I got held up recently by a particularly nasty Trojan infection that seemed to come from a flash vulnerability – or at least it installed itself in a Macromedia directory at a time when embedded flash would have been running on one of the web pages I had open.
No ordinary decent virus this one though. It cleverly disabled my default browser – Chrome – coercing me into a specific set of steps that would ultimately place a rootkit on my OS. As my browser seemingly inexplicably was rendered useless, even after multiple uninstall/reinstalls, something else was up. Internet Explorer was attempting to connect to a “tolule.net” which on lookup resolved to a Chinese IP. So a quick entry into my Sygate advanced rules and I had a large swathe of Chinese IPs blocked. So I was safe for the time being giving me a chance to think about what was going on. (The Trojan was quite busy – attempting to connect every 10 mins or so and to multiple domains – initially always tolule.net but also gusmon.net and somemon.net – each time resolving to an address in China).
Continue reading ‘Trojans. Not Stupid.’
I should probably open my commentary on the SO community with a more wide-ranging piece on the effectiveness of self-moderation and social badge collecting in rapidly scaling a web community but hopefully by dumping this the second opinion will be more insightful whenever that may be.
Ok so really I’m just a petty net troll who completely overreacts to criticism online. That aside, I still cannot understand how the answering army at stackoverflow come to the collective conclusion that every question on a close-to-the-bone programming issue requires some inane form of rephrasing or just outright blanking.
Continue reading ‘The StackOverflow Rant’
Published at 9 November 2009
in Google and web.
I posted about Google’s inhouse deadpool a couple of weeks back. Strangely though although I use one of the wordpress sitemap plugins to update mine accordingly Google stubbornly refused to index it. The reason?
Google appears not to add pages that include the rel=”nofollow” meta attribute by default.
Continue reading ‘Nofollow Stops Google Indexing Your Site’
Published at 28 October 2009
in Google and web.
Mobile, Music, Real-time and er, that watery thing – make no mistake about it, Google is the new borg. But they don’t always succeed. Like the finely tuned crack team of elite geeks they are, they bury their mistakes. For this piece I’ve taken on the role of chronological gravedigger (well it’ll fill my CV out won’t it?) and scooped out the bodies; not pretty viewing:
Dodgeball
This is what happens when the big G ventures outside of it’s tech stronghold: Tech invents something better and Google is left wondering why it got itself into some arcane mysticism it never really understood in the first place. Dodgeball, social networking on mobile before smartphone-based GPS services went nuclear – it even used SMS. Bless.
Google Answers
Two for the price of one here, as Google Q&A was a forerunner to Answers, and whose comedy value is far more interesting. Not today’s Q&A app that very few of you may be aware of, but an old web0.1 version whereby users emailed Googlers who responded for a fee, presumably with some answers. We never found out for sure though, as the service only lasted 24 hours. Nothing like fail fast, fail often eh Google?
Continue reading ‘The Google Deadpool’
Making a bit of a splash (no more I swear) online, Google Wave has been trumpeted as the replacement of ’60s’ email and IM applications. It’s also got friends in high places at Google Towers.
This could be a turning point on the web.Vic Gundotra, Google Engineering VP
On seeing a screenshot my first thought was ‘Facebook news feed’.
It’s got a similar albeit primitive system of inline comment right now. While it’s a nice to have, it’s not ‘killer’ and some of the Wave features (every character typed is spewed out in realtime as if participants were viewing the same terminal) will turn a lot of people off straight away. Indeed I’ve a few ideas of my own regarding ‘next generation’ communication, and they don’t involve greater intrusion. While the inline editing is a good thing I don’t regard it as a big enough win to justify moving onto a new platform, cloud or no cloud. What would be wrong with sticking this kind of functionality into Google Docs? We need smarter comms not more of them.
First quality flame post appears to be at Gigaom…
Free wifi is good. Lots of places do it. McDonalds is the big one, providing wifi in it’s outlets all over the country.
But.
Laptops still consume too much energy. For those of us who refuse to drop our netbooks in favour of phones, this presents a problem. Happily though there are free wifi hotspots that whether unwittingly or not also supply publicly accessible plugpoints.
Here is my attempt to map them out – everyone is free to contribute. Only add locations that have both free wifi & power points. Insert a green placemark if wifi is unfettered, red if there are restrictions such as site blockers or excessive time limits (instant arbitrary decision: anything under 12 hours). Give a description of wifi provider & location of plug point.
You’ll find FreeMap here.
Sometimes the embedded (chromeless) YouTube player will fall silent on video playback for an apparently unexplained reason, with no immediate way to fix. I think it has to do with YouTube/flash caching muted sound settings from youtube.com or other non-chromeless player and somewhere along the way these are carried over to your chromeless video.
Just include these two calls in the javascript player prior to calling playVideo():
player.unMute();
player.setVolume(10);
thus guaranteeing sound playback regardless of previous state. Similar solution for Actionscript. Further API details at http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/js_api_reference.html
Published at 7 May 2009
in cool and web.
The winners were announced this week and while it’s difficult to justify naming any one single site as being ‘the best of the web’ in any category such is the disparity of perspective on the web today, no doubt there are some nice designs & apps at work in this year’s awards.
Here’s my personal Webbys in no particular order and in no particular year – these are among my favourite sites on the web period:
finance – minyanville.com
sport – ourweecountry.co.uk
tech – slashdot.org
user content – flickr.com
hack – hackaday.com
gaming – escapistmagazine.com
tees – splitreason.com
books – amazon.co.uk
Surprised I haven’t found comment on this anywhere yet so here is the gen dit:
- The 30% of private funding requirement for the £5m VC fund can be from another investor
- The Proof Of Concept fund is grant based as opposed to equity
- They are in the process of collecting anchor startups for a first round of funding
- Launch date is 1st of May.
- They have already had a meetup with potential opportunities
- Another one is planned in the next few weeks
- E-Synergy is the firm running the show
- It depends who answers their phone as to whether you’ll get any info.
Facebook opened up it’s user activity streams to the public API today. “This is a big deal.” says TechCrunch, referencing an earlier article on the wider implications for micromessaging, likening it to AOL offering email to the masses.
But is it?
The chief upshot of this will be a mass of desktop and mobile activity updaters. I don’t yet have a Twitter desktop app, due to the fact I don’t want to read tweets in realtime. I like to browse a snapshot of the days events in my own time and not as a distraction. Ok so occasionally tweets and work do synergise to produce a new idea or extra insight to an old one, but the fact is the motley collection of fellow users I follow will always mean a high signal to noise ratio in terms of whatever it is I’m working on *right now*. Hence no realtime feed, no constant blast of interestingness.
Neither do I have an activity stream app on my mobile. And I won’t while the internets are still charged by the megabit.
So no, I really don’t think this is that big a deal. If anything I think it’ll create a backlash, certainly in the mainstream, that up to now appeared warmly receptive to the usefulness of a service such as Twitter in terms of a primary news source. Yes for 90% of people that meant following Stephen Fry, but it was adoption nonetheless.
Instead people will now be bombarded with a hail of disparate apps all doing pretty much the same thing with a slightly different flavour. I think the time has come to split, not aggregate, all these feeds. I had given some thought to submit such an idea for content creators to a recent competition for funding. But I’ll let the crazies crack on for now
Update: Things change fast. Especially when FB invite the devs round. My earlier twittering regarding OpenId or FB Connect now appears deprecated
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