In an effort to block automated spam comments from our articles, we have adopted an image auth system. In short when commenting you will be presented with an image containing some random “case sensitive” text. In order to submit your comment, you must first type the text contained in the image into the text box below it.

We’ve been meaning to do this for about six months now as the amount of comment spam we were having to delete each week was getting ridiculous. We hope it doesn’t inconvenience anyone too much.

Franki

I’m always on the lookout for new ways to tweak CSS for design purposes. The more you can rely on CSS to drive layout, versus images, tables, etc. the faster your site is going to load and the more you’ll distinguish your site from others.

Mandarin Design is one such site that is pushing the CSS envelope. An exploration of their site reveals a whole shebang of excellent tips, tricks, design ideas and style guidelines. I haven’t come close to checking everything out, but here are a couple of notable articles:

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This HP series of articles seeks to address WIFI Security. WIFI will grow increasingly popular and no doubt enable a whole new way of accessing information. Many are using wireless palms to get and send email on the fly already. Security should be part of any wireless users thought process at this point. This article makes some “beyond the basics” recommendations.

In what tentatively appears to be a win for the good guys, the European Union has delayed voting on software patents until sometime in 2005. The reasons for the delay are many and varied, but the most significant reason is that they no longer have the majority, and a vote could well kill off the proposal. So they probably put it off until such time as they can work out a way to push it though without opposition. My guess is that there is a good many dollars behind this proposal, big software companies desperately want software patents in place as it’s a very effective weapon to use against your competition. (Look at the situation in the US if you don’t believe me.)

With many European countries eager to distance themselves from reliance on US big business, they are not too keen to vote in laws that are likely to cement their reliance on Microsoft for desktop and server software. Countries in which OSS (Open Source Software) is growing in popularity are showing a growing desire to remove software patents from the table, and rightly so because software patents are just an excuse for frivolous litigation used by big guys to kill off little guys. Software is copyright, you don’t patent a book, you copyright it, software is exactly the same. We don’t need to hand big monopolies any more tools with which they can oppress the competition.

Franki

For the millions of people changing to the Firefox web browser, today marks the day that the E-mail component has reached a stable 1.0 release.

Thunderbird looks much like Outlook Express, but has been designed with Security, Spam filtering and advanced features in mind. I’ve been using pre-release versions for over a year now and I’ve been very impressed. It’s small, fast and feature filled, just like Firefox. Some advanced features are E-mail cleaning, where spam E-mails are stripped of web bugs and remote images, so the spammers can’t use them to validate your E-mail address, virtual folders for search terms, a learning spam filter, an RSS reader and a heap of other stuff. You don’t see that complexity unless you want to though, so it’s a very easy program to get along with. Thunderbird will also import your Outlook Express mail, address book and settings, so you won’t even have to manually configure it.

Get your free copy of Thunderbird 1.0 today and experience the difference a secure E-mail client can make.

Franki

There is great pressure from local governments to tax internet connection services. Several states already tax broadband and/or DSL connection services. A prior ban on such taxes lapsed at the end of November, but President Bush last Friday signed a bill to extent that exemption from local taxation. They allowed states already charging a broadband tax to continue that for two more years however.

One of the things that constantly amazes me, is that people are so quick to blame Internet banking and E-commerce systems for any small issue that comes out, but these same people will install just about anything with flashy banners that appears in a web page add, and they will run anything that arrives in an e-mail, and many of them have never heard of Windows Update and don’t run an anti-virus program.

The last such item that appeared on the TV news here, was about a guy that had $6000 taken from his bank account. When it was looked into, they found a Trojan horse program installed on his machine, and that malicious program was the reason his banking details were stolen. What amazed me even more, was that the bank actually gave him back the money, even though it was his own ignorance that caused the problem in the first place. It had nothing to do with the bank at all.

If you use your computer for Online banking or E-commerce, and you run Windows without anti-virus, all patches and a anti-spyware program (or two), then you WILL eventually have your details stolen, and probably money as well. And it will be your fault. (And arguably Microsoft’s, and the malicious programmers writing this stuff.)

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