Both a new Harry Potter book and a new Harry Potter movie will shortly be released. Since Potter mayhem is at an all time high, why it’s time to write a computer virus to take advantage of all the people prepared to risk their computer to get an insight to it all.

The Hairy-A worm will create users from the Potter novels on your machine in addition to putting down a word document HarryPotter-TheDeathlyHallows.doc containing a message that Harry is dead. Worse it copies itself to USB storage devices and hops a ride to all your mates/school etc. Oh and it redirects the Internet Explorer home page to an Amazon HP spoof book page.

Read all the details at Sophos. If it’s all the same to you lot, I’ll wait for the book. 🙂

Checking my inbox this morning I found myself reading a “news letter” from Panda security. (I think I may have registered for this one at some time in the distant past) Anyway, their headline was “84% of emails received are SPAM*” (* Data from the Internauts Association .)

At first I just deleted it and went on deleting the spam that my 2 spam systems missed. Then it kind of sank in and I started rummaging though my trash looking for it. 84% of email is spam! that means that for every 100 emails you get, roughly 16 of them are legit, and the rest are trying to get you to buy questionable tablets or increase your organ size or buy some stock so that the email writers can sell their shares when you’ve made them worth something. (called a pump and dump).

Currently (in the past 24 hours) I’ve been getting inundated by spam, 3 times more than normal so I have no trouble believing that at all. In fact in my case currently, I’d put my spam ratio at around 92%. It’s a shame that something as useful as email has been relegated to an annoyance because of greedy knob heads.

Here is the funny bit though, I just received a spam email titled “Not all spam is spam. Some spam is kosher.” by some group by the name of “Tikkun” and they state that some email like political and non profit emails should be allowed as they are kind of public service stuff. The problem with his argument, is that email is worldwide.
Tikkun (in this instance) are a US political group. (or at least associated with one.) I’m in Australia. I don’t want my inbox filled with every political group in the world trying to convince me of their point of view. Heck, most of the time I don’t want my inbox filled with Australian politicos trying to sway my opinion to their cause. If I don’t think I know enough about something, I’ll research it. I don’t need help.
Likewise with the non profits, I don’t want the deaf foundation of America (just a made up example) trying to solicit money from me here in Australia. We have a deaf society of our own thank you. What it comes down to, is that email will be replaced with something else. (probably something that costs money) if it becomes useless as is slowly happening now. Money would solve the problem because if it cost money to send spam, it would no longer be viable. As it stands now, these people will kill the medium for everyone and something precious and undreamed of 50 years ago will have been lost.

In short, I’ll not be convinced that any unsolicited email isn’t spam until it can be limited to the region for which it is relevant, And probably not even then. Am I alone in that?

The w3c Validator has been a part of just about every bit of HTML/xHTML I’ve written in years now. So much so that I usually install a version locally to speed things up. To that end, I’ve installed the latest beta version of the validator on htmlfixit. The official stable version is 0.7.4, however the version running here is 0.8.0. It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s a completely different kettle of fish. Different better error message explanations, a new fresher look and so on.

Try it out, in the very least it’s great to see the direction they are heading in and while it may not be a “stable” release, it is certainly usable and in my brief experience so far quite beneficial. In particular the new explanations make it a worthwhile exercise all by themselves. The Validator has been added to the htmlfixit online tools menu for convenience. Unless I find some very good reason not to, I’ll be using this version to do all my validating from now on.

Apparently there is no end to the lengths spammers will go to fill your Inbox with stuff you don’t want from people you don’t know. Today I received an email with a PDF attachment. I’ve never received PDF spam before, never heard of it in fact. So I opened it to see what it was. Low and behold I was then encouraged to invest in some company or other. The same message that gets filtered hundreds of times a day by my mail server. Guess now my mail server software is going to have to be updated to take PDF files into account. A quick check of the news sites shows I’m not the only one who has received them.

We’ve not had a significant upgrade of our CMS backend in over a year and a half and we were falling prey to thousands of comment spam. (so much so that we had to disable the comment system about 10 months ago).

Today that changes and htmlfixit has a totally new backend. Comments should be open again (with spam protection and blacklists in place) and access to older articles is now much easier. (see the sidebar on the right hand side). There will be some fine tuning to come, but bear with us, we’ll get there in the end. If you have any suggestions as to the layout, feel free to use the contact form and let us know.

regards

Don and Frank
htmlfixit.com

Not so long ago we had a lovely open Forum here where there were no real restrictions and we all chatted happily. Then the spammers found our forum and filled it with ads and links in the hope of improving their Google ranking. The result of this was that the forum had to be restricted to registered users only which stopped the spam, but stopped Google spidering the pages as well. That loss of pages cost us hits, and advertising dollars that go towards the hosting of the site. To solve the problem we’ve updated the forum software. The new version has image capture on registration. It has email verification before allowing posts, and it has a much improved spam filtering back end. The point of all this is that we want to open the forum up to general browsing again and in fact have just done so. enjoy!

If I’ve come across a free tool online lately that I wish I’d written myself, it is this one. I was called upon recently to put a video online and embedded in a web page for a client so they could advertise it, and I needed to get it done ASAP. I was about to start hand writing code when I thought, ‘no I’ll give Google a chance first’ which I find myself doing allot nowadays. So anyway, I did a bit of searching and found this extremely well thought out and implemented online tool.

I’m still annoyed that I didn’t do this myself as I imagine it would be very popular and not that hard to knock together. The tool is called Embedded Media HTML Generator and it’s on the website of the University of California. You simply choose the format of the video you want to embed (from Flash, Quicktime, Real Media or Windows Media Video), you fill out the form detailing file names and locations as well as any optional settings and hit submit. You will then be presented with a heap of HTML code that can be inserted directly into your web page. Simple, easy and elegant. The only options they don’t provide are for choosing XHTML transitional or strict, but that’s easy enough to do by hand.