I was looking over the A List Apart redesign tonight – and it is a nice looking site. While surfing around it I found this article interesting. Here at HTMLfixit we have a couple of items we sell. Our counter and and our ipn product are for sale. We also give away a lot of counters and the download counter, and lots and lots of advice. Are we underselling ourselves? Fortunately we don’t need to feed our families with the proceeds, on the other hand, we do have expenses and dreams of doing bigger things. What do you think? Please comment.

Microsoft has a very good article explaining phishing, a common scheme to defraud people of their personal and financial information. Unfortunately despite a clear explanation and some solid advice on what to look for and what to do if you think you have been a victim of such activity, they miss the most critical step for avoidance – use plain text for reviewing emails.

The phishing emails use a two very common techniques: first, they use graphics from a legitimate website such as a bank, ebay or paypal to appear to be the real website. Second, they use something called uniform resource locator (url) masking to make a link appear to go to the legitimate site, while actually redirecting elsewhere. Both of these techniques only work if you view your email in Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML) format. If you disable HTML formatting and view the email as plain text, the mismatched url’s are immediately apparent and you will be much less likely to fall for the scam.

In Outlook Express for example, you can select to review your email in plain text mode by clicking on Tools, then Options and selecting the Read tab. Check the box next to “Read all messages in plain text.”

We highly recommend that you not use either Outlook or Outlook Express for email. You will do much better for many reasons with Thunderbird, a free email client available for download from Mozilla. Even in Thunderbird, you need to choose plain text by clicking on View, Message Body As and then selecting Plain Text. Note that Thunderbird also offers an intermediate option called simple html which will apply basic formatting, but avoid the display of images and other items such as counters embedded in the emails to detect if you are reading the emails.

Some commercial emailer’s insist on sending email in html format. We encourage the avoidance of these sources. Most however offer you the option of selecting plain text. Plain text is much more bandwidth intelligent and will help you avoid phishing and many other difficulties not discussed in this article.

Remember: plain text

Ironically, you must use Microsoft Internet Explorer to obtain updates for other Microsoft products such as your operating system. If you visit, for example, using Mozilla Firefox, you are greeted with the following:

Thank you for your interest in obtaining updates from our site.
To use this site, you must be running Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 or later.
To upgrade to the latest version of the browser, go to the Internet Explorer Downloads website.

Problems with Internet Explorer are regular and pervasive. It is time to force Microsoft to permit you to update your operating system without requiring you to use it’s own faulty browser. For example, what if you have been the target of a browser hi-jacking? Should you not be able to install updates to your operating system without having to use the hi-jacked browser?

Yikes, the United States Copyright Office requested comments on whether requiring users to utilize Microsoft Internet Explorer to pre-register commercial copyrighted material would pose any problems. Well duh — of course it would because it would mandate that individuals and companies boot up a security hazard.

This is what the request for comments said:

The Copyright Office is supplementing its Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on preregistration of copyright claims, issued July 22, 2005. That notice proposed procedures to preregister any unpublished work being prepared for commercial distribution that is in a class of works determined by the Register of Copyrights to have had a history of pre-release infringement. Today’s notice seeks information as to whether persons filing the electronic-only preregistration form prescribed by the Copyright Office will experience difficulties if it is necessary to use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser in order to preregister a work.

Fortunately Tim Berners-Lee, Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, is once again advocating for open source – vendor neutral standards, especially from the United States Government. He filed a comment that is posted at W3C and was filed with the Copyright Office before the August 22nd deadline.

Perhaps the ultimate irony is that the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT), part of the United States Department of Homeland Security, established in 2003 to protect the nation’s Internet infrastructure, has itself recommended against the use of Internet Explorer as recently as June of 2004. Indeed just this month, CERT published yet another security alert regarding Microsoft Internet Explorer security holes.

Come-on Copyright Office, get a clue!

According to an article at News.com the National Science Foundation plans to spend 7.5 million in grant funds to further develop the concept of e-voting. In a day when I can walk up to any ATM in the world and withdraw a few bucks, it seems stupid that I have to leave work early to go to a polling place in my neighborhood. It is time for elections to be open for a few days and allow you the convenience of electonic voting. In fact, given the typical ATM setup with a security camera, etc., they will probably catch much more voter fraud.

According to a press release today, Google plans to ramp up to raise more capital. It says:
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – August 18, 2005 – Google Inc. (Nasdaq:
GOOG) announced today that it has filed a registration statement with
the Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed public offering
by the company of 14,159,265 shares of Class A common stock.

For those who missed the initial offering and currently regret it, perhaps it will free up some more shares. What it will not do is drop the price so long as Google continues to perform so profitably.

Google announced an ambitious project to scan entire libraries and make the work available on-line. They have apparently pulled back a bit from the project in light of some comments from the publishing industry. According to a googleblog article posted a few days ago, they are now allowing publishers to exclude works from the scanning (and indexing) process. You can read more about it at SouthofBoston.com.