Microsoft IE 6 is old and full of security holes. Not a week goes by that someone says, on one forum or other that I us, “I have to use IE 6 at work”. Well okay there are employers with great confidence or cavalier attitudes. However, people who can switch are doing so fairly quickly and Firefox is starting to get a decent percentage of the market.

Microsoft, as recently as November denied it would update Internet Explorer 6, and wait for IE 7, which was initially planned to be available only with the next release of Windows (codenamed Longhorn) but yesterday they released a tabbed browsing toolbar via MSN for their browser according to C-Net. Of course this is nothing new as Maxthon has offered this as an add on shell built over the IE browser for a long time now. What this doesn’t do is fix any of the underlying problems IE has.

The foolish among us will mistake this for a browser update. It isn’t. Don’t be fooled, go get Firefox. Internet Explorer 7 will not even be available for users of anything older then XP SP2, so users of Windows 98/98SE/ME/2000 will have to use Firefox or Opera to get a decent fully featured secure browser.

[Franki: Interesting to note that for the first time ever, Firefox is scoring above Internet Explorer on HTMLfixIT. See the usage stats to the right of what you are reading.]

Big Brother — in the form of your employer looking over your shoulder — is getting bigger and stronger, according to C-Net.

The percentage of large employers monitoring outbound email and phone call volume now appears to be over fifty percent, up from less than ten percent less than five years ago. Keystroke logging software can tell your boss what you thought about saying to him/her, even if you later changed your mind and deleted the comment.

According to the GoogleGuy, the best way you can ensure that search engine spiders get your sites content as expected, you should use absolute links rather then relative (meaning to use the full web address, including your domain name instead of just the pages file name and relative position) in your site menus. The downside of absolute links rather then relative is that your site is then less portable, but if that portability comes at the expense of search engine ranking then it’s probably not worth it.

Also of interest is the suggestion that if your site resolves with both www.example.com and just example.com you should choose one or the other and use a 301 (permanent) redirect to direct all requests to the chosen one. The main reason for that is probably to ensure your site is not penalised for duplicate content but it’s a good idea anyway, particularly if you use cookies on your site.

The American Board of Surgery gives a written test to surgeons seeking to be board certified in their specialty. They give an all day test in written form. A recent taker reviewed his test and made a list of the questions and answers to over 100 of the questions. He then sold them on eBay.

Now, getting the skinny on tests is nothing new. I found out my junior year in college that most fraternities and sororities at a school I attended kept exam files by professor. What a huge advantage. I was a bit bothered to learn this as I felt it was unfair to those not associated with the organizations who didn’t have access. By the time I was in graduate school, the institution I attended actually made prior tests available in the library so all could have a chance to review them. What makes this situation different is that the gentleman decided to profit from the questions and answers. He sold a few sets on eBay, and now faces over $35,000 in penalties and decertification as a surgeon because of ethics issues.

Is it wrong to have a group of people who took a test mentally make “notes” and then record their information so others can benefit from it? Is it the fact that this guy wrote down the answers? If something is important one year, it will be important the next year. Is the quest for these guys to know the answers to these questions … giving out the answers certainly does that. Or was the goal to make the takers life miserable, that can only be achieved if they have to struggle their way through it.

If having the examinees know the answers (ie the knowledge of the exam topics) is actually the goal, maybe the organization itself should release the questions and answers to the 5000 most likely questions.

Mike Davidson posts today about this project called Our Media that boasts it will forever host your digital works for free without bandwidth or other costs. Sounds great? Is it truly sustainable? For something that says it is soon to leave beta status and will shortly hope to become a 501(c)(3) charitable organization – a designation that means United States donors may deduct the donation from income subject to tax – those are pretty big promises. Someone has to pay the bandwidth bill and pay for the software to find and store the media. And indeed, how long before the thing is bogged down with junk (you know the creative content that may not deserve to see the light of day? – just kidding art is all good – even spam and advertising content …), or at least different versions of the same thing? The concept is good, but the promises sound Utopian to me.

Until this is funded by a major endowment it is just big talk. If it works off of an advertising model, then it isn’t really free, because your work may be carried under an advertisement for something that you dislike immensely. So while it is without monetary cost, you are supporting something you don’t care for – arguably a cost. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be attempted, but rather that it is likely to fail as those currently giving of time and talent are likely to shift focus, lose interest, and some will even die. The commenters over there (that I didn’t read until I was almost done with this post) seem equally rosy as I am. Maybe if enough of us tell them how silly they are, that will be just the ticket to get them motivated to get over the hump.

It will be interesting to see how usable the indexing is. To archive without reasonable retrieval is of no real value.

The Judge in California totally (and intentionally) blew by the question of journalistic confidentiality ruling that stolen information is just that, stolen information. Regardless of who has stolen information — journalist or not — they need to divulge from whence it came. This is exactly what we said previously.

A C|Net article quotes the judges opinion which states that in this case the confidential information “is stolen property, just as any physical item, such as a laptop computer containing the same information on its hard drive (or not) would be… The bottom line is there is no exception or exemption in either the (Uniform Trade Secrets Act) or the Penal Code for journalists–however defined–or anyone else.”

The judge did allow time for an emergency appeal before compelling the disclosures.

Wireless broadband offered city wide, or even in rural areas appears to be a growing trend. This is a good thing as it makes broadband accessible and affordable in most cases. Since the roll out of wireless in Grand Haven, Michigan in 2004, other cities have followed suit. Now, according to this article, Japan appears to be aggressively pursuing wireless not only in populated areas, but in more remote areas as well.

Two things made Grand Haven a particularly attractive spot for wireless broadband:
-There is a large state park there with weekly and daily campers who want to stay connected.
-There is a significant population of boaters who slip in the marina’s there (and can even use wireless up to ten miles off-shore).
Because this creates many monthly users, the ability to pay for the sytem may exceed that of areas with more stable populations.

Wireless has many advantages including the lack of needing to invest in the infra-structure of phone lines and/or cables to carry signal to each end user. The down side is that you create some security risks using wireless over a large area.