Tag: Internet

Firefox Vulnerability

So a flaw in Firefox has finally been found – get version 0.9.2 to fix that problem. At first glance it seems to dent the argument that Firefox is more secure and safer than good old IE. However, look a little deeepr and you’ll see just how quickly the issue was resolved. In just over a day and a half the new release of Firefox was posted for everyone to download – also the Mozilla team were quite open about the flaw. Microsoft have a lot to learn. For a timeline of the fix from first find to download available click here.

BBC Charter Renewal

BBC published it’s future proposals today. The pdf and interesting quote can be found here – BBC affirms Creative Archive in Charter Renewal plans. From DG Mark Thompson…

We want to builld a digital world based on universal access, open standards and unencryption. Encryption, subscription and other forms of digital exclusion lead to widespread welfare losses. They may have a role within the total broadcasting ecology, but the idea that they can successfully replace free-to-air public service broadcasting flies in the face both of economic theory and real-world experience.

The online creative archive sounds amazing but would surely grow to a huge undertaking even for a public broadcaster like the BBC?

I’ve got GMail

I finally managed to blag an invite into the GMail Beta. First impressions are good. It’s claim to fame is the 1Gb storage available altough I struggle to see how I could fill 1Gb. Since Google announced this, others have been quick to catch up or overtake. Hotmail now makes available 250Mb instead of the measly 10Mb and Yahoo has gone to 2Gb for it’s broadband users. Yikes – lots of mail.

A nice feature is the way the mail is held as ‘conversations’ so that the mails read like a forum posting rather than discreet entities within your inbox. Also, there is no concept of folders. Instead you tag your mail with labels (can be done automatically via filters) and the inbox is then split accordingly – the mail can have more than one label. Searching the mail is also easy and quick, although if it was anything else you’d be pretty shocked. All in all, very nice and certainly better then Hotmail. If you want to mail me, try the mail link bottom right and if your interested in getting an invite then let me know and when I get one I’ll be sure to pass it on. The next test is to see if it’s been blocked by the company firewall yet.

WordPress

After upgrading to Movable Type 3, and seeing the reaction elsewhere to the new licensing deals from Six Apart I felt relatively secure in that the deals didn’t affect me, I could still use a free version of Movable Type and I’d spent ages getting the look of my site ‘just so’ – no way was I moving.

That was until I looked at WordPress.

It has everything a blog writer could need, is php based and so incredibly easy to modify and is really easy to set-up. Within an hour I had a site set-up and all my posts from the old blog imported. I’ve never used an easier online tool. In the last hour I’ve added a plugin to switch styles and an Amazon Media Manager. Fantastic.

This is just night and day compared to Movable Type – just shows you what you can miss when you get complacent.

Warning – Messenger Plus

For a while now I’ve been using Messenger Plus which is a nice addon to messenger for Windows. However today via a helpful automatic update it installed some nasty spyware and an obtrusive IE toolbar for some websearching firm which no matter how many times you switched it off, it would reappear. After a half hour of trying to gain control an uninstall of Messenger Plus had sorted it out.

I then ran an ad-aware scan which removed a further 130 (bloody hell) nasty spyware entries on my machine. You just can’t surf safely nowadays. Thats what I get for not using Firefox more, now my default browser.

A9.com

New web search engine from…Amazon! A9.com uses Google as its main search engine but adds a couple of nice features. Firstly your search results will contain any book references which are found in a seperate tab. Also, if you have an Amazon account and log into a9.com your search history will be displayed – handy when trying to remember how you found a particular website. Like Google they also have a browser toolbar which has the same features as Google but also contains a ‘diary’ feature where you can store comments/to-do’s against any websites. Nice.

However it looks more like Amazon trying to capture sales than anything else, and also the searches return less results than Google. Maybe they only have access to some of Google’s search engine? And I don’t like the idea of search results tied to my user account ties to my purchases. I’ll stick to Google for now.