Glad I don’t know what a haiku is if it makes you think like this! Fortunately I don’t have that much to write about that is negative. Still interesting site to ramble around when you are tired of coding.

We are regularly asked how to copyright web content. The best source of United States Copyright information is the Copyright Office web-site. You can register on-line literary works or writings for the cost of $30 U.S. While you can register a copyright for your web-site content, you CANNOT copyright your domain name.

While you can register your copyright, and gain several rights (statutory damages, attorneys fees and prima facia evidence of copyright to name the biggest of them) from doing so, you don’t need to to be protected. You are automatically protected on publication if the work is unique and your own. Even non-United States parties may be protected by U.S. copyright laws if their country of domicile has reciprocal agreement (see pdf formatted list of such countries) with the United States.

When this article showed up in my Thunderbird RSS reader I just had to follow though and read the whole article. The story is about an un-named blog link spammer and goes into why they do it, how they do it, and what stops them.

The interesting thing is that the biggest hurdles to blog spamming, are email response systems and captcha’s, like the one we just employed to stop the problem. Captcha’s are human intervention tools, they are hard or impossible to automate, because a program has a great deal of trouble reading the text on the images, and so can’t post to the blog. (A captcha is a piece of random generated text saved to an image and put into the comment form, a human has to type the text in the image into a provided text box in order to post a comment.)

Other things to note, is that he isn’t particularly concerned about the new link attribute added by the search engines, because there are millions of old abandoned blogs on the net that will not be updated. And that the link spammers use open proxy servers to post the comments, which is why blocking IP address’s is mostly a useless effort. (because they will be different each time.) If you have ever suffered from blog spamming, you should read this to get a feeling for the enemy. “He” actually blames the search engines for creating the opportunity to blog spam. I expect that some effort needs to be spent convincing ISP’s and users to shut down or update abandoned blogs, or the problem will never go away. Without old blogs to target, the problem would become a non issue in a matter of months. One thing is certain, if the problem is not stopped, we will end up with a separate blog search index to general Internet search, and that will hurt all manner of blogs and news sites based on blog software.

The FTC are slowly closing loopholes that were found in the recent Can-SPAM act that was designed to make the sending of SPAM illegal in the US. The act was widely criticized when it came out because it had many loopholes that allowed spammers off the hook, and also because it could potentially effect legitimate e-mail marketing.
Apparently SPAM has had a slight decline of late, but there is still a long way to go. Read more at InternetNews.

Sometime between 3AM and 12PM today, IE6 usage dropped below 50% for the first time ever (with Firefox at 34.1%). I was asleep at the time, so I have no better idea exactly when it happened. Still, it’s great news. It isn’t just htmlfixit that is showing huge Firefox usage, most tech related sites are getting similar results. From my experience, what the tech sites show now, the normal sites will show in roughly a year from now. So if your site is not W3C standards friendly, now is the time to fix it.

In what has to be the oddest arrest of the decade, a man decided to donate money to the tsunami relief effort, so he logged onto the net with his Sun Solaris machine, and fired up Lynx, (a text based browser that has been around for decades on Unix and Linux machines) headed over to the British Telecom (BT) donation site and made his contribution. Not long thereafter, police busted in on him during lunch and arrested him. The reason? well some schmuck at BT read the access log of the server and decided that browsing with Lynx was just odd enough to call it cracking and so raised the alarm. With knowledge like that, I would not be surprised to learn that the unknown tech who raised the alarm was an MCSE. 🙂 Guys, get a grip, there are dozens of web browsers out there, the world doesn’t come down to only IE, Mozilla and Opera, some of these alternative browsers have been around for much longer then IE. The only thing that could have made worse press for BT, would be if they had broken in the door and arrested a blind dude for using his screen reader. Read the full story at BoingBoing

InternetNews has this new story, detailing a new job listing Google have placed looking for (among other things) a project manager experienced in SourceForge (One of the biggest Open Source repositories on the net) as well as experience with Open Source licences and management tools. In the past week Google have employed two other OSS programmers, (both from the Firefox dev team). The new position will be answerable to Chris DiBona, who is known for this work on the SlashDot site. I wonder how long it will be till we find out what the purpose of all this will be. Is this another sign of a forthcoming Google browser (possibly based on Firefox)? Only time will tell.