Every year, I tell myself that I’m going to make an awesome April Fools’ version of my blog, and every year I forget about it until the last minute. I remember one year, I was planning on putting sponsors all over my website. That was a long time ago, and in retrospect, it’s a lame idea. A lot of April Fools’ ideas are pretty lame, but I guess it mainly depends on how you view April 1st. For instance, I find it mildly funny that xkcd points you to Questionable Content, while Questionable Content links to Dinosaur Comics, and Dinosaur Comics links back to xkcd. I also find it funny that the Telegraph reported on flying penguins, and Google and Virgin teamed up to establish a colony on Mars (complete with a questionnaire).
Even better is YouTube RickRolling everyone who clicked on a featured video on the front page (on a related note, GameFAQs has a RickRoll poll on the front page), or College Humor getting bought by some MySpace diva. (Unfortunately, they took that down before I was able to get a screenshot and Google’s cached version is just a few hours off.)
As with every April Fools’ Day, there’s going to be funny stuff, not-so-funny stuff, and stuff that’s just weird. And then there’s stuff like Dextre the Magnificent. Actually, that did make me laugh. In a nerdy sort of way. You know, with the snort and requisite pushing up of the glasses.
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The Firefox web browser is well-known for its memory leak problems. If you leave it open for a long enough time, it can take up as much as 200 MB of memory, even if you’re not actively using it. As an experiment, I opened up both Firefox and Internet Explorer and looked at the memory consumption of both when they had been open for a very short amount of time. The results are fairly interesting. Firefox was taking up almost five times as much RAM as Internet Explorer. And considering that Firefox was taking up more than 100 MB during my browsing session a short while earlier, it’s not inconceivable that the ratio would have gone up over time. Here’s the screenshot:
Granted, I may have a few extensions enabled on Firefox that IE doesn’t have, but that doesn’t help the memory leak problem. Or the incredibly slow startup time. Get working on this, Mozilla! Or I may be forced to switch to Opera.
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You know what I really hate? Those annoying scripts some people use on their websites to somehow prevent copyright infringement by either removing your right-click functionality and replacing it with a message along the lines of “No can click right! Copy is righted, please!” or forbidding you to copy without a message. Admittedly, the last is nicer and a bit surprising (I didn’t even know it was possible), but it’s still irritating. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to select text and copy it. Perhaps you’re quoting from a site, or maybe you just want to copy a hard-to-spell word or name to search for in Wikipedia or Google. I do the latter quite a lot, just because it’s easier to copy a name than try to remember how it’s spelled while in another browser tab.
But it’s not just the annoyances that make this practice silly. It’s the fact that it’s so easily subverted. Much like car ignitions and government encryption, you can get around the anti-right-click with a minimum of technical know-how. For most, simply using a keyboard shortcut to copy (Ctrl+C for Windows, Cmd+C for Mac) will get you the goods. But fancier scripts can prevent even that from working. In such a case, you can easily view the web page’s source code in any major browser and copy text from there. In Firefox, there are three ways to do this: right-click on the page and select “View Page Source”, select “Page Source” from the View menu, or simply press Ctrl+U (Cmd+U on Mac) on the keyboard. The process is pretty much the same in Internet Explorer. If you use Opera, I can’t help you. I’m not about to install another browser just to see how you can view the page source code. Tough noogies.
There may be ways to prevent viewing the source code entirely, but I’ve never heard of any such thing, and anyone who would be that paranoid about people copying their content probably doesn’t have a web site at all.
In short, preventing people from right-clicking or copying from a web page is irritating and pointless, especially when you consider that a determined thief could just use their eyes to copy content into a text document…alas, nature has once again bested technology. Perhaps one day, web site owners will be able to prevent even the eyes from copying their content. Won’t that be a rather ironic day…
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I was just recently introduced to what may or may not be a masterful satire article on Adequacy.org, entitled “Is your Son a Computer Hacker?” If it’s satire, it’s awesome. If it’s real, it’s disturbing. Either way, it makes for a good read.
Basically, the article is written by a father who found out that his son was a computer hacker. He lists out 10 warning signs.
- Has your son asked you to switch ISPs? - Anything other than AOL is for hackers only.
- Are you finding programs on your computer that you don’t remember installing? - Hacker programs include Comet Cursor, Bonzi Buddy, and Flash.
- Has your child asked for new hardware? - If your son wants a processor from AMD, he’s a hacker.
- Does your child read hacking manuals? - “Programming with Perl” by Timothy O’Reilly is out.
- How much time does your child spend using the computer each day? - If your son spends more than 30 minutes online, he’s a hacker and he’s trying to DOS someone’s computer (seriously).
- Does your son use Quake? - Quake is an online virtual reality used by hackers. Hackers will tell you that it’s just a game.
- Is your son becoming argumentative and surly in his social behaviour? - The Internet has that effect on people.
- Is your son obsessed with “Lunix”? - Lunix is an illegal hacker operating system invented by the Soviets.
- Has your son radically changed his appearance? - Hackers dress in bright, day-glo colors, complete with glow-sticks and pacifier necklaces.
- Is your son struggling academically? - It may be due to computer radiation. And Otaku.
I’m reasonably certain the entire site is satire (along the lines of Landover Baptist), but if anyone knows for sure, feel free to let me know.
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This is a most tech rant, so some of you probably won’t care about it at all. But it’s also a privacy rights rant, so I suppose there’s something for everyone. I might even mention kittens. All right, I just did. Moving on…
There’s a service on the Internet called Whois. You can think of it like the phone book for the Internet. Basically, it stores the registration data for owners of millions of web domains (like mine). This can be a very useful tool for various reasons. Since it lists things like phone numbers and addresses for domain owners, it can be useful for tracking down pirates, spammers, and other problem-causing website owners. The IP address side of Whois has helped me many times identify the people who spam my blog so I could report them to their Internet service provider.
But there are some out there who want to do away with Whois entirely. They call themselves privacy advocates, but I have a feeling most of them just don’t like the idea of the law being able to track them down for doing illegal things. Privacy advocates can be like that sometimes. Anyways, the whole thing annoys me. A large group of these people are pushing to remove the Whois requirements placed on domain registrars (the companies you pay to get a .com, .net, .whatever) so people don’t have to put their contact info on a publicly accessible database. This will make it much harder to find the owners of illegal websites, as you can no doubt guess. What torrent site owner is really going to put his name and phone number on the Internet if he doesn’t have to?
Continue reading ‘Internet privacy’
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