The line between Blogging and news sites is in many cases becoming Gray and it is often hard to tell the difference between the two. While looking over HTMLfixIT, I was wondering if we should draw some distinction between those parts that focus on news and those that focused on our opinions of news. It was while doing this that I realised something important, there is no distinction between news and opinion any more. Every site, whether they consider themselves a “news” site or not, indulges in opinion to some degree or another. Even the choice of what news to report is the expression of an opinion. The opinion might be that reporting on certain types of stories will draw more visitors then others, or the choice of story might reflect the authors opinions of what is important or newsworthy, but they are both still opinions.

Take the main media’s focus on the situation in Iraq for example. How many of them focused on the death, bombings and kidnappings, and how many on the rebuilding, or the training of national troops, or the building of infrastructure like schools or hospitals? In fact the only sites covering the more positive aspects of the rebuilding are the “opinion” based Blogging sites. Isn’t it also the expression of an opinion when you only cover the sensationalist aspects of a story? Even if that opinion is that more people will read about those then the more positive aspects? In fact I’d go so far as to say that the stories of bravery and rebuilding in situations like Iraq or 9/11 are classed as “human interest” by the big media and relegated to the bottom of the heap as a result, but are they really not newsworthy?

Here at HTMLfixIT, we don’t deny that a good deal of what we write is opinion based on what we consider the news of the day in our chosen subject matter. After all, we are web developers writing a site that hopefully covers issues important to other web developers, and in that scenario, our opinions are a reflection of at least part of the industry to some degree or another. The majority of our articles start out with reporting the stories we consider important to our industry and then we discuss how we feel about them and invite comment from others. It is my suspicion that this is not that unusual a stance to take, most sites just don’t come out and make it clear that they too have a component of “opinion” in their own stories. To do so would be to indicate a bias and that word terrifies the marketing people at various media companies that provide “news” services. But don’t think for a moment that there is any escaping opinion in news. Human nature is to form opinions on various things around them, and surprisingly enough, most journalists are still human, although that’s a subject for some debate in itself.

So here at HTMLfixIT, we’ll keep on reporting the stories we consider important to our growing audience. We’ll continue to discuss or reflect our opinion of that news, and we’ll make no apologies for it. But we will never claim that there is no “opinion” in our news, and we’ll never go out of our way to word our opinion in a manner that makes it hard to define where the news stops and where the opinion begins. At the end of the day, we know that there is no such thing as totally unbiased news, so to try to make out there is, would be a lie and that’s not a good way to build a relationship with your visitors. You don’t have to agree with our “opinions” and we welcome the chance to discuss them, because the days where “news” was something somebody told you in a one way transfer of “information” are coming to an end.

Microsoft is often quick to point out in their “Get the Facts” marketing that Linux doesn’t have much protection from copyright and IP infringement to anyone that will listen. What they’d rather you didn’t know is that they have a very long and litigious history on such subjects themselves.

TheInquirer has been nice enough to compile a list of sorts, of some of their recent payout settlements with regards to such lawsuits. The numbers are huge and add up to over 9 billion dollars. Well worth the read if you were thinking of believing their version of the “facts”.

News of the upcoming release of Internet Explorer 7, as well as an MSN toolbar for IE that adds tabbed browsing have not stemmed the flow of users converting to the Firefox web browser. Firefox has now been downloaded over 70 million times (71332264 at the time of writing) and according to netapplications.com Firefox is growing between .5 and 1% every month and now accounts for over 8% of the whole worldwide browser market share, far ahead of the growth of other alternative web browsers. Those figures roughly match the growth shown by Onestat and WebSideStory but is lower than what is experienced by tech related sites like ours. Although Firefox has had some security flaws found of late, it is still light years ahead of Microsoft improving your security with regards to exploits, Viruses and Spyware, both because it is not anywhere near as targeted by malicious parties as IE, but also because it doesn’t support lame technology like ActiveX, which has been the cause of many an IE exploit.

With the release of Firefox 1.0.5 and the soon to be released Firefox 1.1 the growth should continue unabated and ensure that the “Internet” isn’t synonymous with “Microsoft”.

Australia has just proven yet again that they’ve been duped via trade agreements into bring in the US’s toughest copyright and IP laws, without the native “Fair Use” laws that protect consumers in the US. An Australian court has just found Stephen Cooper, a man who hosted a site that linked to other peoples content, of copyright infringement. ‘

This seems to mean that in Australia, you need not actually commit any infringement at all. All you need do to land yourself in trouble is link to a site that contains infringing content and you are apparently guilty of doing it yourself. The prospect of accident linking could open a world of litigation for Australia’s which should delight the record companies and lawyers, but dismay everybody else. After all, there is a ton of legal digital music files available on the web and apparently we are all supposed to know the difference.

So there you go folks, in Australia, that great bastion of freedom and democracy down under, it is not only illegal to put your own purchased music onto a digital music player, it might be illegal to even sell such devices over here. Now we have the new idiocy where you can land yourself in court just for linking to another sites content.

We started HTML Fix It dot Com with the intent of trying to help the Internet community at large. We always appreciate receiving feedback and reviews, both positive and constructively critical. Clif Notes gave us a favorable review this week. Some of the more critical people of course need to remember that we are donation based (in an effort to cover our costs — see link at the bottom of each page of our site) and do this with “volunteer” hours of our time. Having said that, we always strive to improve. Thanks Clif for the review.

The Mozilla foundation have released a new version of Firefox, version 1.0.5 to be exact and according to the release file, the only changes are to fix some minor security fixes and stability improvements. This release does not appear to be as critical as earlier versions, but users are encouraged to upgrade anyway. Thunderbird (Firefox’s E-mail counterpart with SPAM filtering and an RSS reader) will be getting the same updates shortly as well.

The hot news with Firefox is the Deer Park Alpha 2 release which among it’s other features is the first Firefox that you don’t have to re-install to update. It isn’t ready for prime time use yet, but neither was 0.7 Firefox and I used it for ages as my primary browser without problem. For those of you that are not sure what Deer Park is about, Firefox 1.0.5 is the latest generation of the old 1.0.x version, Deer Park will be the next generation 1.1.x version of Firefox with more features, more security and more stability.

An email claiming to contain a video of one of the bombings of London instead hopes to lure victims into installing a Trojan Horse program onto their machines thereby handing control of their PCs to malicious parties.

This summary from Sophos seems to sum things up nicely.

Troj/Spexta-A may arrive as an email attachment in emails claiming to be from “CNN Newsletter” with subject line “TERROR HITS LONDON”. The Trojan is included as an attachment with filename “LondonTerrorMovie.zip”.

Every time tragedy reaches the headlines, the writers of these malicious programs use the headlines to try and use peoples curiosity against them (known as social engineering). You should by now know that every file attachment received in an email should be scanned by an up to date anti-virus program before it is run.