Posted on
by

Remember last year when I realized some net filter was looking at teentitans3.jpg, breaking the words in the wrong place, and concluding it must be adult content and therefore should be blocked? (It replaced the “offending” words with spaces, which get encoded as %20 in URLs.)

At the time I left it, since I figured anyone who installed a filter that brain-dead given the popularity of the Teen Titans cartoon deserved what they got. Well, the usability and “make the site work for the visitor” side of the debate finally won out (with a little help from “the people who use these filters aren’t the ones who install them”), and a few weeks ago I renamed the file to teen_titans_current.jpg.

Guess what? I’m now seeing hits for %20%20%20%20_%20%20%20ans_current.jpg.

Even when I give it word breaks, it can’t figure it out.

They’re lucky I called the file titans.html. Otherwise some people wouldn’t be able to see it at all.

Given this level of “quality,” can you blame librarians for opposing mandatory installation of filters on library computers?

Further reading: The Censorware Project, Peacefire, and Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Posted on
by

AOL TideAOL 9.0 Optimized CleanerI’d seen an AOL CD packaged to look like laundry detergent before (Tide, specifically), but this seems to take it a step further.

I think what makes it seem strange to me is the fact that they made “Cleaner” more prominent than “AOL.” Sure, you can’t miss it, especially with the running man icon, and of course they’re plugging their filters and bundled antivirus (to clean your computer), but it just seems like they’ve taken the metaphor a bit far in the design.

Posted on
by

I don’t remember when, where, or how long ago this was—or even which of us saw it—but I found it while cleaning the piles of junk off my desk this afternoon.

Nasty Boss. I'm looking for 6 people I can work half to death in the Promo & ent. ind. Pd training up to $500/wk to start. If you like to be kicked around...

I mean, what’s not to like about this position? You get to work half to death for a “nasty boss”—he’ll even kick you around! Such thoughtful consideration, especially to tell you about it up front!

Posted on
by

OK, that’s bizarre… I just read through the winners of last year’s Bulwer-Lytton contest (worst opening paragraph from an imaginary novel, named after the author who penned “It was a dark and stormy night.”) Naturally, much of the text is displayed in purple.

Now all the text on my screen looks green.

I think it’s time for me to get some sleep.

Posted on
by

The WaSP Buzz points out that Netscape 8’s ability to switch between IE (Trident) and Mozilla Netscape (Gecko) isn’t exactly new: Maxthon apparently does this already. Maxthon is essentially Internet Explorer on steroids, and since I’d rather use Firefox anyway, I’ve never tried out any of the browsers that wrap a new user interface around IE.*

MozIE has a similar ability, but is aimed squarely at web designers: it gives you two panes, one embedding IE and one embedding Gecko, and synchronizes the views. You get a side-by-side comparison of how each browser will display your page.

And a few years ago, Konqueror could switch between KHTML and Gecko. I’m sure it still can, and the only reason I don’t have Mozilla in my list of alternate views anymore is that I didn’t install the relevant bindings, or Fedora Core stopped including them in their KDE packages.

Is it new? Of course not. But this is Netscape. It’s kind of like Apple deciding to ship all new Macs with Virtual PC and Windows XP pre-installed. Or maybe France making English a second official language.

*My main interest in trying out different browsers is to see how they display websites. In theory, Maxthon and any other browser of its ilk should be identical to IE in this respect.