redelijkheid.com

A usenet posting suggests that XS4ALL will provide a filtering service to their subscribers. The filter would consist of 5 levels. Ranging from fully open to ‘fully’ closed. The first will give you the possibility of running your own services at home, and the latter means you’re only able to e.g. surf and e-mail (through the XS4ALL SMTP server).

The filters would give the basic/ignorant user the opportunity of preventing the spreading of malware and other stuff by default. The more tech savvy subscribers can remove the filter for running a bunch of services (webserver, ftp, mail, DNS, etc).

Definitely a good decision. I just hope that the other ISP’s will do something similar, because most of the virus/malware/massmailing ’software’ is running on PC’s run by the average user. Totally ignorant of the malware running on their PC’s.

Yet another ‘thumbs up’ for the quality provider of the Netherlands

Like most security conscious people I use Firefox (FF) for my everyday browsing on the Internets. So when the Mozilla guys released version 3 I installed it on all my machines (2 Windows and 2 OSX platforms).

It was a bit getting used to. The underlying FF part had been changed. Bookmarks, history etc are all stored in sqlite databases. So no more flatfiles. This took me a couple of hours to figure it out, but finally I got ‘there’.

Using FF was business as usual… Apart from one very annoying bug; Opening new windows (not new tabs) results often in an empty bookmarks bar. And this is happening on Windows and OSX versions of FF.
The bookmarks are ‘there’ but not click-able. Using the right mouse button (on OSX: ctrl-mouse click) on the bookmarks bar and selecting ‘Open All in Tabs‘, FF opens every bookmark in the bar.

The only way of restoring the proper bar is the completely shutdown FF and restart it. After that it works for a certain amount of time.

The problem isn’t isolated to my environment. Just google on the issue, and you’ll find more people. There’s one suggestion I haven’t tried yet. Starting with a fresh/clean profile, but I do need my settings/passwords/bookmarks. I’m lost without those

UPDATE: I tried a new profile, and this seemed to work. After this I started to repopulate the new profile with the old settings, etc. Everything went fine until the point where I added the extensions. It seems that even old / not active extensions (SwitchProxy in my case) are still able to f*ck things up.

I, and probably the rest of the world as well, am being hit with spam in the comments at this moment. Over 100 comments a day are intercepted by Akismet.

It seems that all the spamjerks have found a way of creating userprofiles on public websites/forums/blogs and are referring to those in the spam. Below are some examples URL’s which were active at the time of me writing this:

• http://www.lonelyplanet.com/thorntree/profile.jspa?editMode=true&userID=678271
• http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/profile.php?id=699061

I send an e-mai lto Lonely Planet descibing their problem. Let’s hope that they fix it soon.

In the mean time; All hail Akismet!!!!

Mozilla released Firefox 3 during my holiday. So the first thing I had to do was upgrade v2.x to the latest version. Initially everything seemed fine…. INITIALLY…

The trouble began when I tried to add bookmarks. The new bookmark interface (it’s called Library) showed up empty. When I tried to add a bookmark, it was impossible to remove it.

“Why would you want to remove a bookmark??” Well, because every bookmark I added ended up with the URL to some ad. At first I thought I had some weird virus or trojan on my Mac. But it seemed that every Mac had the same problem.

E.g. If I added the SnipURL button to my toolbar (which is basically a javascript) it would work, but when I pressed the button, it would show a Google ad. There was also no way of removing or changing it.

Today I started digging into the /Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/Firefox/ folder. This was the place where all settings were stored. After fooling around with importing the old bookmarks.html file I ended up with 3 times the amount of bookmarks and no way of deleting them.

It seemed that Firefox 3 uses a SQL-like database called ‘places.sqlite‘. This database imports the old bookmarks.html file upon the first launch. Possibly, that html file was corrupt (or what ever), because when I removed all bookmarking files (I did make a backup of the old bookmarks.html file!!!!) and relaunched Firefox 3, the bookmarking interface worked correctly. Now I imported the ‘old’ bookmarks.html file, and everything was back to normal (so far).

For those interested; I removed the following files under the /Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/Firefox/ directory;

• Everything with bookmark in it’s name (make sure to backup the ‘original’ bookmarks.html). This includes backups etc.
• places.sqlite

After starting Firefox 3, you may want to import and (re)organize the old bookmarks.

Note that this scenario occured while upgrading from the latest Firefox 2 version to 3 on an Intel Mac. Other scenario’s might show similar ‘bugs’, but are not tested in any way.

Apart from this ‘minor’ issue, I’m very happy with the new browser. Speedy, less memory consumption, etc.

Now I need to figure out if bookmark-syncing is available in FF3.

As you might have noticed, I run some ads on my website. Today I ran into an add for a new Nikon D300 with a price of 799 euro’s.

Note that at the moment a relatively cheap Nikon D300 costs at least 1400 euro’s, and if it sounds to good to be true, it probably is. Since I have no intention of buying a second D300, I decided to check the add out.

The add links to this page this page this page. A nice overview of the available Nikon D300.

A bit of research reveals the following about this site;

• Company is based in China, and uses MSN to communicate.
• The user comments on the D300 page aren’t very encouraging.
• Payments are only done through Western Union Money Transfers (or other services which guarantees you 100% that you’ll never be able to get your money back)
• Returning goods is done by sending them to another company (escgate.com; ‘Save Moeny Now!! )
• Every piece of hardware is almost half the regular price
• Oh and, there are real world experiences with escgate.com (dutch forum) -> Babelfish translation

Anyway, more than enough warnings if you ask me.

B.t.w. Western Union money transfers are a great way of sending people money in e.g. Africa. It’s not all that bad, just as long as you don’t expect anything in return

UPDATE: found another naughty website. Same products (same product database [1, 2]), same conditions, but different layout and name.

The following list are webshops which are as ‘real’ as the first one I found.

• http://www.ecnnow.com [offline]
  
• http://www.shop-beijing.com [offline]
• http://www.leonoshop.com
• < your website here?? >

Biggest (techno) news in the Netherlands was probably the failure of the Internet. The largest ATM Internet backbone massively failed in the Netherlands. This resulted in thousands of people without any Internet access for 1-3 days.
Currently the problems are temporarily patched, but they are still on high alert.

For the first time I wasn’t affected. Normally this only occurs to me.

Purely coincidentally, I found a South Park episode (s12e06/Over Logging) in which the Internet fails. This results in mayhem in South Park (just like it did over here).

Furthermore, I drove 170 kilometer today, and it took me about 5 hours. Traffic jams due to spring rain (????) were to blame (according to the traffic information services). Basically, because people are egoistic when they’re driving, and won’t anticipate (when they’re reading the paper, shaving, and/or applying make-up using the rear view mirror) on their surroundings.

So no Internet (for large parts of the Netherlands), and traffic jams from here to Tokyo. So ’slow’ might be an understatement.

W00t… KPN is finally starting to upgrade their network to support VDSL. This COULD mean a major speed upgrade for me. Currently I only have a 4Mbps ADSL2 line (but with a 1Mbps upload, thanks to XS4ALL). This is the maximum throughput for me, since I live too far from the distribution hub.

Other interesting news is that KPN won’t charge their customers for MOBILE data connections made from the 21st of December till the 30th of December 2007. So, it’s all you can download via GPRS, UMTS

It seems that Gmail is going to enable IMAP support for their free mail service.

The gmail application for mobile devices is nice, but it IMAP is nicer to have.

It seems that the IMAP option isn’t available on my account (yet). Guess I have to wait a little longer.

Oke, it seems that UPC has already implemented the so-called child pornography filter. There’s no fancy filtering software. They are using their own DNS servers to re-route traffic. This means that when your using other DNS servers (e.g. openDNS), a modified hosts file, or just browse to the filtered server based on the IP address you’ll be just fine.

As I’ve mentioned before; with casual browsing you won’t end up on child porn websites. Only if you want to find it you’ll probably end up getting it. So a awefully simple DNS protection won’t stop the real perverts. It’s just another false sense of safety.

UPC, one of the bigger ISP’s in the Netherlands, will start will the filtering of child pornography on the Internet. This resulted in a (public) debate about the how and why, etc.

First of all, I surf the web (intensively) since the dawn of the Internets . And with surfing I don’t mean the newspapers, and other general information most people search for and read. No, I mean the dark and far corners of the Internet, where every page you enter might be the last you visit (before you may have to reinstall your PC because of all the faul spyware and virusses you may attract). Searching for the leaked video’s of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee Jones in the late nineties, and searching for warez, cracks, hacks, virus generators, and passwords for XXX-rated websites. (more…)

By default, the Google search page is displayed in the language from the country you’re in. You can change this in the ‘preferences‘ on the Google page. The actual text near the language preference is:

Display Google tips and messages in: [<LANGUAGE>]

According to me that’s only interface related and (at most) tips/local event related (like Queen’s Day etc.). But it also influences the search results. Just try it by switching to several different languages.

Shouldn’t search results be the same?

OK… Disaster struck… Yesterday morning I had a flashing DSL LED on my DSL modem. Flashing ain’t good. A stable green light is good, flashing is bad, very bad. Flashing means it tries to connect to teh Internets, but it can’t.

Thankfully, I have a nice neighbor with no encryption on his wireless. Downside is that I need to sit in the hallway to use it. Hopefully the problem will be fixed tomorrow. If not you might be reading this somewhere next week (if ever).

UPDATE: Well things are improving (a very tiny little bit). Statistics show, that the website is available 15% of the time instead of 2%.
An optimist would say; ‘an improvement of 750%’. My opinion is not that optimistic I might say……

UPDATE#2: No idea what’s wrong with the Internets connection. Last night it downloaded three movies worked without any problems. This morning I had to switch it off and on to get it going again. I must say that the modem itself is running awfully hot. In the mean time I have two different types of modems in spare (510i and a 546i). Strange thing is that the logs show disconnections due to idle time?? Idle? The thing hasn’t been idle ever since I installed it.

UPDATE#3: Well, the techies suggested a downgrade path to check if it might help. Off course, I’m against this. This means slower lines, slower downloads etc. It’s like going back to the digital stone ages. Furthermore, it worked perfectly over the last 7 years…. The performance didn’t degrade over time. The performance just said ‘poof’.
Anyway, in the meantime I’m back to 4Mbps, and things seem to look good, but it also looked good yesterday. So until further notice this website might be online (or not, or whatever).

Earlier this month, the skype network went down for more than 24 hours Thankfully I don’t use Skype, so I wasn;t affected. The only downside I noticed was that the TWiT podcasts were delayed because of the outage.

Now the Microsoft Windows Genuine Advantage server are down (or are having problems). No updates, and no activations for many of you out there. This is what happens when you rely more and more on the Internet.

Tried to use my new Nokia E61i for surfing the Internet with my laptop (Windows XP), but this just wouldn’t work. Errors were plenty, but no bit made it to the Internet for some reason. Strange, because my older 6230 (or whatever model it was) worked perfectly.

After cursing a couple of times, I needed to make sure that this wasn’t a defect in the phone, so I tried it with my Mac Book Pro (which is for sale by the way ). Obviously, this worked straight away. Just used the same settings / profile from my older phone….

Windows never keeps to amaze me (in a negative way that is).

You’re in luck, if you have a XS4ALL Internet account. Normally, you have an hour a week free Hotspot access, and this summer you are even more lucky. XS4ALL provides over 900 free Hotspots throughout the land this summer (June, Juli, and August).