Proxies Not Secure? duh.

"A widely used proxy service thought to provide anonymous Web surfing and used to skirt network administrator bans on access to sites like Facebook frequently reveals sensitive information about its users, according to a Swiss security researcher.

"Glype is a small bit of PHP code that routes requests for Web pages through other Web pages running its software, said the researcher, who runs the Swiss Security Blog and the Zeus Tracker project. He prefers to remain anonymous.

"The Glype code allows someone to, for example, access Facebook at work even if that page is blocked, as it appears the traffic is coming from the Web page running the proxy. Many companies now block sites such as Facebook.

"Glype's code is free, and anyone can install it on their Web page. But Glype is frequently misconfigured, the researcher said. It allow someone running a Glype proxy to turn on a log, which shows the IP (Internet protocol) address of the user, what site they requested and the time.

"Many of those people running a Glype proxy have not turned that logging function off, and worse yet, made it Web facing, meaning that URLs can be manipulated to reveal full logs.

"The researcher checked about 20 Glype proxies, found 1,700 logs files and more than one million unique IP addresses. `There are dozens of such 'insecure' proxies out there,` he said via instant message on Friday..."

From TechWorld...

Gartner: Newbz To Write 25% Of Business Apps

"By 2014, citizen developers will build at least 25 percent of new business applications, according to Gartner, Inc. Gartner said that this advance should both enable end users and free up IT resources. However, analysts warned that IT organizations that fail to capitalize on the opportunities that citizen development presents will find themselves unable to respond to rapidly changing market forces and customer preferences.

"Gartner defines a citizen developer as a user operating outside of the scope of enterprise IT and its governance who creates new business applications for consumption by others either from scratch or by composition.

"`Future citizen-developed applications will leverage IT investments below the surface, allowing IT to focus on deeper architectural concerns, while end users focus on wiring together services into business processes and workflows,` said Eric Knipp, senior research analyst at Gartner. `Furthermore, citizen development introduces the opportunity for end users to address projects that IT has never had time to get to — a vast expanse of departmental and situational projects that have lain beneath the surface.`"

From Businesswire...