the login popup. There is literally no easy way to verify where the contents of the login form are actually going. This is especially true in the countless iphone applications and computer programs which are making use of the Facebook Authentication system. A rogue developer could easily create a form which displayed the blue and gray bar, but that actually transmitted the login information somewhere else entirely (such as a database on their own server) before it sent the information to Facebook.

The exact same thing could be easily accomplished by any semi-competent web developer with 15 minutes worth of spare time. All they would have to do is make a mock-up copy of the legitimate Facebook login popup, but have it submit somewhere else entirely. The end user wouldn’t know the difference.

In summary: Facebook’s way of instilling a *false* sense of security via their blue/gray bar is totally flawed and easily exploited. They need to come up with some sort of method which enables end-users to verify the form’s authenticity before they enter their login information.