Month: April 2013

WP Document Revisions

WordPress’ media management tools have really come a long way over the past couple years, but the system still falls down when it comes to sharing and managing files that are not media files. For example, occasionally I have a PDF that I want to host on my server and then link to from a post. The WordPress media manager can be used for that purpose in a pinch, but it doesn’t work very well.

Fortunately the WP Document Revisions plugin largely solves this problem, providing an easy way to upload, track and share documents and files. It aims to solve three specific problems:

  • A document management system (DMS), to track, store, and organize files of any format
  • A collaboration tool to empower teams to collaboratively draft, edit, and refine documents
  • A file hosting solution to publish and securely deliver files to a team, to clients, or to the public

I use WPDR in conjunction with the Simple Downloads addon which makes a number of slight changes to make it easier to use WPDR as a download manager for a site.

The Bat-Gun

Batman’s history with guns is complicated, but generally Batman simply doesn’t use guns. Occasionally this is a point of pride motivated by the way his parents were gunned down. To my knowledge this carried over to the live action Batman television show of the 1960s starring Adam West and Burt Ward.

When it came time to make toys based on that series, at least one manufacturer thought a Batman with a gun made perfect sense.

 

Ideal Batman Utility Belt

 

That is a Batman utility belt from 1966 manufactured by Ideal. It was sold at auction in March 2013 for almost $8,500. According to the text of the auction description,

Accompanying the belt is the original early version spring-loaded Bat-Gun, which sports a bat symbol stencil on its side, painted grips and a black plastic trigger (later versions sometimes had an orange trigger, unpainted grips and/or lacked the stenciled logo). Trace of lt. wear to the paint on the textured grips. Gun functions as designed.

What’s even weirder is the whole Bat-Luger look to the gun. Presumably that’s some toy gun that Ideal was already manufacturing that made it easy to just slap a bat symbol on and repackage.

Bruce Schneier vs. Security Awareness Training

Bruce Scheneier offers an interesting argument that security awareness training — training people how to avoid computer security breaches — is largely a waste of time,

To those who think that training users in security is a good idea, I want to ask: “Have you ever met an actual user?” They’re not experts, and we can’t expect them to become experts. The threats change constantly, the likelihood of failure is low, and there is enough complexity that it’s hard for people to understand how to connect their behavior to eventual outcomes. So they turn to folk remedies that, while simple, don’t really address the threats.

. . .

The whole concept of security awareness training demonstrates how the computer industry has failed. We should be designing systems that won’t let users choose lousy passwords and don’t care what links a user clicks on. We should be designing systems that conform to their folk beliefs of security, rather than forcing them to learn new ones. Microsoft has a great rule about system messages that require the user to make a decision. They should be NEAT: necessary, explained, actionable, and tested. That’s how we should be designing security interfaces. And we should be spending money on security training for developers. These are people who can be taught expertise in a fast-changing environment, and this is a situation where raising the average behavior increases the security of the overall system.