Category: The Web Sucks

Local musician Craig Taubman recently posted an amusing kosher pickle animation on his website. If LAUNCHcast had an absurd category for music, I’d be sure to rate it 100 so I could hear the music like the Kosher Pickle song every day.

Excellent reading for web engineers: How to consume RSS safely. Mark lists 10 HTML elements that must be stripped to safely display HTML from an RSS feed. He mentions stripping style attributes from RSS, but fails to mention an even more imporant set of attributes: the JavaScript event attributes. Sure, you’ll want to leave <img> […]

I had a chuckle when I read these two bullet points in the Mozilla Firebird 0.6 Known Issues release notes: Form auto-complete is still an unstable feature and may lead to crashes. Followed immediately by: Disabling of form auto-completion is not working. Makes me wonder why I’d ever consider using something other than the World’s […]

Those wacky virus people have done it again. The big@boss.com virus (W32.Sobig.A@mm) has mutated into the support@microsoft.com virus (W32.Sobig.B@mm). Ariella and I were chatting about this over lunch. She suggested that if the government simply bought the rights to distribute Norton Antivirus and legislated that it be installed on all computers, we could do the […]

A superb idea today from Yahoo! alumnus Mikel Maron: Reactive Links. Anytime someone click-thrus on these redirect links, the service records that action… more active links could be big and red and quiet links could small and blue, or whatever you like. These links change their character depending on their usage. [Brain Off] It reminds […]

We’re thinking about buying a Mac. One of the things that has been holding us up is lack of support for Hebrew software. Until Mac OS X 10.2 was released, the operating system didn’t even offer native support for Hebrew. However, we’re still waiting for some important applications (such as NisusWriter) to come out with […]

I’ve gotten about 5 or 6 copies of this spam message today: Date: Mon, 5 May 2003 20:28:48 -0700 From: Administrator <Admin@CorporateKiller.com> To: <admin@r…> Subject: Corporate Killer COOL Hello! you must invest money in http://www.corporatekiller.com/ This good!!! Very good! Admin of http://www.corporatekiller.com/ After such a persuasive argument, I’d be intersted in making an investment. Corporate […]

I wrote back in March about the fact that Yahoo! is hiring and wondered aloud if that means that the tech economy is starting to recover. I just got an email from a headhunter looking to hire a Senior Software Engineer in Menlo Park, CA. We are seeking an experienced software engineer to build web […]

I got this email today, and I almost believed it. It’s a typical http://user:password@hostname/ trick. In this case, the user is tricked into thinking that http://www.paypal.com:secure-verifyaccount968ktz642@p9.da.ru/ is a PayPal URL when in fact it’s actually a website served up by http://p9.da.ru/ Here’s the full source of the email message: Return-Path: <anonymous@m1.netfirms.com> Received: from m1.netfirms.com (m1.netfirms.com […]

Got this email from Tellme today: Date: Thu, 3 Apr 2003 01:10:11 -0800 (PST) From: Tellme Studio <developer@tellme.com> To: michael@… Subject: Tellme Studio program change VoiceXML Developer, Tellme has made many investments in VoiceXML over the past four years. One of these investments was in the Extensions program, with the goal of making VoiceXML a […]