a1 a1 fb

To no one’s surprise, I look at my search referrers quite often. Just now I saw someone search for “a1 a1 fb” and actually click on one of the pages I’ve written on the subject.

I thought this was interesting. I’ll leave the meaning of “a1 a1 fb” undisclosed at this point in time. But it is pretty arcane. Whoever searched on this, I applaud you!

Filters everywhere

Finally a clear article describing what NBC wants from Apple:

Microsoft May Build A Copyright Cop Into Every Zune

I really like the last bit:

Mr. Perrette said NBC understands the potential resistance. “In the short term, this will not win us a lot of friends,” he said. “In the long term, the consumer wants there to be quality premium-produced content, and in order for that to continue to be a viable business, there needs to be significant protection around it.”

I have some advice for NBC to ensure their success:

1. Stop giving away their content for free (Over the air).
2. Screw their customers (Filters everywhere).
3. Profit.

Chain Of Trust

The newest scam in the certificate business is EV SSL (Extended Validation Secure Sockets Layer) certificates. If you pay more money, then you get a more “secure” certificate.

But the reality is the certificate is no more secure then any other. All you get is a green tinted tool bar in the web browser. You only get this green tinted tool bar if your browser publisher decides to implement this feature.

This is completely backwards.

The contents of an SSL certificate is really important, it needs to be presented to the user. All web browsers I have used have given the option for the user to view the certificate and this is good. But we need more. I think the chain of trust should be displayed above the web page every time a certificate is accepted by the browser. This section should not be removable or modifiable. No more “trusting” https. No need to buy overpriced certificates.

URL shortening services are a scourge on the web

I don’t understand the need for services such as tinyurl and others like them. They obfuscate links. I pretty much refuse to use them, either as a consumer or a producer.

They seems to have been started because emailing links to web pages caused a lot of problems. Many email programs will insert line breaks on long lines of text. This will usually corrupt the URL.

But they are completely unnecessary in modern email clients. Now I see some forum moderators are demanding URLs to be shortened when posting content. Again, completely unnecessary because most forum software include tags to allow the naming of URLs.

MacBook Air

On the CoCoaDev mailing list it was revealed that the MacBook Air’s operating system has it’s symbols stripped. That is an interesting step to take. I can only assume it is because of the small(-sh) hard drive that the machine comes with.

Heck of a cold.

For the last half week I’ve been under the weather. So to speak. My daughter brought home a cold and I got it bad.
Just today, I am starting to feel good again. I’m sure my co-workers will appreciate that on Monday.