Archive for the 'The Web' Category

Maybe I missed the memo, but I just don’t understand everybody’s sudden infatuation with Twitter. It seems as if everywhere I look, people are ‘tweeting’ about the stupid, mundane, and sometimes horrifying events in their daily lives. Does anyone here use Twitter? And if you do, why?

Google recently enabled “Search Suggest” at their official home page. I find this feature annoying, and I wanted a way to disable it. Thankfully, the solution was very simple:

1. Visit the Search Preferences page
2. Set the Query Suggestions option to “Do not provide query suggestions in the search box”
3. Save your preferences

I wish Google had made disabling this a little clearer, rather than quietly adding the preference to the preferences page.

The Acid3 test for web browsers has been released. Drunken Fist has a number of screenshots that show the failure rate among the various top browsers. There are some really interesting results from the tests:

• Safari 3: 39% success (latest nightlies are up to 87%)
• Firefox 3: 59% success
• Firefox 2: 50% success
• Opera 9: 46% success
• IE 7: 12% success
• IE 6: 11% success

Safari is the surprising top dog in the list, but what I find most interesting is that Firefox 3 (which passes the Acid2 test) only hits 59% in the new test. I would have guessed that being Acid2 compliant would mean being nearly Acid3 compliant. Apparently, that isn’t the case. It looks like web browsers still have a long way to go in the standards race.

As if we needed any more proof that CAPTCHAs don’t always work, it seems that spammers have now successfully cracked the GMail CAPTCHA. A one-in-five success rate is being reported, and it appears that there are multiple bot-nets taking a tag-team approach in hacking the sign up process. This is particularly dangerous, since Google’s domains are highly unlikely to be blocked by any website or ISP.

I don’t know what the solution to this problem is (if I did I’d be rich), but hopefully Google will figure out a way to prevent this kind of nefarious activity from continuing to happen.

Slashdot is running a story on RoadRunner intercepting domain typos. My dad noticed this ‘feature’ a few weeks ago, and opted out via their preferences page. In addition to the Slashdot story, Ryan Govostes has an interesting article (written back in December) on the security holes lurking in this opt-out program. According to his post, one could wreak all kinds of havoc with TWC’s poorly written page, enabling or disabling the service for essentially all RoadRunner customers. SQL injections also appear to be a possible line of exploits.

I got an email this morning mentioning the following:

This is just a notice that your DreamHost Account #XXXXX has a balance of $71.34 (including any charges not due until 2009-01-23), with $71.34 due (since 2008-12-23).

What?!? I renewed my subscription about a year ago (if I remember correctly), and I got a 2 year renewal, meaning that I should still have about a year left. Furthermore, I completely used rewards money to pay my bill (since I had it available), so my credit card was never charged to begin with. Thankfully, the credit card they have on file for me had expired, but I’ve lost all of my referral rewards! Needless to say, I was pretty upset by this. Then I found this post over at their emergency status blog: “billing issues“. It seems like something went wrong, they know about it, and are fixing it.

I have yet to get my money back, and I have no doubt they’ll fix the problem, but it bothers me nonetheless. This problem, coupled with the DreamHost hack seen back in June, are starting to concern me. Not to mention the fact that the server this blog is hosted on has degraded in performance drastically over the past several months. It might be time for me to find another web host. I’ll be sure to keep you posted.

Update: To their credit, DreamHost has corrected the issue. They also posted about what happened.

Is Digg.com on the way down? I personally find myself visiting the site less and less, turning instead to Slashdot and Gizmodo for my news and entertainment. When I do visit Digg, there’s little that I find appealing enough to digg. In fact, looking at my profile, I find that the last story I dugg was on December 12, quite some time ago. The majority of stories seem to be very uninteresting, or (more likely) stories that are already covered on other websites.

Even the Diggnation podcast seems to be degrading in quality. The show used to be solidly funny, but I find myself laughing only a few times per episode these days. I’d much rather have the higher grade content as found in The Totally Rad Show. Neither Alex nor Kevin seem to put as much effort into Diggnation as they once did, which isn’t too surprising. Like the saying goes, ‘All good things must come to an end.’