It would seems that some good does afterall come from the rampant paranoia in the United States. The recently created Department of Homeland Security, through it's mouth piece, [url=http://www.us-cert.gov/]CERT[/url] has recently made a recommendation that people consider alternate browsers to IE. It seems someone in the US government has finaly realized that the whole IE infrastructure is flawed and frequently rushed fixes from Microsoft are nothing more then bandaid solution for a dam that's about to burst (some may argue it has already burst). This the first time a US government agency went out and publically recommended an alternative to a Microsoft product (to the best of my knowledge), could it be that MS slush funds are not getting to the right hands and perhaps not enough of them? :) Ultimately, this is a good thing from just about all respects, first of all it'll hopefully convince people to switch to Mozilla, Opera, etc... which offer greater standards compliance, security and other neat feature...

A few years ago PHP developers decided to address a problem not their's to solve by implementing a configuration directive called safe_mode. To those unfamiliar with this wondrous invention, this setting is primarily intended to provide file access limits to prevent users from accessing files that do no belong to them. This supposedly should make it impossible to access files of other people in a shared server environment, a common operating environment for PHP where PHP runs as an Apache module and as such has read access to all files accessible by the webserver regardless of the owner. When enabled, safe_mode will perform a uid/gid (user id and group id) check on the file/directory to be accessed and compare it to the uid/gid of the script that is trying to access the file. If the two match then the file operation will proceed as normal and in all other cases it will fail. In theory this is a fairly simple hack to a problem that is not otherwise easily addressed without significant performance penalties suc...

Today I have discovered that Gmail (Google's E-mail service, to those living under a rock) had decided to increase their user base by allowing secondary (referred by existing members) to invite up to 3 of their friends to Gmail. The popularity of the service still seems high despite the privacy issues some people choose to be panicky about as my 3 invites were gone in a matter of minutes. Although Google was clearly not ready for the influx of the new users, since all of the people whom I sent the invites reported seeing an error message saying that the service is temporarily unavailable. This was further confirmed by few other people who got invites from other people. This however is not really the the most interesting thing. What is quite interesting is that 2 premier free e-mail (and pay?) providers, Yahoo and Hotmail (MS) have blocked Gmail invites. At first I was a little sceptical of this, despite the long thread on this topic on Slashdot, however when I sent one of my friends a Gmail invite to a Hotmai...

In recent days I've noticed some very strange referral URLs on my top referrals link list. A few sites who definitely have no links somehow appear to have sent me a noticeable amount of users. How is this possible you ask? Well, it seems someone had figured out that blogging software does not perform any validation on the referrals (such as check if the link in present on the sending site) and with trivial scripts generate fake hits that quite easily get said site to appear on the top referrals list. Blocking such things is quite difficult since the scammers fake genuine browser signatures and in some cases even setup dummy pages that have the link back to the original site. More over @ least one of those scammers seems to be using anonymous proxies to prevent IP filtering. Quite frankly outside of manual referral validation or a referral whitelist I see no fool proof way to prevent this from happening. Since I don't have the time or interest invest time into manual validation or creation of whitelists, I am...

Recently I had opportunity to obtain a Gmail account (thanks James). For those you living under a rock it's the latest fad as far as free e-mail is concerned from the same people who brought us Google. The biggest attraction of Gmail is the 1,000 megabyte storage box and saner(?) monetization model that will rely upon the same text ads you may have seen near Google's search results, rather then big bulky banners and/or popup variations. At this time the system is in beta stage, so to get an account you first must be invited by an existing member, but only some members can invite (I am not one of them, so don't bother asking). While my initial plan for this account was to use it as the handler for mail comming to my @php.net account, which now a days comprises mostly of spam and windows viruses. Rather then have my server perform slow analysis on some 2-3 thousand messages, I'd let Google's Gmail do it for me. Since most of the e-mail going to that account ended up being removed by spam filters, which seem t...