Microsoft won a battle in the United States Court of Appeals yesterday. Microsoft was alleged to have infringed a patent in the development of the Internet Explorer development. The “reversal gives Microsoft the opportunity to tell the jury the whole story of how this technology was developed and to present evidence that shows that Eolas did not invent this technology, and that it was developed by others, particularly Pei-yuan Wei and his colleagues at O’Reilly and Associates,” according to the Microsoft Press Release.

The entire opinion in Eolas Technologies, Inc., et al. v. Microsoft Corp. is available in pdf format.

In November, a jury in Loudon County Virginia convicted a brother and sister of violating the state’s tough Anti-Spam Statute. This week, according to the Leesburg Today news site, the Judge dismissed the case against the sister, overturning the jury verdict finding a lack of evidence to convict her. The brother, Jeremy Jaynes, is accused of sending 10,000 unsolicited commercial emails in a three day period. The sister, Jessica DeGroot, was alleged to have purchased domain names that were then used in the sending process. Finding that the only proof introduced against here was that she had a name on a credit card, and a lack of proof that the card was used during the period in question to purchase any domain names, the Judge dismissed the charge indicating he felt the jury may have become confused regarding the brother and sister pair.

Jeremy Jaynes attorney says he will appeal the decision. The trial judge, refusing to act on Jaynes’ dismissal motions, has set his sentencing for April 8th, 2005. At that time it is expected that Jaynes will be sentenced to incarceration.

The case is triable in Virginia because many of the targeted recipients had AOL addresses, and AOL has processing operations centered in that jurisdiction. One wonders if others will open processing facilities in Virginia to avail themselves of the tough anti-spam act.

Within a few days after the super bowl, a site called missgodaddy.com sprang up. It purportedly featured pin-up style pictures of the actress who portrayed the godaddy girl in the Godaddy.com Super Bowl Advertisement in various stages of undress. That site is now gone! (see adult rated google cache from 3/1/05 – so it disappeared overnight apparently as on 3/2/05 it is no more)

The site had this disclaimer:

Disclaimer This site is not affiliated with GoDaddy.com or any of its subsidiaries, It is also not affiliated with Candice Michelle, This site is intended as a parody to godaddy and its SuperBowl Commercial 2005. The owners of this site cannot be held responsible for any information contained herein. All Information gathered and placed on this site is available at various other resources on the internet. All photos contained are copyright protected by their respective owners. Contact us at msgodaddy[ at ]gmail[ dot ]com

In addition to the pictures, it featured several sponsor links and google ad bot ads. The site has disappeared. If you click on that domain name now, you get … that’s right … godaddy itself.

How did the name get transferred? According to the cached site, Godaddy purchased it.

More importantly, why isn’t the name registered with Godaddy, the proud new owner of the domain name?

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Take a look at http://www.shmoo.com/idn/
The link is “http://www.pаypal.com/”, which the browsers punycode handlers render as www.xn--pypal-4ve.com.
This security flaw could be quite major, as any letter can be replaced by its look-alike from an international character script. For full details, take a look at this file.

Vulnerable browsers include (but are not limited to):

Most Mozilla-based browsers (Firefox 1.0, Camino .8.5, Mozilla 1.6, etc)
Safari 1.2.5
Opera 7.54
Omniweb 5

While those are mainly Mac browsers (OmniWeb and Safari), all users of anything that isn’t IE should be wary, at least until a patch is released which fixes this issue.

Update: (Franki) There is a temp fix for Firefox already out, I’ve tried it and it works. Here are the steps:
1. Go to your Firefox address bar and enter: about:config and press enter, this will bring up Firefox’s internal configuration page.
2 Scroll down to the line beginning: network.enableIDN or in the alternative enter that phrase (you can cut and paste it) into the filter text box and click “show all”.
3 Double-click the network.enableIDN label, and Firefox will change the default value of ‘true’ to ‘false’, close that window and you’re done.

There will no doubt be a software fix on the way soon, so you should run Firefox update regularly. (Go to “tools”->”options” -> “advanced” and scroll down till you see the section called “Software Update” and click “Check now” and Firefox will do the rest.

It should be noted that the reason that IE is not vulnerable, is because they never supported international domains in the first place. There is a plug in to enable that functionality in IE, and if you have the plug-in installed, then your copy of Internet Explorer is just as vulnerable.
Read more on this issue here.

Much to the chagrin of head honchos at Microsoft, it seems employees there like Mac’s Ipod just as much as the rest of the world, and there are internal memos to address this faux paus.

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Beginning in January of 2005, Firefox has been added to WC3 Web Browser Statistics. We have been seeing the growing trend for quite some time now and this is a big step forward for the Firefox movement. Mainstream has been achieved and it already surpasses all Netscape and Mozilla browsers.

Don’t be left out in the cold unsecure world of Internet Explo(der), get your copy of Firefox Browser today and see why all the growth! It is free.

Jeff Barr announces that Syndic8 (one of my favorite web places) is co-sponsoring the Blog Business Summit in Seattle later this month. This article explains the explosive growth potential for blogs as the underlying content management system. We see the potential … and wish we could attend. Blogs are also rapidly advancing the RSS explosion on the web.