K-Squared Ramblings

Pressing Buttons

You’ve probably heard by now that AOL and Yahoo are preparing a system by which large-volume email senders can pay to get their mail sent on to subscribers. You probably haven’t heard that it’s not just pay-to-send so much as it’s pay-to-get-accredited. Senders pay a company called Goodmail to say “we won’t send spam,” Goodmail checks them out, and Yahoo and AOL use Goodmail to bypass their regular spam filters.

This, of course, hasn’t stopped a flood of knee-jerk reactions. (via Spamroll)

What’s funny is that this conundrum has been almost exactly like the controversy two years ago over Microsoft choosing Bonded Sender as an accreditation service/whitelist for Hotmail—knee jerking and all.

Back then I wrote the following article and never got around to posting it. Thanks to AOL, it’s finally topical again. Sadly, I haven’t had to change much to bring it up to date. Read the rest of this entry »

Quick Question

Please read the following exchange, and tell me whether you think the response is inflammatory:

So what is opera? i thought it was gecko as well?

Opera Software is a company in Norway that makes its own, closed source, niche browser for desktops and small devices. They’re not based on Gecko.

(For those not familiar with it, Gecko is the “back-end” part of Mozilla, which is open-source. It’s the engine that handles displaying web pages in Mozilla, Firefox, and other spin-offs.)

I’ll link to the source after I’ve gotten some responses, but the context is a post containing browser traffic statistics.

Flame Warriors

I found this site quite amusing: A Netizen’s Guide to Flame Warriors

At the moment there are about 80 types of forum belligerents in the list - each has an illustration and a brief description.