Category Archives: Internet

NoFollow not working?

Nofollow attributes were added to the web in 2005, with major search engines and blog/CMS vendors providing support.

I find it interesting that it clearly hasn’t stopped comment spammers, who continue to bombard blogs. I can only assume they don’t care about Pagerank etc, but just want their links to be seen by humans, though I would have assumed most blog owners use spam detection of some kind, and most spam comments which do make it through are unlikely to get clicked on.

But that’s always been the issue with automated spam. Only a tiny number have to be acted upon to make them profitable.

Hotmail/MS web weirdness

Seeing weird behaviour on Marita and Justine’s PCs: trying to access Hotmail, and most other Microsoft web sites, the browser will divert to login.live.com, but not be able to render the page. It appears to load much or all of the data, but never completes.

It’s apparently been doing this for about a week, on both PCs, using a variety of browsers installed on them, including IE9, Firefox 3 and 5 and Chrome — so presumably not a cache problem.

It’s affecting hotmail, microsoft.com, msn.com (which in Australia redirects to iat.ninemsn.com.au/tickler ), even support.microsoft.com. It seems the common ground is they all use live.com/Passport for authentication.

However if you use IE’s Help / Online Support option, it does get to the relevant page. I wonder if that bypasses the authentication stage.

Using View Source, it appears the pages partially load, but do not complete, so do not render completely (eg ninemsn.com.au), or at all in some cases (hotmail.com). Or on some sites (including this blog) it loads the page, but chokes on other content (such as the addthis.com sharing widget).

One PC is running Vista, one XP. Both have the latest patches. One has MS Security Essentials, the other AVG.

They both use the same connection via a router and modem, but other devices (such as a phone browsing via wifi and the same router/modem) don’t have the issue.

Tried turning off the firewall. No luck. Tried removing all of last week’s Windows patches. No luck.

The net connection is okay. A speed test says line speed is 4.75 Mbps.

The affected web sites are fine at my place.

Anybody seeing the same? Any ideas of things to try?

Update 9:05pm. Tried bypassing the wireless router in favour of the modem. It now all works. So it’s some weird-arse setting on the router. Investigations continue.

Update 9:30pm. Would you believe rebooting the modem fixed it? Blargh! This is why they always suggest to turn things off then on again.

Google Apps to support last two browser releases

Interesting: Google Apps has stated they will support the last major version, and the second-last of web browsers.

As of August 1st, we will discontinue support for the following browsers and their predecessors: Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 7, and Safari 3.

I suppose IE6 was around for so long that it’s easy to think of IE7 as being “new”. But in fact it’s five years old this year (official release October 2006), and was officially superseded two years ago.

Hopefully all those corporates who dragged their heels on IE6 can move a little faster off IE7.

Google Chrome targeted by Malware

Interesting piece by Ed Bott: Malware authors target Google Chrome (on Windows).

Sounds similar to these kinds of fake Windows anti-virus scans which you see around the place, and try to convince you to click and download an executable which will supposedly clean up your PC:

Fake anti-virus check in Google Chrome

This type of thing reinforces the fact that no browser/platform is safe from malware, and that it’s important not to regularly run your account with Admin privileges on your PC.

Personally I reckon it wouldn’t hurt to have a setting in Windows (and other operating systems) that prevents running executables from any directory where the current (non-Admin user) has write-permissions, eg only letting them run programs that have been installed by an Administrator.

Does any OS offer something like that at the moment?

How not to run a corporate web site

I’ve noticed that Transport For London do this irritating thing: they move (“archive”) their corporate media releases content each month.

So this:
http://www.tfl.gov.uk/corporate/media/newscentre/19678.aspx

— which has been quoted widely as the press release for the Royal Wedding Oyster Card, for instance on the popular Going Underground blog — gets moved to:

http://www.tfl.gov.uk/corporate/media/newscentre/archive/19678.aspx

The old link returns a 404.

WHY? It just seems utterly pointless.

The other thing they do is fail to show, or even link to pictures on their media release pages, even in cases like this where the picture is of prime interest, as the story is “Mayor unveils design of the royal wedding Oyster card”. Instead they make you ring the TFL press office.

Perhaps they haven’t noted the rise of social media, where the messages you put out can be spread by bloggers, Tweeters, Facebookers — none of whom will have the time or motivation to ring your press office to get hold of a photo.

If you hide the official information too much, people will end up relying on the unofficial information out there. Less detail, less reliability, and you’ve got less control of the message you want to put out.

Seems an odd way of doing things in the 21st century.

(I only had this rant because I was looking for a picture of the special Royal Wedding Oyster Card.)

Horde access keys

Beware of Horde’s IMP webmail client and its access/shortcut keys.

One that’s caught me is that if new email composition is set to be in a separate window, and access keys are on, then Alt-F4 (which in Windows is normally the equivalent of Close) is pressed, instead of saving the email to Drafts, or cancelling the email, it sends it.

I’m a common user of Alt-F4, which means several times I’ve thought I was cancelling the email, but instead it’s sent it.

Another is Alt-D for Delete (the current message). On many browsers this predates Ctrl-L to go to the address window, and while I know I should learn Ctrl-L, I still commonly press Alt-D. If Horde is configured to not even put the message into the Trash, carelessly pressing Alt-D will zap the message forever more, no trace left.

To prevent these happening again, I’ve now turned off Access keys: Options / Global options / Display Options / Should access keys be defined for most links?

Advertisers impersonating Facebook ON Facebook

This “Mailbook” advert appeared on Scrabble, just below the normal Facebook toolbar.

"Mailbook" ad seen on Facebook

Seems dodgy to me. It’s a quite misleading way to try and get you to click on the ad.

Surprised Facebook would allow something that appears so similar to their own navigation.

Maybe they haven’t spotted it yet. I wonder if the icons are pixel-for-pixel copies?

Which browser?

I was taking a quick look at the browser stats on my personal site for February:

MS Internet Explorer 31.4 %
Mozilla 19.5 %
Firefox 18.9 %
Google Chrome 10.9 %
Unknown 8.7 %
Safari 6.3 %
Opera 0.9 %
IPhone (PDA/Phone browser) 0.7 %
Android browser (PDA/Phone browser) 0.5 %
NetNewsWire (RSS Reader) 0.4 %
Others 1.4 %

The detailed breakdown tells me that the most popular MSIE is version 8, with 13.7%. Then MSIE6 with 11.3%, and MSIE7 with 6%. Virtually nobody’s using MSIE9, with 0.2%. Worryingly there are a handful of hits from other older MSIE versions, although they’re all at 0%: versions 5.5, 5.01, 5.0, 4.01, 3.02 and would you believe it 2.0 all get a mention.

In Firefox land the biggest is version 3.6.13, with 13.2%, followed by a few on version 4.0, and other variations of 3.

Most of the Chrome users are on the current version 9.

There were a small number of hits (all less than 0.1%) from such rare beasts as SeaMonkey, Blackberry, Nokia browser, and the various versions of Netscape — everything from version 0.91 (!) up to 8.1. A bunch of various RSS readers are also in there.

But the real mystery is the figure of 19.5% for Mozilla. What does it mean in this context? Is it a munged reading for more Firefox browsers, a generic compatibility claim from various unidentified browsers, or something else? The detailed breakdown doesn’t tell me anything.

GMail irritation #2

I love GMail, and this error probably seemed like a good idea when they coded it…

Gmail error

…but it’s just irritating.

Please trust me. I know what I’m doing. I know I’m replying to something in the Trash. I don’t care if the sent copy isn’t saved… invariably it’s going to an email list which I have no interest in archiving for myself when it’s stored on Yahoo’s servers or whatever.

So I don’t need this error popping up unpredictably multiple times to interrupt me, when I’ve seen it hundreds of times before.

In fact despite the wording, I didn’t save the message. GMail auto-saved it for me.

And when I send the email, just to cap it off, I get this:

Gmail error

1. These shouldn’t even be Errors. They should be Warnings.

2. How about an option to turn these warnings off, once and for all?

Amusing comment spam

Amusing comment spam left on my personal blog:

Spammers leave spam comments in the belief that they will gain better search engine rankings and traffic by building as many links to their websites as possible. Spammers often employ bots or other automated systems to look for mortgage blog and website and leave self serving promotional comments links..Spam is a numbers game so if spammers can send automated spam to large numbers of websites for very little money so even if they convert a small percentage of the sites they spam they can make a profit..Spammers will also leave links to their websites in an attempt to push link juice or Google Juice to their websites but most mortgage websites and blogs add a rel nofollow tag to prevent the passing of pagerank or link juice.

And this one, from a user apparently who signed him/herself “penis enlargement”.

It’s so hard to get backlinks these days, honestly i need a backlink by comments on your blog / forums or guestbook to make my website appear in search engine. I am getting desperate Now! I know you’ll laugh while reading this comment !!! Here is my website penis enlargement [url deleted] I know my comments do not relate to the topic, but PLEASE HELP ME!! APPROVING MY COMMENT!
Regards: PoormanBH2011

Yeah right. Like I’m going to approve that.

BTW, both were caught correctly by Akismet.

IP addresses run out

At 9:30 US EST (14:30 GMT) today, the official announcement that IPv4 addresses have run out is expected. It’ll be webcast live from Miami.

On Thursday, 3 February 2011, at 9:30 AM Eastern Standard Time (EST) [14:30 UTC /GMT], the Number Resource Organization (NRO), along with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the Internet Society (ISOC) and the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) will be holding a ceremony and press conference to make a significant announcement and to discuss the global transition to the next generation of Internet addresses.

Update Friday:

The Number Resource Organization (NRO) announced today that the free pool of available IPv4 addresses is now fully depleted. On Monday, January 31, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) allocated two blocks of IPv4 address space to APNIC, the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) for the Asia Pacific region, which triggered a global policy to allocate the remaining IANA pool equally between the five RIRs. Today IANA allocated those blocks. This means that there are no longer any IPv4 addresses available for allocation from the IANA to the five RIRs.

— Free Pool of IPv4 Address Space Depleted

Email startup times

Gmail vs ThunderbirdA quick timing test on my main home workhorse computer, which isn’t the fastest in the world, but isn’t the slowest either. (Windows 7, Athlon 64 X2 dual core 4400+ 2300 Mhz, 3 Gb RAM, on a fast ADSL2+ net connection.)

Having started Windows and logged onto a clean desktop:

  • Start Chrome with GMail set as the home page: 8.5 seconds to ready
  • Start Thunderbird: 11.6 seconds to ready

No wonder people are heading into the cloud.

Subsequent timings (without a reboot, so some things may be cached, eg later in a session when you’ve closed your email and you want to go back in):

  • Chrome with GMail: 3.4 seconds
  • Thunderbird: 3.1 seconds

Interesting.