The FTC has asked a US District Court to bar Spyware Assassin and its affiliates from offering consumers free spyware detection scans and from selling antispyware software, alleging that the software is not effective
US politicians and journalists have said that internet bloggers should enjoy traditional press freedoms and not face regulation as political groups
Telemarketers world-wide are realising they can dodge long-distance costs, and US Do Not Call
restraints, by voice spamming VoIP users. Different from spam over internet telephony because it’s not automated, an analyst predicts homes and businesses could see some 150 calls a day from overseas call centres
A leading internet security researcher has warned that personal home computers were never designed to act as secure ATMs and could not be trusted for internet banking or any other online transaction. Yet Australian banks continued to promote internet banking as safe because they did not want to pay for the only technology that could guarantee internet transaction security — a home eftpos system
Apple won the green light to subpoena amateur publishers for their confidential sources, a Californian Judge ruled today. Apple Computer, which wants to discover who leaked product information to three web sites, can now proceed with its subpoena against one of the ISPs hosting two of the websites, Santa Clara county court Judge James Kleinberg has ruled, as well as the web sites themselves
A french appeal court has ruled in favour of a filesharer who downloaded 500 odd movies, on the grounds that they were private copies, that he didn’t redistributed them and that a tax was payed on blank media
The Bureau of Meteorology has upgraded its Web-based rain radar service, adding enhanced maps and finer grades of rain to a service that already ranks as the most popular and fastest-growing educational and government Web site in Australia
The Mozilla Foundation has published its Mozilla Application Suite transition plan, confirming that there will be no official Mozilla 1.8 release. There will be a 1.7.6 release to be maintained by the Mozilla Foundation. All future suite versions from the Foundation will be minor updates only. There is already a community effort underway to continue development
AMD has officially unveiled Turion, its latest chip for mobile computing, a 64-bit processor aimed squarely Intel’s Centrino product, which currently dominates the notebook PC market
The Google News home page is now customisable, allowing you to add or delete main news categories, as well as increasing or decreasing the number of headlines within a section. They’ve also introduced a feature that lets you create your own section using keywords for a topic that interests you
Of late I have been tinkering with Mycroft, which is the search bar widget used by Firefox and the Mozilla / Netscape suites. I have discovered a couple of cool things that I’d like to share with you.
First up, you can delete unwanted search plugins. There’s no GUI for this, but it’s very easy.
And next, you can make your own plugins using a simple SGML markup derived from Apple Sherlock. The documentation for this is here. It looks a bit intimidating but it’s actually no more difficult than writing HTML (and there’s a great validator tool at Mindzilla). If you want to support people using a Moz or Netscape suite, or Firefox with the Search Sidebar extension, you’ll need to read up on the Mycroft sidebar documentation.
The great thing about rolling your own plugin is you can set the search defaults. For example, I like to shop for DJ records at the Juno Records website. Since I mainly buy drum n bass, I have written a plugin that restricts its search to the drum n bass section (as well as a genre agnostic search that I hope Mozilla will one day get around to uploading).
In the meantime you can download the Juno d n b plugin or the full Juno search plugin by clicking on some of the words you have just read.
To install them, find you browser search plugin directory (on Firefox for Win32, it’s Program Files/Mozilla Firefox/searchplugins) and unzip the supplied archive into it. Feel free to play around with the code while you’re at it; it’s all plain text, and the <input> name attributes correspond to the target search engine’s <input> elements.
Update: Here’s one for the Chemical Records d n b section.
Update: If you want users to be able to install your plugin by clicking a link, there’s a JavaScript addSearchEngine() method.
Update: Here’s one for Board Game Geek (my favourite site of late), provided by Andrew Avella of Avella Studios, NY.
Update: Some enterprising soul has written a delete GUI for Mycroft plugins.
Current Testra PR hype has it that nearly all ADSL-enabled exchanges will have ADSL2+ capabilities by mid-2006 under an AU$210 million program being undertaken by the telco
Intel has introduced a new wireless networking standard called 802.11s. This standard utilises a mesh topology, allowing for fully self-configuring networks where each node can relay messages on behalf of others, thus increasing the range and available bandwidth with the number of nodes active within the system, versus the point-to-point structure of existing WiFi networks. This will radically transform WiFi hotspots, allowing the geographical area and available bandwidth on the network to scale with the number of participants
Yet another wonderful collection of machinery, that I should never be allowed near, are the industrial shredders made by SSI. Admittedly the people who work for the company appear to be just as irresponsible as me, as their videos of shredders eating concrete, washing machines, tyres and fridges can attest — via Dan’s Horrendous Waste of Bandwidth
A restaurant in New Zealand has been fined NZ$3,000 for failing to keep its web site up to date. By having out-of-date menus and prices on its web site, it has breached the Fair Trading Act, according to the New Zealand Commerce Commission
The russian site Allofmp3.com, which had been reported as being under investigation recently, has been let off the hook by the Russian DA, becuase of a loophole in russian law which allows users create copies of songs by request. Basically, even though the courts have found their site operator’s behavior to be illegal — they can’t prosecute because the user dynamically creates copies of songs to be downloaded themselves
Google’s desktop search tool officially has left the realm of beta testing and is in full release. The company announced version 1.0 on Monday, along with several additional features. Google Desktop Search now supports the Firefox and Netscape Web browsers in addition to Internet Explorer
Working on weekends = not cool.
Getting paid extra to work on weekends = not highly cool. See previous point.
What if… = very cool.
Hacking your CSS to accommodate Internet Explorer = not cool at fucking all!
Getting Unstuck = cool.
Brain dead-ness = not very cool. But it helps drown out hysterical, whingy, control freak co-workers.
Forgetting to buy decent green tea leaves for work = not cool.
www.zefrank.com = coollishly funny.
sleep = cool indeed.
Anonymous Internet access is now a thing of the past. A doctoral student at the University of California has conclusively fingerprinted computer hardware remotely, allowing it to be tracked wherever it is on the Internet
Don’t have the .Net framework on your PC to utilise Broadcastpc.tv’s spamming adware technology? No problem, they’ll download it for you without you knowing. The problem is that it’s a 23MB download and a 65MB install but, with the service packs and other extras, could end up eating 100MB of your disk space once installed
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