Category: Tech

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Microsoft is really pushing for people to make sure their websites and apps are compatible with IE7. Apparently this is a real concern for a lot of people who relied on certain proprietary features, bugs, and quirks in IE6. I guess they figured they wouldn’t have to worry about future versions. (Hmm… I wonder where they got that idea?)

The fact of the matter is, I’m not worried. I tested my personal sites and the sites I’d built for work months ago, using the IE7 betas, and more recently with RC1. I made a couple of minor changes to some stylesheets, but that was about it.

Why? I’ve been writing standards-based code for years. I validate it from time to time, and I test to make sure it works in the latest versions of Firefox, Opera and Safari as well as IE. So the code was already portable.

Plus, anything new I’ve built since January has been designed with IE7 in mind from the beginning.

Most of the changes were to workarounds for IE6. Either stopping them from running on IE7 (if the bug was fixed), or keeping them running on IE7 (if it was done using a CSS hack).

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Received the replacement battery for the PowerBook yesterday. It was shipped out via DHL, with a prepaid return label for shipping the old battery back via regular mail.

Last night I drained the old battery, plugged the new one in, and packaged up the recalled one in the box. At lunch today I went to the post office to send it off.

As I was walking up the steps, I remembered the “Does this package contain anything liquid, explosive, or otherwise hazardous?” question that postal clerks are required to ask. If you’re mailing a defective battery that could theoretically burst into flames, how exactly are you supposed to answer?

I figured it would be best not to joke about it.

As it was, I just said it was a laptop battery straight out, so the question didn’t come up.

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Space Shuttle Atlantis has landed safely. *whew!* I’m getting more nervous about shuttle missions lately. In part, it’s the greater focus on all the things that could go wrong. In part, it’s the realization that you know, the shuttle fleet really is aging.

But mostly, I think it’s the fear that, given reactions to the Columbia disaster, our nation may be only one disaster away from writing off space—or at least humans in space—entirely.

Speaking of Atlantis, the Bad Astronomy posted a fantastic photo by Thierry Legault of the shuttle and the International Space Station passing in front of the sun!

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Here’s another example of randomly-generated spam somehow being appropriate:

This morning I received an image-based stock spam. The sender’s name was listed as “eye gouging.” Yes, spam does sometimes make you want to gouge out your eyes (or perhaps the spammer’s). May I recommend the Grammar Spork™ (NSFW: language) for such cases?

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I just read an interesting post from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team on The IE7 User-Agent String. This statement in particular illustrates a problem not unfamiliar to Opera users:

There are a few remaining sites which fail to recognize IE7 because they are performing exact string matches to look for specific IE version strings. Those checks will need to be removed or updated to accommodate IE7.

Yes, you read that correctly: there are websites out there using bad browser sniffing code which will send the wrong code to Internet Explorer 7. In fact, they go on to say that they’ve released a tool which will let IE7 pretend to be IE6!

To enable you to workaround any remaining sites that block access to Internet Explorer 7, we developed the User Agent String Utility. The utility comes in the form of a small executable that opens an IE7 instance that sends the IE6 user agent string. It also provides a mechanism for you to report problem web sites to Microsoft so that we can follow up with the affected site owners.

I’ll admit to a certain amount of schadenfreude, but it also points up just how bad a strategy browser sniffing can be when done thoughtlessly: It effectively builds an expiration date into your website after which even the browser you designed it for will run into problems.

*This post originally appeared on Confessions of a Web Developer, my blog at the My Opera community.

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I just spotted a rather disturbing phishing message in (of all places) our abuse contact mailbox:

Subject: Fraud Prevention Measures

Dear customer!

Due to high fraud activity we constantly increasing security level both for online banking and card transactions. In order to update our records you are required to call MBNA Card Service number at 1-800-[removed] and update information on your MBNA card.

This is free of charge and would not affect any transactions with your card. Please note this is necessary to provide highest security level for all transactions with your card.

No HTML tricks. No links to fraudulent websites. Just a phone number.

I can only assume this is a response to high-profile inclusion of antiphishing features in Internet Explorer 7 and in Firefox 2. If there’s no website, there’s nothing for a web browser to check.

And of course by not using sneaky technical tricks in the message, it’s harder for tools like ClamAV, spam filters, or mail clients to detect.

Incidentally, does anyone else find it ironic that one of the most common phishing techniques is to exploit people’s fear of being phished?

Further reading: Anti-Phishing Working Group.

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