Posts

Matt Haughey explains how spammers are exploiting Blogspot by using scripts to create Blogspot accounts that link to their Web sites and in turn raise their position in Google. (Ironic considering that Blogspot is owned by Google.) There’s no reason why criminals couldn’t take this one step further. Let’s say you have files you want to share but you don’t want them traced back to you. First you take over somebody’s PC, then you run a program on that PC to create a bogus Blogspot account and post your files to that account so that they can be shared. You’ve now got this anonymous content out there. Theoretically, it’s not going to last long, because the content is illegal. How do your cohorts keep up with where these files are currently shared? The weblog infrastructure comes through here as well, courtesy of tags or basic search terms. Every time you create a new weblog because the old one was shut down, you put the same bogus phrase on it (something along the lines of “nigritude ultramarine” will do), then submit it to Technorati. Tell your cohorts to keep searching Technorati for that phrase to find out where your illegal content currently resides. (They can even subscribe to an RSS feed for that search.) Perhaps more simply, create a tag nobody else will use on del.icio.us and continually post the current location of your content to it. Or if you’re afraid of people using automated tools to keep track of your sites, use captcha to obfuscate your URLs as parts of images and post them to a particular tag over at Flickr. The possibilities are endless. ...

Ed Foster has a good item on how copy protection injures legitimate customers. I can say one thing for sure – the thieves will always figure out how to get around it. Believe me, when I was a kid with a Commodore 64 and a floppy drive, we found programs that would copy any game regardless of the protection (and we figured out how to copy those copy programs as well). Via James Robertson. ...

James Governor points out that open source software often serves as the personal trainer for its proprietary complements. I’d go one step further and say that open source software is the only way to inject real competition into moribund markets. The biggest reason why Java is pushing .NET in server side development is the open source world. And Mozilla is, of course, the prime example. Opera does good work, but Mozilla has kick started the browser wars. No commercial company (not even Google) could have done that. ...

Basecamp developer David Heinemeier Hansson has a tale of woe about an application upgrade. There’s nothing worse than that, “This should have worked …” feeling.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been thinking about politics and conscience, and where one stops and the other begins. My thoughts on this really started coalescing when I wrote about how I feel about Iraq about 6 weeks ago, and I’ve been thinking about it contantly over the past couple of weeks mainly due to ongoing events in Lebanon. The bottom line is that it’s a good thing that the Lebanese people are demonstrating peacefully to end the Syrian occupation of their country. One day, if we’re really lucky, Iraq will be safe and self-sufficient enough for thousands of Iraqis to take to the streets and demand that the US end its occupation of their country as well. Unfortunately, I spend an inordinate amount of my time trying to figure out to what degree our invasion of Iraq and the election there has spurred what’s going on in Lebanon. And that’s where politics and conscience start to diverge. It’s a good thing to try to figure out which actions bring out which results, but that all too often devolves into an argument about who gets credit for what. And that leads to feeling unhappy about good news because it bolsters your opponents. So my goal is to focus more on conscience and less on politics, in this space anyway. My conscience tells me that it’s a good thing that many of the Lebanese want to be free from foreign occupation. What more is there? I guess mostly I want to note that I hadn’t even realized until recently how much politics was distorting my view on things. Reading every piece of news and pondering how it helps or hurts your side in the political debate is no way to live. ...

Tim Bray actually tried out the AutoLink feature in Google’s toolbar and writes up his impressions. To be honest, I have not tried it out because I just can’t be bothered to start Internet Explorer. Yes, I really am that lazy.

Did you know that being a famous software developer can get you an invite to dinner with one of the world’s best known Middle East correspondents? How cool is that?

Yesterday was an exciting day – release day. I’ve been working on a web service product for about a year now, and I published the initial version at least 10 months ago and have updated it many times since then. But yesterday felt like the first real release. It had been almost a month since I had last updated the application (at times I’ve updated it several times in one week), so the release included bunches of new features and improvements, not to mention bug fixes. And this time I actually treated it like a real release – I made a tag in Subversion and even archived the WAR files themselves. It’s fun when things start feeling more official. Anyway, since the release I’ve already published one bug fix, and we found another bug that I’ll have to publish a fix for this weekend, but release day is still pretty fun. ...

Commentary? Nay, art.

Seems like Sony Ericsson is building music playback software into all of its new phones. The only remaining obstacle to making portable music players obsolete is storage. How long will it be before commonly sold phones include a gig or so of memory for storing music? Maybe a year? The world still waits for Apple’s play in the mobile phone market.