Adobe’s proprietary Flash format has become a significant part of the Internet as it is today. While its importance in Web applications is slowly decreasing due to Web 2.0 technologies and HTML5, it is still a major player in the browser game and application sector. The majority of these games and applications are for entertainment only and offer you nothing but a nice rank in the high score. On rare occasions, however, there are Flash games in which you can actually win something valuable such as concert tickets or even money. And of course there are applications that let you stream, but not download content from a website.

So what’s the problem with that, you think? The problem is that almost all Flash applications can be hacked very easily and most developers are not aware of that.

As a reminder of how vulnerable Flash applications are, this post aims to raise awareness for these issues. In a case study, it shows how a Flash-based game and its server side high score can be tricked within a few minutes using free tools only.

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Version control systems like CVS or Subversion are designed for keeping track of the changes of a project and for having the possibility to revert to old revisions if something goes wrong. In contrast to regular relational databases, these systems are made only for adding new content to a repository, and not for removing data from it. In fact, deleting old content is not a built-in functionality in SVN, and mostly requires removing entire revisions from the repository or even creating a new one.

But what happens if you accidentally commit a password or other sensitive information to a repository? This post explains how to remove this confidential data permanently from the repository by simply overwriting it in old revisions, i.e. without having to remove revisions or create a new repository.

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As one of the best picture organizers out there, Picasa is (in my opinion) almost complete in terms of features and has a nice look and feel at the same time. Even though Google stopped developing the Linux version after 3.0, it still works perfectly using Wine and a couple of cp-statements.

However, as stated many times by Picasa users and bloggers [1,2,3,…], Picasa’s export function misses a tiny little feature that maintains the sort order of the album when exporting it to a folder. Instead of renaming the pictures to keep them sorted in normal file managers (by name), Picasa just copies the files of an album to one folder and thereby destroys the order. As if that wasn’t enough, Picasa also overwrites duplicates filenames from different source folders.

This missing feature has even led to small standalone projects that fix this issue, e.g. Picasa Independent Album Exporter (PIAE) and Picasa Order Preserver. While both applications do their job, both are a bit heavyweight, and PIAE only works for Windows (and not on Wine).

This post presents a tiny little Perl script that renames pictures of an exported album according to their Picasa sort order.

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