Posts by Christian Vest Hansen

Site schools world+dog in browsing history pilfering

Not "every website" in browsing history

"a website that demonstrates just how easy it is for a webmaster to detect every website contained in your browser history."

It cannot detect every website or URL in your browsing history. It loads a long list of domain names, such as http://startpanic.com/db/db_en.txt, and then creates a hidden iframe that contains various links built from those domain names. Then it checks the computed style attributes on those links to see which have been visited.

So, it may detect that you have been to youtube, but it has no way to tell which videos you saw or how many.

Verity Stob's Big Fat Geek Yuletide Quiz of the Year Part 2

Answers Approved

Who needs questions when the answers are so great?

I see before me a plethora of situations wherein one of these answers would find apt application. Hopefully they don't install a Yahoo! Tool! Bar! upon use.

Nine in ten emails now spam

@Jason

"What we need to do is get the people behind the spam the places who buy it as advertising and name and shame them."

Careful now. Let's take a thought experiment: imagine we live in a world where every company who's product s advertised for with spam will get summarily punished. Now, if you really didn't like some company, you could send out some billion spam messages advertising products from that company, and have the government smack them around a bit with a large fine.

No, we need to keep the heat on the spammers, like we do today but regretably/preferably even more so. And we need the ISPs to somehow facilitate that their spam-churning customers get a stern talking-to.

Norwegians spill Opera 10 alpha

Re:3 attempts

Mine worked on the first try, but I've heard others report an unstable performance.

If I'm not mistaken, some of the tests are also about the speed of rendering, which in turn can depend on the hardware in use. Still, It's alpha software so bugs are to be expected, but even so I'm finding it remarkably stable and it is currently my primary browser for home use.

Nuke-nobbler raygun 747 in first full-power blast

Tin foil hats...

... for the misiles.

I mean, surely it is possible to fashion a surface material for the rockets, that is able to reflect the majority of the energy away, no?

HP breaks Japanese excessive packaging record

Dell can beat that

I've seen Dell deliver a single RAM block for a laptop, not by sending it in a box, but by sending two people carrying it.

At least the block wasn't wrapped in excessive cardboard.

Paris could teach them a thing or two about cutting down on excessive wrapping.

Sun may or may not be about to obliterate Oracle and Microsoft

The I-don't-want-to-think crowd

It might save your ass and make some things easier to develop in low-load scenarios, but just be careful your dead-locks don't turn into spin-locks when two or more competing transactions keep rolling each other back. Good luck debugging that.

Apple account hijacks spread to developers

Well, at least...

... they didn't send the old password to the crook, but instead generated a new random password and sent that.

So even though it is bad amateurish practice to gleefully surrender peoples accounts to strangers like that, we know that at least a) the crook cannot get the original password which might be used elsewhere (like net banks) and b) you know something fishy is up when the password unexpectedly changes.

Paris, because she knows the importance of controlling who has access to what.

CE giants pitch yet another wireless HD standard

60 GHz band?

"[WiHD] operates in the 60GHz band"

Which, if I'm not mistaken, is the microwave part of the spectrum. That way, you won't run out of popcorn when you watch your wireless HD movies. Just keep the kids and pets out of that 10 meter reach or enclose it in a faraday cage before turning it on.