Vulnerabilities in Vista, Leopard, and iPhone

Here's the news:

Intel Accused of Anti-Competitive Action

European Commission regulators accuse Intel of 'market abuse' in EU based on initial findings. Intel has allegedly tried to exclude AMD from the market by offering incentives to drop product with AMD technology, and by selling its products under production costs. Fines of up to 10% of annual turnover are possible in Intel is found guilty.

Interesting to see how this will develop.

Update: Intels response to these clams is that all their practices have been "lawful, pro-competitive, and beneficial to consumers".

iPlayer Launched

It seems BBC have launched their iPlayer. iPlayer has been the source of much controversy in the blogging world, since it only runs on Windows. The BCCs claims that they will release versions for Mac OS X and Linux later.

I really hope they will do that, but it would have been interesting to see the reactions if they had done this the other way around: released a version for Mac OS X or Linux first. Just think about the publicity that would have earned them... It would have been very effective marketing. They could have released a Windows version very soon afterwards.

Malaysia Cracks Down on Bloggers

According to BBC news, they threaten to use their anti-terror laws against bloggers who insult either the king, or Islam. This is after 11 years of avoiding online censorship altogether.

Developments like this are why I support privacy software and anonymous browsing. One of Internet's most important uses is in my opinion free speech in places it is otherwise difficult. I'll continue to support Tor and Freenet.

Removing Blogger Navbar - Allowed?

After seeing numerous hacks for it, and claims that it is "not violating TOS", I searched Blogger Help, and this came up:

"Unless you publish your blog via FTP, the Navbar cannot be disabled."

So, I guess it doesn't violate the TOS, but they certainly tell you not to do it...

Search Sites Care About Privacy?

After Google began to improve its ranking as the worst web site with respect to privacy, other search engines quickly followed.

Yahoo! only cut a few months from Google's expiration times to get ahead. Microsoft, on the other hand, joined hands with Ask in calling for a standard in privacy policies. Ask went even further with their own policy, announcing a tool that will let users have almost complete control over what data is gathered about them (AskEraser press release).

Wow, I wouldn't have believed this would happen, had someone predicted it a few months ago. I wish other web industries would follow, but this is a start, certainly.

The Contradiction of Internet

I find it interesting how Bill Thompson describes the contradiction at the heart of internet in his most recent comment at BBC Tech: "It is a mutual enterprise that relies absolutely on co-operation, but the resulting network supports the harshest and most brutal free market ever created."

I think that was a fair description of internet as a whole. It could not exist without all the joint standards and recommendations (eg. those of W3C), but is used as the playground of many commercial ventures, many of which pay no tribute to this spirit of 'mutualism', as Thompson calls it.

I believe it is this contradiction that causes the collision of open source and free software movements, and commercial software developers like Microsoft. They represent the different aspects of what contemporary internet is all about. The open standards people may have been here first, but today internet belongs to all of us.

All in all, I have to agree with Thompson in his conclusion: both aspects are important. While making certain that important standards continue to be open and free, we must allow internet to function as a free market.

From Lua to PHP

Got enough of studying Lua for now. My next programming language project is to familiarize myself with another scripting language: PHP. And the tool: W3Schools' PHP Tutorial.

I've made extensive use in the past of W3Schools' HTML and CSS references - in fact I think I studied my first bit of CSS with their tutorial coupled with W3C Learning CSS.

How to remove the InstantBuzz toolbar

In desperately trying to get visitors I installed the InstantBuzz Toolbar (stupid me?). I read about how many have had trouble uninstalling/removing the toolbar. Here's a simple instruction on how to do it.

1. Don't follow the instructions by InstantBuzz. They don't usually work.

2. If you have installed the toolbar in Firefox, remove it now: Click Tools - Add-ons and Uninstall it. This requires you to restart Firefox.

3. Disable the toolbar in Internet Explorer. The method will depend on your IE version. I have an old version, so I can't really help with the new ones. Post a comment if you know how to do it in the newest version, or if you want to know how to do it.

4. Remove it from Control Panel - Add/Remove programs. This will require a computer restart, after which the program is completely removed.

5. Check your computer with AdAware, or other spyware remover. I didn't have anything on my computer after following these instructions, but some have had.

After AdSense

After following up on what I wrote earlier about AdSense, I realized that the area of internet marketing is just huge. I ended up navigating through hundreds of sites in a couple of days in search of relevant information. Most of it was unsuccesful, but some of what I found was interesting.

I also visited sites of over ten different e-currencies, many of which I had never heard of. I'm still far from owning any e-gold of my own, but I did sign up for a paypal account, which I had until now tried to avoid.

The little experiment I had with AdSense didn't work out: the minimal number of clicks I got on my ads gave me no revenue (I still wonder why that is). My AdSense balance is still 0,00. Maybe I'll try it again, once I have a website with higher traffic to test it with.

Semantic Web

An article on CNNMoney, Web 3.0: No humans required, got me interested in the concept of the semantic web again. I had last delved into it in 2004, when W3C published a new revision of the Resource Description Framework.

According to the article, Radar Networks have had some success in creating a RDF data engine and an user application. This got me real interested, and I immediately Googled up their site, only to find that: "Radar Networks is presently in stealth-mode and anticipates releasing its first commercial products in 2007. "

So I'll just have to wait then, I guess. Meanwhile, I'm going to re-read the RDF specification and find out if I can figure out something useful to do with it.

Can you trust AdSense?

After reading many articles (eg. Google AdSense Account Disabled) about how people lost their AdSense accounts I decided to see for myself. I created an account and placed the ads on a couple of low traffic sites I'm administering (including this one for now at least). I don't think they'll generate a lot of revenue (any in fact), but I'd like to see if it works.

I read a few articles, which gave various suggestions on how to keep your account, for instance How to ensure your AdSense account will not be cancelled, and Review on AdSense. And, in case something bad happens: Banned by Google AdSense?

Too bad I don't have a proper site with traffic to test this more properly. I'll have to try adding content to my site and getting other sites to link to it more. While at it I'll also test the Google Webmaster Tools.