Cyber Visor

History

The Cyber Visor project, came after I created a JavaScript Document Object Model (DOM) tutorial site, which primarily uses introspection techniques to aid in understading the DOM.

I had just finished the site, when it hit me, wouldn't it be great to get these effects and apply them to any web page, even ones I have not personally built.

The Libmarks offered the way to do this, and I thought I would explore this approach a bit more.

Plugins for the popular Mozilla Firefox tend to use JavaScript (EMCA Script), but of course these plugins have to be installed in the browser you are using.

I had toyed with the idea of creating or installing a proxy server to achieve similar effects, but of course these solutions would not be as versatile as the Cyber Visor.

The Plan

I quickly knocked together what I called the Pre-Concept Visor and tried it out. The Visor just scanned the document looking for embedded objects and checked if the content pointed to looked like a multimedia file.

I tend to run Linux systems, and often web developers have assumed a plugin that is not available for Linux. I was getting bored of looking through the HTML source code to find the movie or audio links to the embeded content. The visor worked surprising well.

The next step was to create a website, and get a Concept Visor put together. I decided I would go from Pre-Concept to Concept, then to Alpha, Beta and then finally a production Cyber Visor.

The reason for the many versions before an official production release was to force the rewriting of the code base a number of times. The Cyber Visors use a technique that is not often explored by people, and JavaScript is a very rich language that tends to operate differently in different browsers and different modes. The Cyber Visors are also injected into pages that they know very little about, effectively they would, from a developer's perspective, have to run in unknown environments.

Free for non Commercial

I have given some thought to the licencing of the Cyber Visors and the general rule of thumb for the Cyber Visors are they are free for non commercial use, so can be used only for entertainment purposes unless otherwise stated by myself.

Developers and designers who contribute accepted plugins or designs, will obviously be given special consideration concerning commercial rights, but still should get in contact to discuss such matters before submitting a plugin or design, and before they intend to do anything commercial with the Cyber Visors.

The intention is to allow people to use the Cyber Visors in a variety of ways, but not as a free plugin for commercial sites that may not have contributed anything to the project.

Security Issues

The Cyber Visors use a cross site scripting injection technique. This is initiated either by yourself or the page you have elected to visit, so it is quite safe, but it does mean you have to apply some 'common sense' to when you apply the Cyber Visors.

Please do not use the Cyber Visors on sites where your session variables are valuable, eg. bank sites, ecommerce sites where you are logged in and the credit card is associated with the account. Whilst the Cyber Visors are designed not to transmit sensitive information, you have to trust the site the Cyber Visor comes from. So, better to be safe than sorry only activate the Cyber Visors on a page or site which is not associated with sensitive data.

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