I was playing the very last puzzle in the google Da Vinic Quest game. When I logged into my personalized google home page I saw this warning and captcha request:
Of course my first attempt failed, can you tell if thats a zero or an ‘O’ ? Apparently I’m not the only one. I’m thinking that this means the whole world was querying the snot out of google trying to go for the big prizes. Has anyone else experienced this?
google, google captcha, Da Vinci Code Quest, Da Vinci Code, captcha, prize
Wow! According to dearaol.com:
AOL has proposed the adoption of a system called CertifiedEmail, provided by Goodmail Systems. Under this pay-to-send system, affluent mass-emailers who are willing to pay AOL the equivalent of an “email tax” would get to bypass AOL’s spam filters and get guaranteed delivery to the inboxes of AOL customers.
When I first read this, I thought “big deal, AOL sucks anyways”. Thats just my opinion. At heart I want to beleive that AOL is trying to provide a certified mail as a bonus service to their clients. But I paused and thought about it. THIS IS A BIG DEAL! The more I think about it the more I realize how big it is!
This means that in the future it could be possible that if you are an AOL subscriber that is not on the pay-to-send program there is no promise of your emails being sent, or received…. just pause again and think about that. But it does mean that people sending advertisements and do pay for the service will be able to get their commercials to you.
Yes it will be for current AOL subscribers, but now consider how this will begin to affect other major Internet Provider and Email companies. Others who would want to cash in on the monies made. The article goes on to say some of the ramifications could include “The cost of communicating online will skyrocket, as intermediaries attempt to skim a fee from every communication. Paying AOL’s ransom means paying to build a taxation system for the Net.”
What can we do? I myself am signing the petition to express my opinion that I would like AOL to not do this. If you read their blog, you can read this more in depth. They did a really nice job explaining this view.
Unfortunately the group that begin the petition process was MoveOn.org. So now we are throwing politics into this as well. I wonder why? Im thinking that it partially has to do with campaign bulk emails. I always try to follow the money when it comes to politics. I think that this started because they didn’t want to pay the fees to spread their cause.
Comments?
aol, spam, email, pay-to-send, email tax
In the line of search engines Brandon pointed out, I am liking the koders.com search engine. You can search for code in all different kinds of languages. They have a firefox plugin as well as code to embedd the search on your site. Enter a snippet of code, or a function and try it out:
koders.com, code, code search, programming, koder
According to zdnet Firefox has passed a 20% marketshare in Europe.
Personally I’ve used Firefox for the last year or so and I really like it. I’ve recently tried Opera. It seems to run much lighter. However, I’ve been told by some css “gurus” that Opera isn’t that good.
I’m unsure why or what the exact complaints are against the Opera browser, and I’m unsure of my source’s credentials. I would really like to get feedback from anyone on their preferred browser and why. Please feel free to leave a comment.
I’ve also been using IE7. I’m quite frankly not pleased with it. In general the options really don’t offer anything more exciting than the firefox or the opera. Not only does it have the M$ signature giant footprint, but as usual it does NOT render css very well.
Firefox, Opera, Browser
So theres a wicked .wmf vulnerability going around(Microsoft Security Advisory #912840) which according to the Washington Post won’t get a patch until next Tuesday. The 2nd Tuesday of the month is when Microsoft sends out most of it’s patches.
Thanks to Ilfak Guilfanov’s hexblog.com, you can not only download software to check if you are vulnerable, but you can also get this unoficial patch before next Tuesday’s release.
Hmmm, what would happen if a vulnerability was found on a Wednessday and the webosphere was all a fuss about it clueing in miscreants on how to go about causing havoc??
wmf vulnerability, patch
