Chad’s News

For web designers, dealing with images is simple. You just use the <img> HTML tag, and the browser knows how to handle it, whether the image type is PNG, JPEG, GIF, TIFF, or whatever. The same cannot be said for video content. Adobe Flash has become an informal standard, but even then you have to use the nonstandard <embed> tag with lots of vendor-specific information, or the horrible <object> tag that’s official but even more cumbersome. HTML version 5 hopes to do away with all this by making video content as easy to handle as images are today. The browsers will have built-in codecs to display the video, and all the designer will have to do is use the <video> tag. No more browser plug-ins for Flash, Silverlight, or JavaFX.

This is only one of HTML 5’s new features. For instance, there’s an <audio> tag for (you guessed it…) audio content.

HTML 5 is still in draft form and won’t see widespread use for years, but some newer browsers already support certain features. And it will make life much easier for web developers.

Link: http://www.infoworld.com/…
(via Slashdot)

How well do you know your web-related acronyms? I got 18 out of 20 correct. And I have to admit I’d never heard of “YUI” before.

Link: http://www.elanman.co.uk/…
(via digg)

Here’s another example of why it pays to be careful about what you post online. This man lost a lawsuit because his Facebook entries showed that he had not actually suffered the damages claimed.

Link: http://www.cbc.ca/…
(via Kim Komando)

Twitter is a popular micro-blogging site, where you can post short messages (tweets) about yourself. But users are starting to see a new type of directed, unsolicited advertising based on their posts. For example, say that you tweet about having an ear infection. This is monitored by someone, and you receive a message from a medical company suggesting that you try their product to help with the infection. It’s an advertisers paradise, because the messages are directed to those most likely to be interested in the product.

Link: http://www.bloomberg.com/…
(via Kim Komando)

The creator of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, predicts mobile devices are the future of the web, especially in developing countries. Here at the Chad’s News network command center, we’re way ahead of the curve on this. Browse Chad’s News with a phone, and you’ll automatically be transferred to our mobile site.

Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/…

Chad’s News previously mentioned the DNS security hole now known as the Kaminsky Bug. The linked article has more information about the discovery and revelation of the bug.

Link: http://www.wired.com/…
(via Slashdot)

The internet was designed to be decentralized, error-tolerant, and highly variable in how it could route packets from one computer to another. According to Wikipedia, the “internet backbone” is “made up of a large collection of interconnected commercial, government, academic and other high-capacity data routes and core routers that carry data across the countries, continents and oceans of the world.” The internet doesn’t have a backbone in the traditional sense; rather, it’s more like a spider web. Many of the connections referenced in the Wikipedia definition are between major service providers who have cooperative agreements (I’ll carry your traffic if you’ll carry mine). The linked article explains what happens when one of those agreements breaks down, and gives insight into just how fragile the internet can be.

Link: http://www.forbes.com/…
(via digg)

And I always thought it was because they were too out of touch with technology.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/…
(via Lifehacker)

Update: Turns out that he may be keeping his Blackberry after all.

Update #2: Yes he can.

This 60 Minutes segment discusses how there are little or no consequences for those caught cheating at online gambling. To make matters worse, there’s also the possibility of encountering a computerized opponent designed to rake in the money from poker novices.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/…
(via Kim Komando)

The linked article addresses the question of how to remove embarrassing or career-impacting personal information from the internet. It turns out there are a lot of things that seemed like good ideas at the time but later turn negative—I think the most obvious are drunken/risqué pictures. The short answer is that it’s really difficult to remove things from the internet, and the best way is to make sure they never get there in the first place.

I’m at the point where I think carefully about what I write in website comments, to the point of the Digg comments on which I click the “thumbs up” icon. That information is stored somewhere, and even though some of it isn’t currently available for general viewing, it may not remain that way. Here on Chad’s News I have total control and can change anything. Yet there’s The WayBackMachine, the Google cache, The Coral Content Distribution Network, and other caching or archiving services. Those are much more difficult to modify.

My previous employer checked me out on the web before hiring me, as did a woman I met on match.com. Fortunately I “passed” whatever tests they were giving me. This shows, however, how much my online presence can affect my life.

Link: http://www.computerworld.com/…
(via Lifehacker)

Ever wondered about the success rate of spam? Researchers hijacked a botnet and used it to distribute millions of spam email messages. The response rate was 1 per 12,500,000 emails sent. (By the way, what they did was illegal, even though it was in the name of research.)

Link: http://www.techradar.com/…
(via digg)

We’re all familiar with CAPTCHAs, those weird pictures with distorted numbers and letters that you have to copy when submitting an online form. They’re designed to ensure that a human, rather than a computer, is the one doing the submitting. So what’s honest spammer to do? Simple, just hire cheap labor.

Link: http://blogs.zdnet.com/…
(via Slashdot)