Flash blocker

Thursday, 18 August 2005

All advertising is annoying.

But Macromedia have upped the annoyance factor by a couple notches with their irritating technology which allows websites to get around popup-blockers and ad-blockers. Since most browsers don’t have the ability to turn off Flash on an individual website basis, many commercial websites have now adopted it as a means of advertising their wares.

Spam gangs

Monday, 15 August 2005

According to Spamhaus, their ROKSO database is:

“The Register of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) database collates information and evidence on known professional spam operations that have been terminated by a minimum of 3 Internet Service Providers for spam offenses.”

Their known spam gangs list asserts that these criminals are responsible for 80% of our spam.

What business can learn from open source

Friday, 12 August 2005

Paul Graham, the renowned technical writer and programming language designer has an excellent essay entitled “What business can learn from open source”. Paul makes some interesting assertions:

People have always been willing to do great work for free, but before the web it was harder to reach an audience or collaborate on projects.
The average office is a miserable place to get work done.
The basic idea behind office hours is that if you can’t make people work, you can at least prevent them from having fun.
Many employees would like to build great things for the companies they work for, but more often than not management won’t let them.

Read the full article, it’s well worth the time.