Chad's News

All that time in medical school wasted…

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

Should you ever get into trouble with the MPAA or RIAA for illegally downloading copyrighted movies/music, the linked article will be very helpful.

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

Yesterday (May 3rd) was the 30th anniversary of the first internet spam message. The linked article has the exact text of the message. Interestingly, an interview with the message’s author reveals that it was very successful.

Link: http://tech.yahoo.com/…
(via Neatorama)

You’ve seen CAPTCHAs, even if you’re not familiar with the word. They’re those pictures with distorted words that you have to enter when registering or posting on some sites. It’s supposed to ensure that it’s a real, live human performing the input, instead of some sort of ‘bot. Well, the ‘bots are getting good at reading CAPTCHAs—so good that they can average one valid guess per minute on Windows Live Hotmail. This makes CAPTCHAs fairly useless, and I expect to see them get phased out for something better (whatever that may be). Chad’s News uses an arithmetic entry for anonymous comment submission, but even this has not stopped some spammers.

Link: http://arstechnica.com/…

System administrators, as well as anyone who understands how email works, will appreciate the linked story where a network admin had to figure out why emails would bounce if the recipient was more than 500 miles away. And in this case, statisticians turned out to be quite useful. (Note that he has taken some literary license with the story, as described in the FAQ, but the basic facts are correct.)

Link: http://www.ibiblio.org/…
(via User Friendly)

Back in the early days of the web, this man bought the pizza.com domain on a bit of a lark. He recently sold it for $2.6 million, and says he wishes he’d had the foresight to buy more domains when they were still available.

Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/…

The linked article gives a good explanation of how JavaScript negatively affects one’s web browsing experience. I know that for me, heavily scripted sites such as digg.com significantly slow down my computer. Not only do they prevent the browser from multitasking effectively, but they peg my CPU at 100%. (Note: the WebKit product discussed in the article is part of Apple’s Safari browser.)

Link: http://arstechnica.com/…

Many companies send out bulk email with a bogus reply address, and it’s not unusual for that reply address to be <something>@DoNotReply.com. It turns out that someone actually owns the DoNotReply.com domain, and he gets some interesting stuff in his inbox—stuff that he posts on his website at www.DoNotReply.com.

Link: http://blog.washingtonpost.com/…
(via Slashdot)

The linked site converts your email address into an image file, which you can use in place of your email address, to keep spammers from harvesting it. On the downside, legitimate users can’t click on it to open a new message; rather, they have to type it in. The quick and easy method of obfuscating email addresses is to encode them as HTML character entities. Probably the best method, however, is to set up a submission form on your website–but this can’t be used in every situation where you want to publish your email address.

Link: http://www.spam-proof-email-generator.com/

The linked article has some statistics on just how much information is collected by Yahoo!, Google, etc on our browsing habits. Very sobering. I run all of my email through Google, which means I can’t complain if they use it to compile statistics.

Link: http://arstechnica.com/…

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file transfer protocol that was used early on to distribute Linux kernel builds. It’s great for quickly distributing large files when you don’t have much server bandwidth. In recent years, however, the protocol has become synonymous with illegal file-sharing of movies and music. So it’s really good to see BitTorrent being used as it was originally intended—in the linked article a Dutch university uses BitTorrent to push Windows updates out to 6500 PCs. Where they originally needed 22 servers and 4 days to distribute the updates, now they only need 2 servers and less than 4 hours. BitTorrent has saved them a lot of time and money.

Link: http://torrentfreak.com/…
(via Ars Technica)

I’m guessing that the web developer community, like me, is excited to hear that IE8 will pass the Acid2 test. But there has been concern expressed about the various “modes” that IE8 will support.

The basic problem is that web developers write their code to work around (or take advantage of) bugs in the various IE versions. When Microsoft fixes these bugs in subsequent releases, the effect may be to break existing sites. And in the case of Internet Explorer, we could be talking about breaking millions of sites. Web browsers, including non-Microsoft ones, have dealt with this via a method known as doctype switching, where the browser will render the page in one of three modes (quirks, standards, and super-standards) depending upon the DOCTYPE value. When developing IE8, however, Microsoft realized that doctype switching was insufficient for their purposes. Assuming that each new browser release would have unique bugs and quirks, they needed some way of informing future releases of IE that the web page had been coded against a specific version. So they came up with a new method that uses a META tag to determine which browser mode to use.

The META tag, which is described in the linked article, will specify the highest browser version against which the web page was coded. Thus if you set it to IE8, for example, when IE9 (or IE10, or IE11) comes out, you can be assured that your page will still be rendered as if the browser were IE8. Each subsequent version of IE will be capable of rendering the older versions with all their bugs, based on the META tag. If the META tag does not exist, then the current IE7 doctype switching method will be used.

Link: http://arstechnica.com/…

Update: After a significant amount of web community uproar, Microsoft has changed its mind and decided to use the latest standards mode by default. Thus IE7′s standard mode is no longer the default.