ThemesPress, a site which promises to turn your static HTML into a fully functioning Wordpress theme for $10 has launched. Whilst it is not particularly difficult, as I understand it, to turn HTML into a Wordpress theme manually, when I tried a litte while ago I failed initially, and couldn’t be bothered to spend the time to make it work, a feeling which I am sure many people have. I thought I’d try out ThemesPress to see if it worked.

I was pleasantly surprised. In the first step, I uploaded the images used in the HTML, then entered the HTML, placing various special template tags into the code, such as {CONTENT} for where I wanted the Wordpress loop to go. After uploading the CSS and setting various options, I was able to preview the theme in a dummy WP installation and make necessary changes.

As it turns out, it is a well structured theme. It is widget enabled, and everything is very clear and easy to edit. I doubt I will ever need to use ThemesPress again, as now I have the necessary template code in a template that I understand, as I coded it, and I will therefore be able to easily manually covert to a theme myself in the future.

All in all, hopefully we will see more custom themes in the future, as this definitely makes it easy for non-php gurus to easily create Wordpress themes, which can only be a good thing.

The Unofficial Apple Weblog is reporting that Jon Lech Johansen (aka ‘DVD Jon’), the hacker who first released the DeCSS tool to break DVD encryption back in 1999, has apparently rewritten Apple’s FairPlay DRM algorithm and is offering to license it to anyone that wants their content securely played on an iPod.

Basically, Jon has written a 100% FairPlay-compatible DRM system which would allow anyone (who payed him for it) to lock down content for playback on an iPod.

Currently, Apple owns the FairPlay DRM system and it is only in use on items distributed via the iTunes Store. Unlike Microsoft’s Windows Media PlaysForSure DRM system, only Apple can use FairPlay and it is not licensed to anyone else.

This will undoubtedly land Jon Lech Johansen in trouble with Apple Legal (and he’s no stranger to legal battles) and I very much doubt that any company will take up Jon’s offer considering that they will very likely also get into trouble with Apple.

Still, it adds to the list of DRM-related stories we’ve been seeing recently, with both PlaysForSure and FairPlay being cracked and now FairPlay being rewritten.

The BBC is reporting that Tesco (the UK equivalent of WalMart) will start selling low cost software on their own brand. Apparently the software will include CD/DVD burning, productivity, image editing and security software packages, with each one costing ‘less than £20′. The software has been developed in conjunction with Formjet, which tells us something about the nature of the software which will be released.

Formjet describes its business model, saying that it ‘acquires territorial rights to ‘alternative’ software products, and markets, sells, distributes and supports these products in place of the vendor in the UK.’ So, in fact, the software which will be sold by Tesco is not new software. Formjet lists the packages it has the UK distribution rights for in the UK. From that, the security suite will (probably) be Panda Platinum Internet Security, the office suite Ability Office and the image editing app Image Broadway 5.

This shows Tesco’s mistake, and why I think that this strategy will fail. The software they are selling is ‘alternative’ for a reason; it is simply not as good as the market leading alternatives, or more importantly open source alternatives. By taking the approach they have chosen their brand by selling inferior software.

A much better approach would have been to take open source software and sell that, where necessary developing a proprietary UI (or OS if they were feeling benevolent) to sit on top to improve ease of use. This is entirely legal under OS licences and would result in a much better product. They wouldn’t have to do any work to OpenOffice.org - they could sell that today. A new UI to TheGIMP would be useful, as it does not have good usability. This is entirely possible, as has been shown by the GimpShop UI which makes the GIMP look like Photoshop.

This looks like it might be the end of Tesco’s midas touch when it comes to entering new areas of business. We shall have to wait and see.

Slashdot has the story that Mischa Spiegelmock and Andrew Wbeelsoi revealed at the ToorCon hacker conference a vulnerability in Firefox that allows someone to take over a computer.

The vulnerability is so-called ‘zero day’ because no patch for the exploit is currently available and malicious hackers are using this in the wild.

Apparently, the exploit uses the way JavaScript is handled in Firefox and some malicious JavaScript code can cause a malicious hacker to gain control of the computer, regardless of whether it’s running Windows, Linux or Mac OS X.

You can mitigate this attack by either switching off JavaScript in Tools > Options (Win) / Edit > Preferences (Linux) / Firefox > Preferences (Mac), then choosing Content and unticking the relevant JavaScript option.

This is a bit limiting in that no website will be able to use legitimate JavaScript (for example, all Ajax applications will use it). Alternatively, you could use the NoScript extension for Firefox to only allow JavaScript on sites that you specify. This is what I do all the time, and although it is slightly irritating on some sites, it’s fairly quick and easy to add a site to your ‘whitelist’. Note that this would prevent the attack, but not if the malicious code got onto a site that you had trusted.

What is interesting about this is that it proves Firefox isn’t invulnerable to this type of exploit. However, we are very likely to see a patch and new Firefox version from Mozilla in the next few days. When you compare that to how long Microsoft usually takes to patch up Internet Explorer (with a few notable exceptions recently with the worst exploits), it usually takes at least the rest of the month for MS to get round to it in its patching schedule.

Firefox is, generally, secured pretty quickly (provided that users upgrade to the latest version).

In the meantime, I’d recommend you use NoScript and upgrade to Firefox 1.5.0.8 as soon as it’s released.

UPDATE: Apparently this was a hoax and the vulnerability isn’t nearly as bad as it was first reported (it seems it can crash your browser, but nothing more).

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