Category: Tech

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The disclaimers spammers add to their missives are sometimes bizarre, ranging from excuses to nonsensical “word salad” to, in this example found in today’s spamtrap haul, legal threats.

WARNING: ANYONE REPORTING ALLEGED SPAM TO ANY PERSON OR PERSONS, WITH OUT PHYSICAL PROOF OF SUCH A CLAIM IS GUILTY OF BOTH FRAUD & A CIVIL CRIME AND WILL BE PURSUED AND PROSECUTED TO THE FULLEST EXTENT OF THE LAW. FOR MORE INFORMATION PLEASE READ:
http://www.ncsl.org/programs/lis/legislation/spamlaws02.htm

Physical proof? Of something which exists entirely in the virtual realm of bits and bytes? Do you have to submit your hard drive as evidence, or is a paper print-out sufficient? Continue reading →

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From the Gnome 2.10 release notes:

In the past, while typing something into one application when suddenly your instant messenger offered a chat request from your friend, your words would be typed into the chat window. Imagine if you were typing your password at the time. This should no longer happen in GNOME 2.10.

In addition, if an application takes a long time to start, your work will not be interrupted when it finally opens its window.

About time someone fixed this! The window focus-stealing problem has plagued just about every desktop out there. I think Windows is the first one I noticed that attempted a solution (blinking the taskbar button instead of switching to the dialog box). And since I often fire up several programs at once, it can get really annoying when I start typing my password into one, hoping I’ll finish before the other window appears and drops the last three letters into my web browser or something.

Unfortunately I’ll probably have to wait for Fedora Core 4 to really use it, unless I want to go even more bleeding-edge than I already am.

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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.

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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.

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I installed the just-released Netscape 8 Beta. It imported most of my settings from Firefox, including bookmarks, cookies and even history. One of the first things I always check with a new browser is how it identifies itself, which in this case is as Firefox 0.9.6. (Presumably they’ll get on this by the time the final version is out.)

First impressions: importing was clean and worked well. UI is a bit freaky, as things are spread all over the place—like the main menu, which is in the upper right and in line with the title bar instead of where the menus are on every other Windows application. The multiple toolbars seem confusing at first (it took a while to dig up my bookmark bar, for instance). Then I looked at the site trust/rendering choices, the big exciting feature of this release. And I’m not impressed. Or rather I am, but not favorably.

The current tab shows a shield icon indicating the trust level of the site: Green if it’s been verified by a “Netscape Security Partner,” yellow if not, and I would presume red if it’s a known phishing/virus/etc. site. There’s also an icon indicating the trust level: a check mark if it’s trusted, an ellipsis for “not sure” and an exclamation point for not trusted. Unverified sites are, by default, in the “not sure” category. So far this makes sense.

Clicking on the shield icon opens a site controls dialog box enabling you to choose to what extent you trust the website, and below that, whether to display the site using the Mozilla Netscape or Internet Explorer engine: Continue reading →

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In the past few weeks, advertising developers have come up with scripts that will work around Firefox’s pop-up blocking. This is rather like a telemarketer calling someone on the do-not-call list. We installed a browser that blocks pop-ups for a reason. We are not your target audience; we are the people for whom pop-up ads are an invitation to boycott the advertiser.

If you’re selling something door-to-door, some people will buy, some will not, and some will be annoyed. But if someone has posted a “No Soliciting” sign, it’s a sure bet that they’re going to slam the door in your face. Why go to the effort when you know it’s going to be counterproductive?

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