My second political entry in a row, oh my god!
So, it's all about this thing: Deep Packet Inspection. Quoting from Torrentfreak:
An innocuous sounding name for a technology that basically means ‘Internet monitoring’. Deep packet inspection is a technology that some companies are salivating over, including advertisers and entertainment lobby groups like the MPAA. With it, their dreams can come true, some of them anyway.
Enough said, no?
Funny, yesterday Tom and me were talking about the impossibility of creating a webpage that doesn't log a thing, thus being the only page on the internet that doesn't invade your privacy. But apparently the capital city of my country, Brussels, decided there is still too much privacy, by signing an agreement with the most privacy invading country in the world: the United States of America, you might have heard of it.
This agreement currently affects only people in Great Britain, but I wouldn't be too surprised if the whole European Union is affected too, soon enough. The actual law in short:
American authorities will be able to obtain greater access to private information such as credit card transactions, internet browsing habits and travel histories of people in Britain under a deal being finalised by European Union officials.
According to the agreement, it's only accessible if you are handling with a specific purpose, but that doesn't mean shit. They will still search through all your data you have generated in their logs.
Original article: link
If you ever used Google AdSense or an other advertising company that allows you to modify the colours/layout of your advertisement, you may have noticed that they automatically adjust the colour of the text if the background doesn't provide enough contrast. This is a method these companies use to make sure no one makes their advertisement blocks invisible, like a white zone on which people can accidentally click.
I wondered how they did this, and did my own little experiment. It turned out quite different than I had in mind, but its still a fun tool. Contrast reader uses Javascript to check the difference in colour and gives you a rating between 0 and 765. The closer you are to zero, the harder your text is to read. Please don't mind the text ratings I added, it could be it gives your text a "bad" but it can still be perfectly readable.
Chances are you already have heard of this since it's all over RandomBase already but in case you didn't: we have started our own free subdomain service, named va.my. The fun thing is, it's easy to remember and it is just like any second level tld, examples are .co.uk and .co.jp. The difference with the other TLD's is: ours is completely free. So, RandomBase > ICANN.
Now go register your free subdomain to prevent whining about someone else taking yours before you could.
It's comparing apples to oranges, I know. But still, this is quite interesting. When you look at the PHP functions list, you see three filled columns. I took the time to count it all (copy, paste in document, count lines) and got to the result of... 5250. That's right, PHP has 5250 documented functions.
Now, let's take a look at the Perl function list. I could have counted this one almost without a text editor, 209 functions.
So, can PHP do a lot more than Perl? Hell no, Perl was smart enough to divide its detailed functions into modules and extensions. PHP has extensions too (a lot of them are included in that 5250, I know), but a lot of them come with the distribution already.
An example: PHP has the built-in function "parse_url()", I'm not kidding. If anyone ever asks me what I believe is the single most useless function in PHP, it's parse_url(). You're not learning anyone to code by spoon-feeding this junk, in Perl you have to write your own functions atleast.
I do agree that writing a complex script is a lot less work in PHP than it is in Perl, but I think they really could miss some of the functions they have now...
Companies like Norton and McAfee charge a hell lot of money for software that makes sure your computer is unstable, without performance, ruins your experience whenever you are trying a new application or just blocks you out the moment you try to uninstall it. These companies have the nerve of naming things w32.evilthing.worm or something while their own piece of junk is probably more harmful then the things they attempt to remove.
Let's face it, the software the average computer user buys to "protect" his/her computer is way too primitive and resource demanding. They are known to be full of bugs, extremely easy to hide from as a piece of malware, and best of all: you can't control shit about them (Norton has maybe twenty configuration options, try making it to not start up when Windows does).
But there are more reasons I don't have their junk products: I just don't need it. When I receive a mail from this beautiful Polish lady that would love to chat with me, through her very own chat client, which is of course included as chat.exe, I realise she is just not right for me. Or when someone advices me to go back to Internet Explorer 4 because it has more advanced features, I might question that persons intelligence (for two reasons: recommending Internet Explorer and recommending an older version).
After that, there are still two methods on not getting annoyed by malware or attacks. A good method I use is just misconfiguring your router in such a way it doesn't accept any reverse connections but HTTP and some other protocols. The second method is the one I'd recommend to everyone: try not to make too much enemies, because not all virus mails you get are unsolicited spam mails...
I have finished a new project of RandomBase, movStream.com. This cute little search engine can find direct music links, streaming tv shows and movies. I hope to add eBooks and maybe even torrents soon, but am already quite satisfied with the way it works now.
As you might notice, the domain name suggests a more "peekvid"-like approach, but for a number of reasons we didn't continue with this plan. I hope however, to start some new websites on subdomains, like familyguy.movstream.com and add Family Guy streams here. These subsites would focus on the most popular shows only probally, or what'd you expect?
Yes, it's awesome, but only in the hands of a qualified coder.
AJAX (asynchronous Javascript and XML) is a technology that allows the client (browser) to fetch a webpage or file without having to reload the page. That's it, it's that simple (my IT teacher will kill me though for that explanation). The major advantage of AJAX is clear: way more advanced applications from your browser, good example is Gmail: it barely loads and new page but still manages to show all your mails, smoothly. The fun thing about Gmail is it actually lets 90% of the parsing of data to you, all they have to send is some raw data (XML) and some Javascript, and once put together you get a neat interface to webmail.
That's one advantage, but the second advantage is bandwith. This is and will always be an issue for enormous websites (ever noticed how Google isn't even xhtml valid?), and AJAX can save you some bandwith. Instead of sending a complete interface every time with the content, why not make the content dynamically added and just send the interface first? You can save some kilobytes by just having to send the content each time a hyperlink is clicked. Now even "static" HTML pages can act like a PHP page that uses include().
There is also a disadvantage (what'd you expect?): search engines just can't read the content that is dynamically triggered. This can be solved by coding two versions of your page, but this takes longer and no one likes to spend hours on duplicating their own code, eh?
Ever noticed how many websites you try to visit from the frontpage of Digg are down or load very slowly? This isn't coincidence of course: you're one of the thousands and thousands of visitors to that site in an extremely short amount of time.
The problem about some sites that get on Digg frontpage is that they're on shared hosting, and once their company figures they're making the server unstable: suspend it.
RandomBase once got (for whatever reason, but it sure helped) somewhere high on Stumbleupon and the result can still be seen on our homepage, the second line under statistics:
Most users ever online was 424 on 03/16/08.
That's a lot more than our 30 - 50 average we have throughout a normal evening. Luckily we didn't get suspended (that was only later after RandomBase started growing like mad) by our shared hosting provider but I received a very threatening mail that night... If we made it for some reason on Digg homepage on 3 march, then RandomBase wouldn't exist anymore, at that time we couldn't afford a dedicated server like we have one now, and losers as we are, wouldn't have tried continuing this project.
Finally the antispam industry came up with something working, instead of creating an unreadable image with words that go all over the place, create something that only humans can recognize. The most famous example are "The Rapidshare cats". A poll on our homepage showed about 80% hated them, but they have no idea what poor RapidShare is going through with the captcha crackers.
A common question is "why not just add two pictures, cat and dog, and make the human user select which one?". Well, the answer is simple: if spammers have a success rate over 5%, they consider it to being profitable. So, that's why they combined it with the old textbased captcha.
Personally, I believe the idea is awesome, but the realisation could have been done better and as usual: less annoying for the end user. Maybe they should try to implement some sort of rotating system showing different types of captcha's all the time?