After a long break from this blog due to an overwhelming number of projects and "real life stuff" I've been neglecting this little corner of the net :-). I my long absence spammers have discovered this site and on a daily basis have been spamming the comment system with ads. This is hopefully now a thing of the past thanks to the upgrade of Serendipity, which now uses Turing tests to prevent automated tools from posting messages. And the older spam has been manually removed. Now that my schedule is more or less back to normal, I expect to be able to rant more often, something I am sure those of you who read this blog can wait for hehehe.

It appears that exploitation of the public's paranoia is not unique to us, North Americans, it's something our Trans-Atlantic friends in the UK have adopted as well. According to a [url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3881587.stm]recent article I've read on BBC[/url] Federation Against Copyright Theft (Fact) in UK is launching a new anti piracy campaign under the slogan that Movie piracy supports terrorists. They claim that illegal movie copies are being distributed by IRA and Afghans Sikhs to sponsor their insurgency activities. They even made a nice poster. [center][img]http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/40369000/jpg/_40369411_dvds3_203.jpg[/img][/center] It would appear they hope that capitalizing on the public's somewhat irrational fear of bad man hiding behind every corner they will accomplish what all other methods have failed so far. Good luck to them...

It would seems that some good does afterall come from the rampant paranoia in the United States. The recently created Department of Homeland Security, through it's mouth piece, [url=http://www.us-cert.gov/]CERT[/url] has recently made a recommendation that people consider alternate browsers to IE. It seems someone in the US government has finaly realized that the whole IE infrastructure is flawed and frequently rushed fixes from Microsoft are nothing more then bandaid solution for a dam that's about to burst (some may argue it has already burst). This the first time a US government agency went out and publically recommended an alternative to a Microsoft product (to the best of my knowledge), could it be that MS slush funds are not getting to the right hands and perhaps not enough of them? :) Ultimately, this is a good thing from just about all respects, first of all it'll hopefully convince people to switch to Mozilla, Opera, etc... which offer greater standards compliance, security and other neat feature...

Today I have discovered that Gmail (Google's E-mail service, to those living under a rock) had decided to increase their user base by allowing secondary (referred by existing members) to invite up to 3 of their friends to Gmail. The popularity of the service still seems high despite the privacy issues some people choose to be panicky about as my 3 invites were gone in a matter of minutes. Although Google was clearly not ready for the influx of the new users, since all of the people whom I sent the invites reported seeing an error message saying that the service is temporarily unavailable. This was further confirmed by few other people who got invites from other people. This however is not really the the most interesting thing. What is quite interesting is that 2 premier free e-mail (and pay?) providers, Yahoo and Hotmail (MS) have blocked Gmail invites. At first I was a little sceptical of this, despite the long thread on this topic on Slashdot, however when I sent one of my friends a Gmail invite to a Hotmai...

In recent days I've noticed some very strange referral URLs on my top referrals link list. A few sites who definitely have no links somehow appear to have sent me a noticeable amount of users. How is this possible you ask? Well, it seems someone had figured out that blogging software does not perform any validation on the referrals (such as check if the link in present on the sending site) and with trivial scripts generate fake hits that quite easily get said site to appear on the top referrals list. Blocking such things is quite difficult since the scammers fake genuine browser signatures and in some cases even setup dummy pages that have the link back to the original site. More over @ least one of those scammers seems to be using anonymous proxies to prevent IP filtering. Quite frankly outside of manual referral validation or a referral whitelist I see no fool proof way to prevent this from happening. Since I don't have the time or interest invest time into manual validation or creation of whitelists, I am...