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...

A few years ago PHP developers decided to address a problem not their's to solve by implementing a configuration directive called safe_mode. To those unfamiliar with this wondrous invention, this setting is primarily intended to provide file access limits to prevent users from accessing files that do no belong to them. This supposedly should make it impossible to access files of other people in a shared server environment, a common operating environment for PHP where PHP runs as an Apache module and as such has read access to all files accessible by the webserver regardless of the owner. When enabled, safe_mode will perform a uid/gid (user id and group id) check on the file/directory to be accessed and compare it to the uid/gid of the script that is trying to access the file. If the two match then the file operation will proceed as normal and in all other cases it will fail. In theory this is a fairly simple hack to a problem that is not otherwise easily addressed without significant performance penalties suc...

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...