Southern Bread » internet

Firefox – Tab Effect

Dave — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 09:36:00 +0000

I love Firefox. If you don’t use it as your main browser then you should. One of the coolest things about it is the ability to add extensions to it, and the community of extension creators that has built up around it over the years. I found a rockin extension on digg yesterday called Tab-Effect. It adds that extra little bit of eye candy that we all crave. It animates transitioning between tabs sort of like Vista and OSX. Unfortunately it’s Windows-only for now, but I’m sure that will change. Grab it here.

Screenshot:

Sites and Sounds

Dave — Wed, 10 May 2006 11:14:00 +0000

I can’t stand websites with sound. It has got to be the scourge of the
world wide web. Nothing is more annoying than checking your e-mail
after the kids have gone to bed and someone links you to a site that
has sound. It’s inevitable that you are going to have the PC speakers
cranked inadvertently. I can deal with some background ambient noise
to give some mood to a site, but not when it cranks into a full blown
rock song as soon as the page loads at 11:30 at night when the house is
dead quiet. I’m going to have to start keeping an extra pair of
underwear by the computer.

A Personal Warning

Dave — Thu, 04 May 2006 08:40:00 +0000

I have been seeing a lot lately about myspace.com.
You may have heard of it. It’s a social networking site where people
can chat, share photos, and communicate with other myspace users
easily. It has also become a major hangout for child predators. It’s
become so bad that it has caused Microsoft to hire a full time Chief
Security Officer for myspace.com who was formerly a U.S. Prosecuter
chasing down child predators. Please be sure to scrutinize your
children’s online activities. Especially if they use these social
networking sites like myspace.com. It’s not just viruses any
more. The threats to our kids online are real. Here is a recent
article by InformationWeek that goes into some detail about myspace and
some things to watch for:

href="http://www.informationweek.com/shared/printableArticle.jhtml?articleID=187001704">http://www.informationweek.com/shared/printableArticle.jhtml?articleID=187001704

The most important thing is that your kids know that talking to
strangers on the internet is just as bad as talking to strangers on the
street. You never know what information they could glean about you
from an offhand comment. The other thing is that kids should NEVER
give out any personal information on the internet. Sites like myspace
make it waaay to easy to give out personal info and most kids don’t
have the forethought to see that it could be a bad idea to give out
there cell phone number to their myspace “friends” or something like
that. If your kid has a computer in their room and their own cell
phone, it’s time to check it out and see exactly what they are
doing online.

Internet P0rn Domain Cancelled

Dave — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 09:54:00 +0000

ICANN(the group that manages the top level internet domains) has once
again scrapped plans for a separate domain just for pornography web
sites. It would be something like .xxx instead of them using the .com
namespace. This is actually a deceptive issue. If you look at it from
one direction it looks like a very good idea. You create a separate
top-level domain called .xxx so that all the pornography websites would be
easily identifiable and easy to filter out. As a system administrator
that would be great because I could just put one filter in the firewall to
block any website with a .xxx domain and my job would be done.

But as usual the reality is not so simple. For one, there is no way to
require adult websites to take a certain domain. I could go right now and
register sector62.org even though I am not a non-profit organization.
Nobody is going to stop me and nobody really cares. Most people try to
adhere to the .org(non-profit), .com(commercial), .net(ISP) style but
there is no actual way to require people to do this. What would almost
certainly happen is that current adult site owners would just double-register
their current site on both top-level domains. So the owner of
pornsite.com would just go and register his site as pornsite.xxx also so
that both names point to his site and that gets us no where.

The “religious right” is getting all kinds of bad press, as usual, for
putting pressure on ICANN to scrap the .xxx idea but their position is
never spelled out in any of the articles I read on this subject. Their
position is that to create an entire top-level domain for one industry
does more to legitamize that industry than anything else, no matter what
industry it is. When you say that .gov(government) and .mil(military) are
on the same level with .xxx(porn) that is just crazy. Pornography on the
internet is a big enough problem already without giving it defacto
legitimacy within the internet structure.

You are seeing this cached out everywhere as a nail in the coffin of
ICANN and a victory for the religious right. That is just a bunch of
garbage. I applaude ICANN for not getting involved in such a fiasco when
they themselves know that the desired outcome will be the exact opposite
of what these senators that are pushing for it think it will be. Don’t be
fooled by the media. A separate .xxx domain is a very bad idea.