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!”