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Mac OS X Parental Controls Stomp the Web

“Won’t anyone think of the children?”

Oh, snap. Apple may be our techno-culture poster child for great design and great execution, but they appear to have flubbed it badly while trying to keep the children sitting in front of its computers safe from whatever’s out there.

We recently were dealing with a support call concerning a number of Noteflight scores created in a particular school classroom. These are XML documents, and it turned out that they had been corrupted by the injection of web proxy HTTP headers in the middle of the document, rendering it unparseable. The corruption now appears to be the handiwork of Mac OS X 10.5’s Parental Controls option, which has been reported to have a buggy interaction with Firefox that can insert this garbage into the content of any HTTP POST. And indeed, all the cases we found occurred with Firefox (various versions) and Mac OS 10.5 with Parental Controls in effect. Safari reportedly has no problem.

The garbage typically takes the form Proxy-Connection: keep-alive\rCache-Content age=0 and appears a little under 1500 characters into the POST — probably not coincidentally this is approximately the length of a network packet. Parental Control’s web aspect is implemented as an HTTP proxy server, no doubt one with a bug in it.

What’s really amazing is that this bug has been around since the beginning of 2009 or so, and little has been said or done about it. But if you Google for the garbage, you’ll see that this garbage has made its way into every corner of the web.

Now, that’s what I call viral!

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You Are My Starshine

This is not an entry for the recent Noteflight composition contest — I’m flagrantly ineligible to enter. But sometimes, you just have to get something out of your system.

This piece is dedicated to the memory of George Russell.

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Urban Raspberry

It sounds a little like a synonym for the expression “Bronx Cheer”, but we’re being completely literal here.  We are talking about a raspberry in the city: a regular raspberry, the kind that grows on a bush in clusters.

I was walking to the Noteflight office this morning, a walk which meanders through Cambridge’s various ideas of upscale, downscale and industrial-scale before terminating in a neighborhood one could describe as biotech chic. It’s ironic that what we call the “life sciences” seem to require, for their successful pursuit, a sterile environment purged of all life. This notion seems to have leaked outward from their labs and glove boxes into the architecture, which is designed to convey that same sterility.  I much prefer the industrial stretch of my walk, right at the boundary of bio-land and the residential neighborhood preceding it.  In this area, a disused auto repair shop looks exactly like what it is, lying just outside the zone in which it would have been cleaned up to reflect its rows of newly minted  equipment inside.

On that walk today, I met an urban raspberry.  Like the auto repair shop, it looked exactly like what it was. I ate it, looking at the cracked and broken windows of the buildings around me. A perfect moment unfolded on my tongue, fading half a block later.

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