Category: General

Firefox, Google and VG

Both Google and the company behind Firefox refuses to comment the case at this point. And with that the hate-campaign continues

I have never been a fan of tabloid newspapers. Virtually the only thing I dislike more than tabloid newspapers are readers believing in tabloid newspapers, and sadly there are too many of those.

Lately the Norwegian tabloid VG ( Verdens Gang, roughly translated world's times) ran a story related to certain usage of the Firefox referral program offered by Google.

Well, to clear a few things up, despite VG trying to make this sound like a new thing, the Firefox referral program was offered to US publishers the 4th of November 2005. International publishers, of which I'm one of, living in Norway got access to the Firefox referral scheme the 28th of November 2005.

If they had done some more research they would have found out that Google has hired several known Firefox developers in the past. As firefox is an open source project, creating an extension for it (such as the google toolbar for firefox) is easy, and it can usually be more flexible than for proprietary systems. But I guess it isn't of interest for VG that google might be have monetary interests to offer a referral program.

The article is focusing on Explorer Destroyer. A set of javascript code snippets used by a small group of individuals.

That someone took the referral program to the next level and requires people to use Firefox in order to visit their website, instead of just offering a suggestion, doesn't really come as a surprise. And that is what ExplorerDestroyer does, at least in "Level 3: Dead serious". It offers two other levels as well, level 2 offering a "splash page" that an IE user would have to continue from to see the rest of the page, and in level 1 showing a field recommending users to switch to Firefox.

Although any real web developer will frown down upon such actions, it is generally easier to develop a website with a spesific browser in mind, and chances are these sites have flaws when rendering in other browsers than Mozilla Firefox, and rather than fixing the site, they decide to use such as script.

The World Wide Web Consortium, in short W3C is responsible for maintaining amongst others the HyperText Markup Language(HTML) recommendations used to write the markup for websites. Internet Explorer (IE) has historically, and still is in voilation of many of the recommendations, and you often have to use different sorts of hacks to separate IE from other Web User Agents in order to serve a good looking website to it. Hopefully this is better in version 7 of the browser, although that won't help for a number of years due to different update cycles.

I particulary dislike the ending of the article in VG: Roughly translated it says "Both Google and the company behind Firefox refuses to comment the case at this point. And with that the hate-campaign continues".

I'm pretty sure that whomever received the request for comment is still laughing at VG. Neither Firefox nor Google is related to the "campaign" in the first place, and it annoys me that the wording might lead people to believe that VG is implying that Google is behind the "hate campaign".

protect yourself against identity theft


Audi A6

As you may or may not know I bought a new car some weeks ago. I got myself a nice Audi A6, 2003 model, first registered in 2002. The car is a quattro (four wheel drive), is silver grey, has tiptronic (automatic gear), GPS navigation, a tv, and well, pretty much everything a computer geek and business student can hope for.

Although there were some small problems, amongst others related to one of the headlight, this got fixed today under warranty, so thank you Audi for living up to your reputation of being a stable car.

I will probably remember to grab some pictures of the car at one point as well.

Tor

After reading a blog entry and comment about Tor I decided to test it out for myself.

Tor is a toolset for a wide range of organizations and people that want to improve their safety and security on the Internet. Using Tor can help you anonymize web browsing and publishing, instant messaging, IRC, SSH, and other applications that use the TCP protocol. Tor also provides a platform on which software developers can build new applications with built-in anonymity, safety, and privacy features.

Tor aims to defend against traffic analysis, a form of network surveillance that threatens personal anonymity and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security. Communications are bounced around a distributed network of servers called onion routers, protecting you from websites that build profiles of your interests, local eavesdroppers that read your data or learn what sites you visit, and even the onion routers themselves.

In my case it was a rather simple matter of "sudo urpmi tor privoxy" as I am running the Mandriva distribution of GNU/Linux. Followed by adding "forward-socks4a / localhost:9050 ." to /etc/privoxy/config and starting the services. After that I added the Torbutton extension to Mozilla Firefox.

As the original blog entry mentions, the system is rather slow due to a lack of servers, but the Torbutton extension allows for quick activation / deactivation that might come handy at times.

Personally I'm more interesting in securing my communication and avoiding trojan horses and spyware on my acquaintances' computers. But Tor does have its place in order to help ensure privacy while using the Internet.