Another great idea from the folks at Eyebeam. Take the idea of one of the most popular extensions for Firefox, AdBlock, but remix it to display art placeholders instead of blank space.
Instead of crappy banners, Fox news gets an eagle flying with an American Flag!
Now, this isn’t a final product – it’s still being worked on. I’ve sent them a mail offering development help if they need it. I love this idea.
Been reading a lot about spam problems lately.
It isn’t a problem for me, since I’m not a high value target for spam. The other reason is that I’ve raised the bar by a very tiny amount. CAPTCHAs (those type the letters in the picture tests) are designed to raise the bar for spammers, and I’ve got kind of a unique one on this blog.
My comments aren’t hosted on blogspot, but rather on a site called haloscan. That tiny little difference has meant that I have never displayed a single comment spam ever. Automated comment spam occasionally is done, but it is always done using the normal blogspot comment fields. I get notices of these when they happen, but they aren’t a worry because they aren’t displayed ever or crawled by search engines.
This works because spam is a problem of economics. It takes very little work to be not worth the effort.
This is also a reason that firefox tends to be more secure than ie6. Fewer folks use it and therefore its less lucrative to write firefox exploits. So one of the surprising things that would tend to make ie6 and the web more secure is if opera, safari, and firefox took off!
If you’ve heeded my advice to get firefox for your browsing pleasure, then you may enjoy this little tidbit from devnulled, via forevergeek, via hack-a-day. Credit where credit is due, that’s my motto.
Here’s something for broadband people that will really speed Firefox up:
1.Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:
network.http.pipelining network.http.proxy.pipelining network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.
2. Alter the entries as follows:
Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.
3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0”. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.
If you’re using a broadband connection you’ll load pages MUCH faster now!
I’ve recommended to a number of my friends and coworkers that they get firefox for a nicer time browsing this here interweb.
If you are still using Internet Explorer, it’s important that you get it updated rightnow. There is a current vulnerability in IE that means simply looking at a .jpg can let bad guys do nasty stuff to you. Since the web seems to have a whole lotta images on it, it means that it’s impractical to browse with images turned off. So go get that fixed.
Firefox coincidentally has a similar issue for .bmp images in an older version. The current version is all good, but if you don’t have it, best go get it now. I looked into all the technical hoo ha and it comes down to a single library with an error in it.
Called libpr0n. What’s up with the name?
From their FAQ:
- Why the name “libpr0n”?
- The main goal of the library is to render pornographic images in an efficient way.