This article at C-Net talks about a move to increase the level of investigation required to obtain a valid secure socket layer certificate. The reason alleged is that people are too easily getting secure certificates, leading to phishing schemes that look authentic.

I suspect the real reason is that it will increase the cost of the certificates, resulting in significant extra profits for the issuing companies. I daily get phishing scam emails. Many look very real in HTML format email, but always (thus far) are clearly bogus in plain text format.

The actual sites, when you visit them are impressive. A domain we sometimes work on was hacked last week (only our second incident of successful hacking) and GoDaddy flagged the domain almost immediately and closed the site until the content was removed. That was pretty impressive. I really doubt that phishers are purchasing secure certificates with great regularity to make their sites look secure. More likely they are hacking onto someones already secure site.

The other item of note is that MicroSoft is still talking about releasing Internet Explorer 7. Until they do — and probably after they do — go get a copy of FireFox 1.5 at Mozilla.com.

One of my favorite reads is Mike Industries Blog. While scooting around that site today, I came accross a post about intellegent 404 pages — hidden on a page about naming/extensionless url addresses. That got me thinking, is that really a helpful feature? We already have a search function and we happen to think or structure of presentation is pretty clear (of course you may disagree). Thoughts? Leave us a comment.

This is interesting, Google to be discussed in roundtable format for a week. Google truly has many irons in the fire as the old saying goes. This should make for an intriguing follow.

An Anti-trust ruling from Korea again asserts that Microsoft has unfairly tied instant messenger and media player software to the Microsoft operating system. The last time this happened, Microsoft had to release a copy of it’s software sans the media player. That software known as XP – n, sold very poorly. We’ll see how this one plays out.

Today I found a great extension for Thunderbird that shows just one message in HTML format (not sanatized so use it with care). This will return you to plain text (or sanitized HTML if that was your default setting) for the next message. This is very handy.

The extension is avialable from Mozilla.

Only someone really slow would regularly view their email in HTML format because of security risks involved in HTML email and because most SPAM contains a unique counter “image” to tell the sender that you are reading your email. They see this as a green light to send more spam.

In Mozilla Thunderbird (get your copy at Mozilla.com) you can click on view, message body as, and select either sanitized html or html when you encounter a message that you do want to view in HTML format. The problem is that once selected, you need to then reverse the process to get back to plain text mode. No longer a problem with this extension installed.

There is a significant push to digitize many writings, books and documents, including entire libraries. This combined with a comic I saw the other day really got me to thinking. The comic (I am sorry I don’t know the artist’s name, but it is a daily joke calendar I got as a gag gift last year) had a machine that purported to highlight the text of books as you waited. Now it seems to me an “easy” thing for someone to place hooks into their digitized works so that it would automatically highlight in several different ways depending on the audience. Indeed, it is easy enough to do in html, you just embed style tags in the document and then switch on/off the relevant styles it seems to me. Google already does highlighting when you search for terms, but this could be much more meaningful. Great thought, but what do I do with it next?

I was reading Mike Industries Blog today about his frustration with his DVR. I occaisionally miss recording something because I forget to change the channel between shows (we tape two shows back-to-back). We use the old fashioned method of starting the VCR manually and it works well with that one exception. But when will the time be right for TV on demand. When I miss a show can I get it sent to me? I have several times considered calling a friend on the West Coast to say … could you tape that in two hours when it comes on?

I read a few articles on TV on Demand that outline some of the problems and pitfalls — like revenue. I guess until those things get sorted out, I’ll have to just remember to change the channel when I hit record.