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BYU’s new website theme fosters identity theft

Jacob — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 20:05:12 +0000

On February 15th, BYU will launch a new look and feel for its various websites including the BYU homepage, Route Y, and department and college sites. The administrators for BYU’s webpages have nicknamed this new look and feel Collage. The Collage theme sports new colors and new methods for user interaction, but will increase a hacker’s ability to steal student’s identities.

An essential component to Collage is a login form on the top of every page. Students can type their username and password into the form to be shown a custom set of Internet links. Webpage administrators expect that students will frequently enter their password to gain access to their preferred links. Students will then be trained to frequently type their password on top of any page with the Collage theme.

Within a matter of minutes, anyone with a technical background can set up a page using the Collage theme. They can make it look like a genuine and legitimate BYU site. In particular, hacker’s can create a fake site that looks like a BYU site, but it really just a technique to trick student users. Many student users could be tricked into giving their username and password to a fake site created by a hacker. The hacker could then gain access to the student’s personal information, email, and financial accounts. Once the hacker has access to the student’s information,

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New LDS.org website

Jacob — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 12:35:35 +0000

This morning the LDS church launched a new version of their website at LDS.org. I wanted to send out a special congratulations to all those who worked hard on the new design. I know a little bit of what it is like to launch a big website, and it is a great experience (assuming nothing goes wrong).

I first saw parts of the new website design almost a couple of years ago. The new design represents a more reverent feeling as well as a greater ability to translate the site into languages other than English.

In similar but unrelated news, a new BYU homepage is set to launch in about two weeks. However, BYU’s new design does not represent anywhere near the amount of testing and work that was put into the new LDS design.

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Jacob — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 21:57:45 +0000

The last couple of days I spent just a little bit of time throwing together a new homepage. I’m not really sure what the idea behind it is, I just thought that I should have something, especially with having three different blogs to keep track of.

So the home page is basically a personalized aggregator of blogs and comments I write or read. It was coded in PHP and makes use of the MagpieRSS parser. The HTML code for the page is also very simple, making good use of some CSS features for a quick layout.

The page is likely to evolve over time.

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Jacob — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 07:01:11 +0000

Today, BYU released a preview of their new look for the home page and Route Y. This new look is code-named Collage and will eventually be used universally across BYU.

I first saw previews of this new look about a year and a half ago. I expressed anticipation for some good changes, and I made many suggestions about how it could be better. Some of these suggestions were implemented, and others weren’t. Over the last year and a half, I’ve watched my colleagues at BYU debate and discuss different features of Collage. At this point, most suggestions about the templates have been resolved to, “let’s see what the users say about it.”

At this point, it is absolutely critical that users provide as much feedback as possible. I invite you, even if you aren’t affiliated with BYU, to take a look at the design and provide feedback about what you do and don’t like about it. The feedback button can be found near the upper right corner of the page.

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