K-Squared Ramblings

The trouble with web ads

A truism of television is that they aren’t in the entertainment business, they’re in the advertising business. Their job is selling commercials, and the shows you watch are nothing but an enticement to get you to watch long enough that you’ll see the ads. This is true for ad-based websites as well. The content is just there to get you coming back so you’ll see and click on the ads. (I’ve always had a problem with the idea of using click-through as the primary measurement of an ad’s success, but that’s another story.)

The problem here is that a balance needs to be struck between content and ads: Tilt too much toward content, and you need another business model to pay for hosting. Tilt too much toward ads, and people will stop visiting your site—or start blocking your ads. The more intrusive and annoying the ads, the more likely people will block them.

I rarely block ads. (Of course, I don’t click on them very often, either.) I figure if the website owner needs an ad banner to pay for hosting and/or make a profit and continue providing the site, that’s fine…as long as it doesn’t distract from the content. Remember, I’m not there for the ads, they have to convince me to come to their page, and if the ads make an otherwise-appealing site too annoying to read…well, sorry, I’m either blocking the ads or I’m not coming back.

DevArticles is a good example of this. The page was so full of animated banners visually screaming for my attention, I could barely focus on the article long enough to read it. This one page prompted me to install the Adblock extension for Firefox at work and block everything coming from their ad server, just to be able to read it. Had they kept their ads sensible, like the dozens of ad-supported sites I frequent without blocking the ads, I probably would have bookmarked it as well. As it is, the site reminds me of a line from Babylon 5: “Too annoying to live.”

Web Clutter: An Object Lesson

Here’s a pair of excellent articles about how to avoid cluttering up your website so that people can actually see your content. The article is, however, hampered by appearing on a site that seems to violate every usability principle imaginable…. to the extent that the second one showed up on the Cruel Site of the Day [archive.org]. From the introduction:

We’ve all visited websites that made us wince. You know what I mean: full of distracting animation, flashing text, and enough other clutter that it reminds you of a Victorian home filled to bursting with knick knacks. Are you guilty of filling your website with useless junk? Christian Heilmann takes you down his checklist of website clutter. You just might find yourself considering a redesign.

Yeah, that sounds like a description of Dev Articles to me. I count no fewer than 8 ads on the first page, 6 of them animated. The text is buried in a morass of advertisements and navigation that make it extremely difficult to actually read the article.

It reminds me of a book called Fumblerules, which collected (or possibly originated) guidelines like “Always proofread carefully to make sure you don’t any words out,” or “Plan ahead” with the last few letters scrunched together to fit on the page. These were designed to make their points by deliberately breaking the rules to make them more memorable.

Well, there’s always the Daily Sucker.

Update: I checked out the author’s website, which demonstrates he has the sense of taste and aesthetics one would expect from his articles. It really is too bad DevArticles isn’t willing to take his advice.

Pronunciation of the Year

I heard someone on the radio refer to the year as “two double-oh four” (2004), a pronunciation I had never heard before in my life. This fits somewhat with what seems to me the American tendency to speak the year 1906 as “nineteen oh six,” but we also tend to say “two-thousand four.” I have it in my head that people in England say things like “nineteen hundred six,” but then I’ve seen Orwell’s novel spelled out as Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Branching to other languages, my German classes taught me to speak the date as “neunzehn hundert vierundachtzig”—effectively the same phrasing I’m used to—but my Spanish classes taught me to say “mil novecientos ochenta y cuatro,” the equivalent of “one thousand nine hundred eighty-four.” Either could have been simplified for teaching purposes.

So I have to wonder—is this an American/Commonwealth issue, a regional issue, a romance/germanic issue? How do you say the date where you live?

The saddest part of the tsunami

Apparently tsunamis are so rare in the Indian Ocean—once every 700 years—that there is no warning system in place. When the USGS detected the quake, they scrambled to send a warning, but couldn’t reach anyone in the area:

“We tried to do what we could,” McCreery said. “We don’t have contacts in our address book for anybody in that part of the world.”

Within moments of detecting the 9-magnitude quake, McCreery and his staff were on the phone to Australia, then to U.S. Naval officials, various U.S. embassies and finally the U.S. State Department.

Even with a warning system in place, it would have caused massive devastation, but there would have been time for many—maybe even most of the people who died (at least from the immediate deluge) to reach higher ground and safety.

Reportedly efforts are underway to set up a network.

Red Cross donation info.

The Web Is Round

It’s official. Now that Firefox has effectively overtaken the Mozilla Suite, all the major web browsers’ icons are round:

Ah, the spirit of giving

Dear [insert advice columnist here],

I moved out of my parents’ home four years ago and have been speaking to them and my sister less and less over time. They rarely have time to visit us, and it is impractical for us to visit them at their home, due to the amount of junk accumulated in their house and my husband’s allergies to their cats. When we do see each other, I find myself uncomfortable with them, both politically and socially, as our interests have diverged. Last Christmas, rather than give generic gifts that would go unused and further clutter their home, my husband and I chose to make donations to charities in their names, and picked foundations and causes important to them. At the time, they seemed to approve of our choice. However, three days ago, my mother called to ask if we would be doing this again so that she could tell everyone to donate for us instead of giving gifts. They are apparently displeased with our nontraditional method of holiday giving and do not want to give us tangible gifts if they will not receive them in return. I don’t mind this for myself, as I dislike the commercial mess Christmas has become, but I’m curious to know if others have received similar reactions, and what you make of the situation. I’m getting the impression that for some, the thought isn’t what counts.

Welcome, BlogExplosion Visitors

In hopes of bringing in some more readers, I signed up with BlogExplosion yesterday. I’ve spent some time last night and tonight surfing through their system, and I’ve seen some interesting blogs, some boring blogs, and some infuriating blogs. (Politics… why did it have to be politics…)

If you’re coming here through BlogExplosion, feel free to skim for 30 seconds or explore as much as you want. This is the group-blog of a twentysomething married couple in California who enjoy computers, sci-fi and fantasy, and comics (OK, one of us likes comics). Each of us has other, non-blog stuff online as well.

Enjoy your visit!

An Earlier Identity Crisis

With Identity Crisis just finished, and news breaking about DC Countdown, Crises are in the news in comics right now. That makes this exchange from The Flash 80-Page Giant #1 (1998) all the more interesting.

The setup: The DCU version of comic book writer Mark Millar is interviewing the Flash to get ideas for his next script. Apparently DC Comics exists in the DCU, but they publish stories about “real world” heroes. As you can see, they don’t know all the details—like their secret identities—and have to fill in the gaps themselves.

Robots in Disguise

Wondering just how many Netscape 4 visitors this site gets, I pulled up some server stats and noticed two very strange patterns.

The first appears to be a spider, calling itself Mozilla/4.08. It’s already suspicious, since the real Netscape 4 includes the language and OS, as in Mozilla/4.08 [en] (Windows NT 5.0; U). Then there’s the pattern: lots of hits from the same IP, all to actual pages—not a single image, style sheet, or script—and some interesting mistakes that look like it misparsed the links.

The other pattern showed Netscape 4 requesting favicon.ico. The thing is, Netscape 4 doesn’t know about favicons. This is scattered across a few visitors from various IP addresses and looks like actual visitors—show up, look at a page or two with images and styles, etc. Versions range from 4.06 to 4.8, and platforms include Windows XP, Linux, BeOS, and—believe it or not—CP/M. Actually, the last set of hits admit to being Mozilla/4.7 [en] (CP/M; 8-bit; Fake user agent). The only direct reference I can find calls it a robot, but it seems the anonymizing features in Squid use CP/M in their example fake UA.

So why do browsers and robots fake their identity? Read the rest of this entry »

What I’m Reading

Top ’o the pile:

• Flash — I run a website devoted to this series. Under Mark Waid and now Geoff Johns, this series has delivered good stories with a strong sense of legacy, but without requiring you to know every nuance of the character’s history. Johns has made a career out of revitalizing forgotten or deteriorated characters (Hawkman, the JSA, Hal Jordan, etc.), and he regularly turns that talent to the Flash’s Rogues Gallery.
• Fallen Angel — covered in August. On hiatus until February, this series just wrapped up a major storyline answering questions about the origins of Bete Noir and the Fallen Angel.
• Powers — covered in August. The new dynamic is setting up plenty of conflict, as the status quo continues to change. In addition, both leads have picked up dangerous secrets.
• Girl Genius* — covered last year. You really can’t go wrong with the Phil Foglio/mad scientist combination!
• Planetary* — covered in August. Archaeologists of the Impossible, uncovering the secret history of the 20^th century. It looks like it’s getting ready to start the push toward its big conclusion.
• Astro City* — Super-heroes from a human perspective. Sometimes it’s a look at the everyday lives of people who happen to dress in costumes and fight crime. Sometimes it’s a look at the lives of the ordinary people who live in a city where super-powers are the norm. Always a refreshing take on just what lies behind the archetypes.

* On those rare occasions that a new issue actually comes out.
Read the rest of this entry »

Taking the Web Beyond the Typewriter

I recently stumbled across an old copy of the Demoroniser (which my American-trained sense of spelling keeps trying to spell as demoronizer), a script designed to correct some of the, well, moronic HTML generated by Microsoft Office. Aside from flat-out coding errors, Office would use non-standard characters for things such as curly quotes or em-dashes that would only show up on Windows computers. If you viewed these sites on a Mac, a Linux box, a Palm, etc., they would seem to be missing punctuation everywhere. His solution was to convert these to their plain-ASCII equivalents.

Over the last year or so, Wordpress and A List Apart have converted me from “stick with the lowest common denominator” to “let’s show real typography.” Since the days of the Demoroniser, Unicode has become a standard part of HTML, so modern browsers* can either display a full range of characters or convert them to something they can display. You probably won’t be able to see Chinese text in Lynx, but a properly encoded curly quote—“ or ”—will show up as a plain old ".

For one thing, real typography looks much nicer. Read the rest of this entry »

The Flash on Film

Well, it’s official. As reported all over the place, David Goyer is signed on to write, direct and produce a Flash movie. This isn’t just a rumor like the Jack Black Green Lantern, this was announced in Variety.

Goyer’s got experience with superhero films. He wrote all three Blade movies, and the upcoming Batman Begins. He spent several years co-writing the current JSA comic book, in which the original Flash is a regular.

Variety states that the movie will focus on the original Flash, Jay Garrick, though other sources have stated that Goyer wants to use the current Flash, Wally West…and Blade: Trinity’s Ryan Reynolds is rumored to be in the *ahem* running.

OK, I’m not going to hold my breath about this. Film projects get sidetracked or abandoned all the time—just look at how long it’s taken the next Superman film to get off the ground. As for whether it’s likely to be good or not, Goyer has a hit and miss record. He co-wrote Dark City, one of my favorite films. (It was the first DVD I ever bought. I didn’t even have a DVD player at the time.) On the other hand, I’ve heard almost nothing good about Blade: Trinity. I assume he hasn’t even started the script, though, so it’s way too early to get into the “This will rock!”/“This will suck!” debates.

Not that I expect the rest of the net to wait…

Update June 2005: I’ve added a page on the movie to Flash: Those Who Ride the Lightning: Flash Feature Film.

Fargate!

Okay, this has got to be one of the strangest pairs of sci-fi news stories I’ve seen in a while.

First, Farscape star Ben Browder (John Crichton) will join the cast of Stargate SG-1 for its ninth season. (No word yet about his character, though I suppose he could appear as Daniel Jackson’s long-lost brother.)

Now it turns out that Farscape star Claudia Black (Aeryn Sun) will reprise her Stargate SG-1 character Vala in a 5-episode arc next season. (The original episode in which she appears, “Prometheus Unbound”, airs in January.)

Another one for the “Holy frelling dren” file.

(Thanks to aeryncrichton for the news.)

Browser Switch Campaigns Compared

Firefox - Switch is the first of these sites I noticed. Based on Apple’s “Switch” campaign, it’s aimed at raising awareness of Firefox and convincing people to switch from IE. It has stories of people who have switched, a top 10 list of reasons to switch, and answers to questions about just how you go about this switching thing, anyway.

Stop IE [archive.org] is, as its name implies, a negative campaign. It focuses on the security risks inherent in using Internet Explorer and provides a list of alternatives, though Firefox is the only one it deals with in any depth.

Browse Happy is my favorite of the bunch, because it’s an inclusive campaign. It’s run by the Web Standards Project, so the goal isn’t to promote Firefox or eliminate Internet Explorer, it’s to promote choice and get people away from today’s Internet Explorer. The WaSP’s ultimate goal is to encourage people to build a vendor-neutral web in which you can use whatever browser you want—including IE—and get the same high-quality experience. That’s a goal I can agree with, and that’s why Browse Happy is the one I promote. The meat of the site is stories of people who have switched away from IE, with profiles of four browsers: Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, and Safari.

Update (June 2007): Stop IE is long dead. I’ve updated the links to point to the Internet Archive of the site.

Spam and Piracy

Shocking proof of a connection between spammers and pirates!

Get your e-script at no charrge.

first ten picks of the day in the marrrrrket

Backwards!

A while back I found a site called The Hembeck Files, which reprints old DC-themed comic strips by cartoonist Fred Hembeck alongside related essays about comics. I just found one I hadn’t seen before, dealing with Zatanna and Professor Zoom. Zatanna performs magic by saying the words of her spells backward… and the accompanying essay is written in an appropriate format. (Ugh!)

Mailer-Daemon’s Aunt Edna

Here’s a gem from today’s postmaster mail:

Mailer-daemon, You’ve received a postcard!

You have just received a virtual postcard from Aunt Edna!

Uh huh. I know some software projects have enough history to have family trees, but this seems just a bit too unlikely!

Identity Crisis Conclusion (spoilers)

I went out at lunch and picked up Identity Crisis #7. Looking back at the series, it was very satisfying dramatically, though of course there were many things happening in it that I didn’t like. Even the revelation of the killer’s ID didn’t feel like a cheat. There was no sense of an Armageddon 2001-style last-minute change, and no one showed up out of left field in the final chapter.

On to specifics. Spoilers abound! Read the rest of this entry »

WordPad?!?

Today’s Microsoft security patches include one for a potential remote exploit in… Wordpad? Yes, according to Security Bulletin MS04-041, there are two problems in the Word 6 converter that could be used to take control of your system. In addition to fixing those holes, they’ve disabled the converter.

I could understand if this were something like Emacs, which is practically its own operating system, but Wordpad is a bare minimum RTF editor.

What next? Are they going to find a plain-text hole in Notepad? Discover you can crash your system by dividing by 0.0000000000001 in Calculator? I know, looking at a malicious font in Character Map is going to be the next big virus vector.

Spamming for God (multicultural edition)

Various outlets have reported on the recent appearance of evangelical spam—unsolicited bulk email which promotes religious messages instead of advertising products. It’s been pointed out that since CAN-SPAM refers to commercial mail it can’t be used to stop people who bombard you with other types of messages.

I’ve seen 419 scams with religious trappings for months. These are the usual “Help me smuggle $20 million out of my country” ploys with the added twist of “Oh, I’m a missionary” or “I’ll donate it to an orphanage” or “You can trust me, I’m a Christian,” usually tied to a middle-eastern nation where Christians are in the minority (because Nigeria is so passé). Of course the only thing the scammers really worship is the almighty X-MILLION US DOLLARS. It’s a cheap sympathy ploy, nothing more, made obvious by the fact that, well, it’s a scam!

Today I saw a new variation on that tactic: instead of appealing to Christians, this one was appealing to Muslims. It was all about some Muslim convert in Cuba who had been abandoned by his Catholic family and just needed to transfer $12 million out of the country… all sent from a UK-based email account.

On a side note, I’ve found myself wondering lately why so many of these seem to come from European ISP Tiscali, particularly Tiscali UK. (One came through yesterday with 119 copies of the standard footer!) I assume they must provide easy-to-get email accounts, or perhaps connectivity for a lot of Internet cafés. It also suggests that quite a few of these scammers aren’t anywhere near the (mostly) third-world nations where they claim to live.

Spyware and Spoofing and Spam, Oh My!

CAN-SPAM one year later: more spam than ever. Spam has more than doubled from 15 billion messages in 2003 to an estimated 35 billion in 2004. Is anyone really surprised? From the article: “The FTC says the goal of the act was never to cut down on spam but to give recipients control via the opt-out component.” Hmm, that might be part of why groups like Spamhaus were calling it the “You Can Spam” act. (via The War on Spam)

Webroot identifies the Top 10 “Most Unwanted” Spyware programs, using the “P-I Index…. P is for prevalence, I is for insidiousness.” The “winners” include pop-up generators, keystroke loggers, autodialers and the like. (via Aunty Spam’s Net Patrol)

Finally, there are several fixes and work-arounds for the pop-up window spoofing vulnerability I wrote about last week. There’s the all-inclusive method: close all other browser windows. Netcraft reports that Opera has issued a fix (7.54u1) and Safari is safe if pop-up blocking is enabled. I just got an email indicating that KDE has released a fix for Konqueror (expect that to start hitting distributions this week). No word yet on Firefox or IE, and while Microsoft has its monthly patch day tomorrow, I wouldn’t expect this to show up quite that soon.

Recursive directions

From a medication insert:

But if you need instructions on how to use instructions, how are you going to follow the instructions for the instructions?

A note, by any other AIM

It seems that the city of Verona wants people to text-message “Juliet” (of Romeo and…) [note: originally linked to Reuters] instead of writing notes and sticking them to the walls with gum. (Too bad it wasn’t in Singapore.) Apparently the notes are damaging the walls of the 13th-century building, and they want to set up a screen and have people send text messages to it using the phone.

There’s a small courtyard with a balcony, a gift shop, and a statue of the Shakespearian heroine. According to the article it was originally an inn, but has long been associated with the Capulets. “Acquired by the council a century ago, it was officially designated ‘the house of Juliet’ in 1935.” I don’t recall seeing any notes on the walls when I was there in 1999. Either I’ve just forgotten, or it really has gotten worse in the last five years.

Interesting Priorities

Secunia’s weekly mailing list includes a list of the top ten most read advisories for that week. This week it’s mostly filled with variations of the cross-platform spoofing loophole I wrote about on Wednesday, since each browser they tested gets its own advisory.

What’s interesting is that the Mozilla/Firefox advisory was read by more people than the Internet Explorer advisory.

I figure there are two explanations for this:

1. Secunia’s audience might be mostly technical users, who are more likely to try out new programs, and therefore are more likely to be using Firefox and concerned with its vulnerability to the attack.
2. Everyone’s used to hearing about IE vulnerabilities. A flaw in Firefox is a “man bites dog” headline. (Or perhaps, for something a bit more contemporary, “dog shoots man” [note: originally linked to CNN])

If I were betting, my money would be on #2.

Stealing pop-ups from your bank

Here’s an online security story to freak you out: Security firm Secunia has found a loophole [Edit: originally linked to Yahoo! News] in basic browser window handling that can let any site plug its code into a pop-up window generated by any other site. That’s not just ads, that includes pop-up help files, password dialogs, you name it.

They even have a demonstration: Start the code going on their site, open up Citibank, then click on a button on the Citibank site and it’ll open a page from Secunia.

And it works in every major browser, for the simple reason that it uses standard functionality that no one has questioned until now: The ability to open a page in a particular frame or window. All you need to know is the name of that window, and you’re set. As long as it hides the toolbars (SOP for pop-up windows of all stripes), the user will never notice. There is a workaround, at least for Firefox and Mozilla users, but it’s ugly: prevent sites from hiding the location bar.

Actually, the functionality has been questioned before: last July, when Secunia found a similar problem in frames. The solution for that was to prevent a page in one window (or tab) from accessing frames in another. But it’s a little more challenging to decide which pages should be allowed to update a top-level window.

In the short term, sites wanting to protect themselves from being hijacked can probably help by randomizing the names of their pop-up windows. In the long term, browsers are going to have to figure out how to separate windows that should have the ability to load new pages from windows that shouldn’t, knowing that they’ll undoubtedly end up breaking some websites in the process.

(via The War on Spam)

Strange Opera Bugs with li:first-line

While trying out the latest Opera 7.60 preview, I ran into a couple of of weird CSS bugs. It turns out they’ve both been around a while—one since 7.5 and one since 7.2. And they’re both related to problems with li:first-line.

In CSS, :first-line lets you apply style to (not surprisingly) the first line of an element. So if you say something like li:first-line {color: red} you should see the first line of every list element turn red. It’s got fairly wide support at this point—even IE 5.5 can handle it—but it seems some bugs crept into Opera 7.

The first one I noticed was fairly simple: If you have something in the form:

<ul>
  <li><a href="somewhere">Link</a></li>
</ul>
<p>More text<p>

…and you apply style to li:first-line, then the underlining for the link continues to the end of the page. Here’s an example of case 1.

Then there’s the really weird one. Read the rest of this entry »

Working around the censors

I saw a truck this morning with a license plate that read:

After I tried to puzzle it out for a bit, I suddenly realized…

It’s pig latin.

I had a good laugh after that!

Proto-Autobots

I found this ad from 1972 while looking through old comic books. At first I just found it interesting in a proto-Transformers sort of way, but then I looked more closely at it:

It actually uses the phrasing, “more (car) than meets the eye!”

Netscape: Re-Clutter the Web

CNET has posted a write-up of AOL’s new Netscape prototype based on Firefox, as well as a screenshot. It seems to be a combination of Firefox + theme + bundled extensions… plus a mode that embeds Internet Explorer for compatibility.

There are some nice ideas: adapting Firefox’s RSS capabilities to create a headline ticker, for instance, and the Firefox team has been talking about bundling extensions since it was called Phoenix. As for the embedded IE mode… on one hand it provides a convenient solution to the biggest criticism laid on all non-IE browsers: they don’t render pages exactly the way IE does. But it comes at the cost of all the security risks inherent in IE itself. It does remind me of the “View with Gecko” option Konqueror used to have (and probably still does on some systems).

But the clutter… The sheer number of buttons, icons, widgets etc. in that screenshot is staggering. Even after installing the web developer extension I don’t think I have that many buttons on Firefox. 3+ buttons on the tab bar, 3 icons on each tab…. I hope that CNET was just enabling every feature they could find to get them all in one screenshot, but if AOL is trying to bill it as “easier” than Firefox (which was created with a simple user interface as a design goal), they’ve got to try another approach.

Update (via WaSP): It seems BetaNews has more information on the dual-engine setup. Apparently they do have security settings to mitigate the IE issues… but then so does IE, and we all know how well that’s worked. Also, another screenshot, which looks even more cluttered than CNET’s. I think this will be a browser that requires you to run it maximized at 2000×1500. (Also of note: Firefox developer Blake Ross’ Open Letter to Netscape and Henrik Gemal’s collection of screenshots.)

Further Update: MozillaZine has posted a more thorough review.

No Serenity in April

Slightly old news, but worth a post for people who (like me) hadn’t already seen it. Apparently the marketroids at Fox have decided to delay Serenity until Fall, scheduling it to open September 30, 2005.

The good news is that, according to Joss Whedon, it’s purely scheduling. (The original release date put it barely three weeks ahead of Star Wars: Episode III, after all.) “There’s no reworking the end, no reshoots, no ‘does it have to be in space?’”

The bad news: the wait time just doubled. There’s already too little Firefly as it is. Then there’s the question of a Farscape feature film: conventional wisdom has it that studios will be watching to see how well Serenity does before committing to anything. This will probably further delay anything on that front.

*Sigh* Serenity was the main movie I was looking forward to next spring.

A little scripting humor

After updating some links, the following dialogue occurred to me:

Sallah: Indy, why does the web… move?
Indiana: Give me the URL.
(The location looks like a Python script)
Indiana: Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?
Sallah. ASP. Very dangerous. You go first.

(Actually, I have to credit Katie for the Python reference. The first and last lines just popped into my head, though.)

Outlook Viruses Trash Non-Outlook Mailboxes

Mozilla developer Ben Goodger writes about losing his inbox to the latest virus… despite not using any vulnerable software. Apparently he’s been getting over 10,000 virus-laced messages every day, and with the four-day weekend they built up to the point that Thunderbird wasn’t able to handle the influx. (Imagine having to filter out 770 megabytes of junk every day, and having that build up over several days.)

Sure, the the pre-release Thunderbird still has problems dealing with very large folders, but 770 MB/day? Even Gmail only gives you 1 GB of total storage. I can’t think of any reasonable expectation that any mail client should have to deal with that at today’s level of data richness. Maybe in the future when we’re sending full-motion video on a regular basis, but not when most email is text with maybe some formatting and a couple of small images.

It’s just staggering that, even though the main email worms depend on Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, and Internet Explorer to spread themselves and infect new hosts, they can still damage systems that don’t use those programs!

Super-Spawn: Rogues

While working on my Flash site last night, I noticed something interesting: several of the Flash’s classic Rogues Gallery have children.

The Trickster was the first: he discovered he had a 12-year-old son by an ex-girlfriend. (Neither Billy nor his mother has appeared since this story, which was part of 1998’s “New Year’s Evil” event.)

The Weather Wizard was next. Early in his run on the book, Geoff Johns introduced an ex-girlfriend of Wally’s who had an infant son with lightning-based powers. He turned out to be the result of a rebound one-night stand with the Weather Wizard (in his civilian ID, of course) just after she and Wally had broken up.

And now, with Identity Crisis, Captain Boomerang has a long-lost adult or teenaged son… who looks like he’ll be taking over the “family business.” Who his mother is remains to be revealed, though the next issue of either IC or The Flash seems likely.

Sad Holidays?

No photo, but we saw this sign on a bus:

HAPPY HOLIDAYS
NOT IN SERVICE

Hopefully not an omen…

Pinning down Identity Crisis

With the Top’s history featuring prominently in the current Flash tie-in to Identity Crisis, I realized it’s possible to narrow down just when the flashbacks in IC take place. I’m not very familiar with the satellite-era Justice League, but I have tracked down, read and, yes, catalogued the entire Barry Allen run of The Flash.

In Identity Crisis #2, Green Arrow states that it was a few months after Iris died. Iris died in Flash vol.1 #275, and the storyline wasn’t really resolved until #284, when Barry trapped her killer on the wrong side of a time machine. In Flash vol.2 #215, Barry writes about an event that took place a week after the Top’s ghost was excorcised from Barry’s father. That storyline ran from #297 (the car crash in which Henry Allen’s heart stopped) to #303 (getting rid of the Top). Since this was clearly after the *ahem* incident, we can narrow it down to taking place between Flash #284 and Flash #297.

(This has got to have been the most fanboyish post I’ve made here…)

Waiting for the Trade

The current tenuous situation with Fallen Angel reminds me of one of those curiosities of the comic book market: the relationship between episodes in magazine form and longer stories in book form.

Most comics in the US/Canadian market are released as individual issues, with maybe 22 pages of story and a bunch of ads. Longer works are often released as trade paperbacks (TPBs), but often don’t sell as well because, let’s face it, $19.95 is a much bigger chunk of change than $2.50. However, many series are collected into TPBs once the publisher figures the original issues have mostly been tapped out, often adding additional material like sketches, character designs, or occasionally an entire epilogue. (Kingdom Come and Death: The High Cost of Living both used that trick.) Advantages: they fit on a shelf, they’re often better paper and more durable, you can get an entire 6-part story in one chunk… and most importantly, they can fit on bookstores’ shelves, bringing them to an entirely new audience.

During the 1990s, only the most popular storylines would get the TPB treatment, but as the graphic novel market has grown, the trend has been toward collecting every issue of a series, so that whether you get the original issues or the collections, you still get everything. This has led to two controversial phenomena: writing for the trade and waiting for the trade. Read the rest of this entry »

Internet Explorer: Unsafe at any speed

Netcraft reports on a series of malicious banner ads using a vulnerability in Internet Explorer 6 to spread the Bofra virus. Clicking on the banners sends you to a website that uses the recently-discovered IFRAME vulnerability to infect your computer. Of note are the facts that there is no patch for this yet, and XP SP2 is affected (whoops, I misread that part).

The Register found the ads on their own website and identified the source as ad server Falk AG. They have pulled Falk AG’s ads from their rotation and apologized to their readers. Netcraft adds that Falk AG’s clients include high-profile sites such as A&E, NBC, and Sony. The ad company has issued a statement, but the page currently consists of the line “Server Engine: Application error.”

Update 3pm: The statement from Falk [archive.org] is readable now. Apparently someone broke into one of their network load balancers and reconfigured it to redirect ads to the malicious site. Once they discovered it, they shut down the affected system and started checking the rest. The malicious ads ran for a total of about 6 hours on Saturday.

Update Tuesday: the Internet Storm Center has posted a write-up of the attack response.

Of course, there are several ways to protect yourself from this type of attack.

Quantum Spam?

OK, chalk this one up in the “What the heck?” column:

The limitation of the Photon Hypothesis

According to the electromagnetic theory of light, its energy is related to the amplitude of the electric field of the electromagnetic wave, W=eE^2(where E is the amplitude). It apparently has nothing to do with the light’s circular frequency v.

To explain the photoelectric effect, Einstein put forward the photon hypothesis. His paper hypothesized light was made of quantum packets of energy called photons. Each photon carried a specific energy related to its circular frequency v, E=hv. This has nothing to do with the amplitude of the electromagnetic wave.

And so on. It triggered a number of spam tests, including forged headers, a failed SPF check, and appearances in both Razor and DCC, which means a lot of other people got the same mail. It’s plain text, no attachments, and the only link in the message is to a physics site. As near as I can tell, someone’s just randomly sending out a physics paper by email. That leads to the question: why?

Well, the state bird is the Quayle…

The local Ralphs has been remodeling. New tiles, new signs, new carts, everything’s been rearranged—heck, they even have a new logo. So keep in mind that this isn’t a leftover sign, it’s brand new:

I’d say Dan Quayle left more of a mark on America than we might think.

P-U!

We spotted this half-lit CompUSA sign a few nights ago:

I hope that doesn’t reflect the store’s contents or service!

Mirrormask is going to Sundance

Neil Gaiman reports that Mirrormask will show at the Sundance Film Festival in January! (No word yet on an actual release date.)

Now, let’s not be hasty

Marvel is suing City of Heroes’ makers for copyright and trademark infringement. What’s that, you say? The game doesn’t have any Marvel characters or lookalikes built-in? Of course not—they’re suing because it’s technically possible for players to design a character with a similar costume and use a similar name. Sure, it’s against the terms of service, and they try to stop it when they find it, but people do it anyway.

But note: the game makers aren’t the ones doing the infringement. As I understand it, the character designer is rather like HeroMachine: you pick a body type, colors for different parts of the costume, accessories and masks, etc. So sure, you can create a brick, make him green and give him purple shorts… but it’s not as if they built in textures and symbols specifically to make a Spider-Man costume.

I’ve only read about half the comments on the thread where I found this, but many of them seem to misunderstand the situation as if CoH were the ones designing or providing patterns for the knock-off characters. If someone puts out a “How to Draw the X-Men” book without authorization, then sure, you sue them, but if they sell “How to Draw Super-Heroes” and people can apply those skills to Wolverine, you don’t have a case… and you definitely don’t sue the people who made the pencils and paper!

Blazing Firefox

Well, Firefox 1.0 is taking the world by storm! So much, in fact, that the regular download sites are completely swamped. Even the FTP site has been hard to reach—I can get smaller files, but larger ones have been stopping halfway through. Update 12:00 pm: It looks like they’ve solved some of their bandwidth issues, but it’s still slow going.

If you can’t download it from the link above, I suggest using BitTorrent. Unlike downloading through the web, the more people download through BitTorrent, the faster it goes, because the bandwidth is spread around. Be sure to leave BitTorrent running when the download is done so you can help other people get it. I’ve made copies of the .torrent files for the English-language installers:

• Firefox 1.0 for Windows Torrent
• Firefox 1.0 for Linux Torrent
• Firefox 1.0 for Mac Torrent

Remember, always verify software you download from the net. There’s nothing to stop someone from putting up a fake link to Firefox that actually installs something else. Mozilla has provided GPG, MD5 and SHA1 signatures at their FTP site which you can use to make sure you got the right installer.

Fallen Angel Gets Reprieve

Peter David’s excellent Fallen Angel comic, previously doomed by excellent critical reviews (and low sales) to an untimely death at #18, has achieved the impossible: a two-issue reprieve!

The series will skip a month after the conclusion of the current storyline in #18, and Issues #19-20 will pick up in February and March. These will feature a self-contained two-part story in which the enigmatic Angel meets a pair of classic Peter David/George Perez characters: Sachs and Violens. (And yes, that is a George Perez cover you’re looking at.) Newsarama has the details.

If these issues do well enough, it just might be enough to get Fallen Angel off the chopping block. If not… well, 20 issues is a good run in today’s market, where series are canceled after less than a year.

The present storyline, “Hurlyburly,” began in issue #15 and runs through #18 (out next month). It promises to finally reveal the origins of the title character and the city of Bete Noir. There’s a TPB of issues #1-6. No word yet on a second collection, though increased sales on the first, and on the current issues, should make it more likely.

Map Crazy!

OK, one more election-related post. This one comes from The Big Picture, and features links to various maps of election results. Comparisons of state vs. county maps, looks at which candidates were favored by people in other countries, comparisons to past elections and to pre-Civil War America… and of course the comedy (including the redistricted Jesusland and the United States of Canada).

Interestingly, it’s missing the county-by-county Purple America, though it does have a link to the state-by-state one.

Found via WebWord.

Coming Soon to a Computer Near You!

Next week is going to be interesting.

It starts Monday with the anticipated release of Fedora Core 3, which is expected to form the base of Red Hat’s next Enterprise Linux. I’ve got quite a few systems running Fedora Core 2 between home and work, and while I won’t be upgrading everything at once, it looks like it should be less painful than the upgrade from 1 to 2.

Then there’s two releases on Tuesday. Most anticipated is the final release of Firefox 1.0. I’ve lost count of the systems I’ve installed Firefox on, and I’m very much looking forward to 1.0!

Finally, also Tuesday, is the monthly collection of Microsoft security patches. Off to the land of installations and reboots!

Of course, Mandrake released a new version last week, Apple posted a minor update to Mac OS yesterday, and Yellow Dog Linux just released 4.0, so it’s definitely upgrade season.

Comical Third Parties

Wow… a new issue of Rising Stars! To be honest, it was a bit of a let-down. Usually JMS is better at showing, rather than telling. He’s infamous for laboriously laying groundwork in the B-plots and character moments of what seem like “ordinary” stand-alone stories, then kicking the arc into high gear and making use of it all. He did it with Babylon 5 and Crusade, with the first arc of Rising Stars, seems to be taking the same approach in Supreme Power, and from what I’ve heard (though I’ve seen very little of it) he did the same with Jeremiah as well. If you’ve seen B5 once the story got going, go back and look at some of the first season episodes, and you’ll be surprised how early some elements are established.

This issue, however, though it had some nice moments, was basically a plot summary. “Poet tells the story of…” It seemed an odd narrative choice, particularly for an issue so near the end of the story (#22 of 24) and for the first issue to hit the shelves in nearly two years. Maybe it’ll read better in context.

Anyway, that’s not what I really wanted to talk about. What’s interesting is that in this issue, one of the Specials runs for President. It reminded me of something about the way comic books tell campaign stories. When a fictional character is in the race (or the office), he (it usually is a he) is almost always running under one of three circumstances:

• As an independent.
• On a fictional third-party ticket.
• On an unidentified party’s ticket.

As we all know, third party candidates are rarely high-profile, and they rarely get significant numbers of votes, and I don’t think one has ever won the office*. Yet in comics, it happens all the time. Of course, heat vision, teleporters, and people who wear purple tights to fight crime are also commonplace. Read the rest of this entry »

Purple America

Veeery interesting! By now everyone’s seen maps colored in red/blue by state, which make the vote look very regional (the South and Midwest pull red, and the northeast, the West Coast, and the Great Lakes area pull blue). A map by county makes the country look extremely red, until you realize that many of the blue counties are the more populous ones, highlighting the fact that the split is primarily urban/rural.

A Princeton professor has taken the election results and produced a shaded map by county, with a full red-purple-blue continuum. Looking at this map, it’s clear we’re a lot more integrated than we think we are.

Hat tip: from a comment on peterdavid.net.

Do the @#!$ Math

Despite Bush’s appeal to Kerry supporters [in his acceptance speech], Cheney said the popular vote victory gave Bush a mandate and the Bush White House would continue pushing for the Republicans’ “clear agenda.”

Excuse me, but how the #@*! is a 51% victory a “mandate?”

In any other race, that would be called “barely squeaking by.”

Yes, it’s unusual for a presidential candidate to actually get more than 50% of the popular vote, but that still means 49% of the voters preferred someone else. If you broke a cookie in half, and got a 51%/48% split with 1% of crumbs, you wouldn’t notice the difference.

Last night there were state propositions hovering at around 53%/46%, and the LA Times thought they were too close to call. That kind of victory in a state race would never be considered a mandate, or a repudiation, etc. — it would have passed by the skin of its proverbial teeth. A 66% win? That would be a mandate. A 60% win? Maybe. But 51%? That’s a sign that you’d better look at what people wanted from your opponent, not a blank check to ignore half the population of the country.

Political Connections

Perhaps you’ve heard of electoral-vote.com. Over the past few months, the site’s author has been collecting data from various polls and trying to predict which candidate is likely to carry each state. Each state’s support is classified as strong, weak, or barely there, or a straight tie, making it a more useful gauge than a simple red/blue map.

Yesterday’s data showed a strong win for Kerry, 298 electoral votes to 231. This morning it shows a virtual tie: 262 for Kerry, 261 for Bush.

This morning the “votemaster” also writes about dealing with a simultaneous denial-of-service attack and Slashdotting (or “flash crowd” as he prefers to call it), and he talked about his previous Slashdotting experience… with a rebuttal to claims that Linux was stolen from Minix.

Yes, the “votemaster” is none other than Andrew Tanenbaum, author of the MINIX operating system, one-time teacher of Linus Torvalds, and an interviewee for Samizdat, the Microsoft-funded study that attempted to prove that Linux couldn’t possibly have been developed honestly. Tanenbaum was disturbed by the leading questions, and incensed when his responses were taken out of context and used to support a position he categorically refuted. He and others posted rebuttals before the book even saw print, and by the time it was actually published, it was essentially a nonissue.

Smallville Traffic Leveling Off

I suppose it was too much to hope that the traffic spike from Smallville’s Flash guest spot would translate into a long-term increase, but it seems to have dropped to normal levels after 1½ weeks:

Daily traffic for Flash: Those Who Ride the Lightning (October 2004)

Still, it was a pretty huge spike, and I’m seeing a lot of new referrers as well. At one point the top non-search-engine referrer was actually Television Without Pity (although they seemed a bit confused about the reference they were linking to — they picked an alternate universe for Bart’s “start a league” line instead of, say, the Justice League). Lots of Smallville and Superman forums, sites, blog and LiveJournal posts linked to Bart Allen (Impulse/Kid Flash), Bart Allen (juvenile delinquent) and Superman/Flash races. It’s always nice to get some exposure outside of the usual sources, even if it is only temporary.

Checks, Balances, and Civility in Politics

One thing that always stuck in my head about government, way back to elementary school, was the idea of checks and balances. You see, our government was designed deliberately to prevent any one person or group from getting too much power and becoming a de facto monarch (or oligarch). For instance, Congress passes laws, but they don’t go into effect until the President signs them. The President is commander-in-chief of our armed forces, but only Congress can declare war. The House and Senate are designed with different representations so that neither the most populous nor the most numerous states can overwhelm the others.

This principle extends further. Competing businesses keep each other in check (word of the day: free market). Business and government keep each other in check through lobbyists and regulators. Conservatives and liberals, playing tug-of-war, should together keep us trying new things without completely losing track of the old things we should keep. This can usually be managed by having one party in charge of the White House and the other in charge of Congress. The last thing you want is for the extreme right or extreme left to control all branches of government. (We’ve seen what a conservative-controlled country is like over the last few years, and a lot of people don’t like it.)

So it was interesting to see J. Michael Straczynski (a.k.a. JMS), best known as the creator of Babylon 5, talking about the breakdown of civility in politics in terms of the breakdown of checks and balances. If you have 10 minutes to read this tonight — especially if you’re an American citizen of voting age — I recommend that you do. You may nod in agreement, or you may shake your head in disbelief, but it should at least make you think.

Distributed Blog Spam

Yesterday morning, I remarked to Katie that it seemed odd that with the vast number of “zombie” computers infected with remote control programs via viruses, trojans, spyware, etc., their primary use so far has been sending spam. After 7-odd years of distributed computing projects ranging from demonstrating weaknesses in encryption schemes to searching for extra-terrestrial radio signals via SETI@Home, and reports that access to zombie nets is selling on the black market, you’d think someone out there would be trying to crack into the DoD or something. (That last link refers to phishing attacks, but the current form of phishing is very tightly coupled with spam.)

Last night I saw proof that zombies are at least branching out a little: they’re not just being used for email spam, but they’re also being used for comment spam. Starting around 8:30, someone started posting pairs of comments every 20-30 minutes. The content and links was identical each time, except for some random numbers in the (probably bogus) email and at the end of the body… but the IP address was different each time.

I caught it around 10:00, added “poker” to the list of moderation triggers, figured they’d give up when they saw their comments weren’t posting, and after another 3 pair (that’s not a legal hand, is it?) I just closed comments on the two posts.

Update 6pm: After a long afternoon dealing with server recovery issues, I checked my email and found about 40 “Please approve…” notices, starting around 1:45 and running all afternoon. All from the same blog spammer. A bit more aggressive than yesterday’s, because they hit a new post every time, but this batch all went straight into moderation. You’d think after you posted 20 comments and none of them showed up, you’d get the clue that it’s not worth posting 20 more…

Update 9am: I installed a plugin last night to block those comments from even reaching the moderation queue. Then laaate last night I noticed that it was screwing up comments with apostrophes, so I disabled it. The moderation notices started coming in immediately. 60 of them from around midnight to about 6am this morning. And none were ever displayed on the site. (Thank you, WordPress!)

The Geek Factor

I saw this CNET headline — Microsoft battles piracy with free software — and my first thought was that they were using some GPL’ed/BSD’ed/etc. tool for tracking or some such. No, they’re just giving away free software to people who will let them remotely verify that their OS installation is legit. Which makes perfect sense once you get out of the open-source/Free software (with a capital F) mindset.

In other news, I feel like I’ve spent the entire month of October rebuilding, recovering, restoring, repairing, reinstalling and retrofitting computers.

Strike that. I have spent the entire month doing that. *Sigh*

Secret Origins

I more-or-less randomly wondered about the origin of the phrase, “My hed iz pastede on yay!” and did a quick google search (the phrase + “origin”). This led me to the Google Meme Observatory, which I am hereby posting so that I can come back and look at it when I have time to, y’know, look at it.

As for the phrase, someone had tracked it down to a particular ex-LJ community, and found the original April 16 post in which someone coined the term regarding an apparently bad image manip featuring the faces of Merry and Pippin. One of the replies: “you do realize you’ve started a goddamn PLAGUE with that expression over at livejournal?” Prophetic words, indeed.

Also worth a link: The Fanfiction Glossary

Smallville Spike

Wow. I expected a spike in traffic after the Flash appeared on last night’s Smallville, but I wasn’t expecting a three-fold increase!

It’s all on the Flash site — no sign of spillover onto this blog, for instance — but Bart Allen’s 15 minutes of fame have propelled him to the #3 spot (right after the Teen Titans and Raven).

With luck I answered people’s questions about the Flash, Bart Allen, and just who is faster in a race between the Flash and Superman. With more luck, some of them will be intrigued enough to come back. With even more luck, some of them will pick up the comic to see what they’re missing.

Read the rest of this entry »

Spoiler-free FPKW Review

Three words: Holy frelling dren!

Alternate review: “Boom. Boom boom boom. Boom boom. Boom! Have a nice day!”

Mailing Mishap

I’ve been getting a lot of what Katie calls “concrete spam” (i.e. junk mail) from charities over the last few months. Eventually I’ll track down who sold my address. But this was an interesting one because they seem to think I’ve gone back to college:

What, did my evil psychic twin get a doctorate over the Internet?

I’ll have to look for this on other mailers and see if anyone else thinks I’m a professor. That may help track down one source.

Strange Searches

Some odd searches through which people have found this site over the last two weeks:

• “vice presidential debate drinking game” somehow hit Fallacious Arguments, despite the fact that the post never mentions a drinking game.
• “breakdown girl” hit Donna Troy via Yahoo images search. Somehow it seems appropriate.
• “folsom street fair 2004 pictures” and similar phrases directed several people to Living in Middle Earth, though I can’t imagine why.
• “sugar packet” — I think someone was looking for real sugar (image search again).
• “rhyming poems by katherine foreman” hit (big surprise) Katie’s Rhyming Poems. (What’s it like to be famous?)
• “space pirate amazon ninja catgirl” sounds ridiculous, wich is exactly why I posted about the game
• “jesse quick in love” actually hit the speed force and Jesse’s mother, but not Jesse Quick herself.
• “how to steal flash” brings up the Flash Museum. I have to wonder what they were actually looking for, though.
• “xxx hermione” and similar (some of them rather explicit) — WTF? These hit Harry Potter Titles I’d Like To See.

Unfortunately there are too many phrases for the stats program I use to show anything that hit less than twice — and that’s where the really odd ones to show up! I’ve skimmed the logs a bit, and some of the choice items include: Read the rest of this entry »

Airport Extreme vs. Linux

One of the reasons our Powerbook stays in Mac OS most of the time (aside from the fact that It Just Works™) is that Yellow Dog Linux 3.0 didn’t have drivers for Airport Extreme, so it can’t connect to the wireless network. I had hoped that YDL 4 (just released) would resolve this — perhaps the driver was only available for the 2.6 kernel, or something.

I finally started looking, and that’s not the case. It seems that the Airport Extreme chipset manufacturer, Broadcom, refuses to release Linux drivers or to release specs to allow anyone else to write Linux drivers.

I don’t expect it to do any good, but I signed my first online petition.

Ah, well, I can do almost everything under Mac OS, and for those occasions that I actually need Linux, I can always go solo or plug in a cable, though it does limit where I can hook it up.

Jeweled Symmetry

Now that I’ve got the complete Alias comic book in TPB form, I’m selling the individual issues on eBay. In getting that set up, I was reminded of an interesting piece of symmetry between Alias and another Bendis series, Powers.

Both feature ex-heroes who now work as “normal” detectives. Christian Walker is a homicide cop, and Jessica Jones is a private investigator. Early on we learn that Walker’s hero identity was Diamond. When we finally get the details of Jessica’s back story, it turns out she went by the name Jewel.

The similarities pretty much end there, though. Despite the names and circumstances, the characters, stories, and overall feel of the two books are quite different. Alias is “comic book noir,” and Powers is a cop show in a city overrun with super-powers. Alias tends to be far more character-driven. Jessica gets into trouble during investigations, but it’s her and the people she’s looking for who are most affected. Powers works on a bigger scale, looking at superheroes as celebrities, and when things go wrong, they affect everyone.

(I’ve got a dozen or so issues of Powers up for auction as well — for the same reason!)

Points for honesty?

This showed up in the spamtraps today:

Subject: Truth of the matter

Dear Sir,

This letter can only define Nigeria Scam, a.k.a. 419. If this mail look like scam to you delete it, we are looking for serious minded person.

As we all know, top officials do loot funds out of the country with non-residence foreigners. When they try and fail, the world hears it as fraud/scam, but when they go through, nobody or a newspaper writes it.

This trade is huge here and people are making lots of money out there in most foreign countries. Though the government are mapping out sophisticated strategies to checkmate unauthorized dealers. From the president to the cleaner in the house, they are all into this trade.

And so on.

This has got to be the most brazen variation I’ve seen — and the first one that admits what it is up front. Of course it goes on to try to convince you that no, this one’s the real thing, we’re only trying to cheat other people, not you, because you wouldn’t fall for that sort of thing, would you?

I’m trying to figure out whether the proper response to this is “WTF” or “O_o” or just “Unbe-flipping-lievable.”

Warspamming Update

In an update to the earlier warspamming story, the defendant was convicted. [Edit: originally linked to Yahoo! News]

Apparently, this is the first conviction obtained under CAN-SPAM.

(Found via The War on Spam.)

Reusable space travel is here!

SpaceShipOne has won the X-Prize! This morning it completed its second trip to the edge of the atmosphere within one week (the prize stipulates it must be within two weeks!)

The Scaled Composites team m