famous tale speaks of a naked king, who being the King, makes nakedness blindly accepted as a norm. No suspicion is raised until one man from the crowd yells “The King is naked“. This comes to show that the flock can accept things without using any self-judgement.

Likewise, Internet users circulate bits which gain their value from word of mouth. One such example is the Satellite Google Maps hype. When the net became aware of the service, everyone quickly got excited. This probably wouldn’t have been the case if was not a Google feature. I looked at satellite images of this type back in 1999 or 2000 (using TerraServer) and identified friends’ homes. It wasn’t as widespread at the time because there wasn’t as great a ‘buzz’.

An actual satellite image of a field in Illinois

Certain on-line services offer customised information as images. Wundeground deliver your local weather as a GIF file and DanaSoft provide informative signatures, as shown below. Since both are displayed regularly in my personal portal, I like using the functionality of CSS which clips images as illustrated in this example page. Feel free to copy.

Some relevant code from the example:

<div style="position:absolute; top:5; left:10;
clip:rect(12px auto 40px auto)">
<img
src="http://www.danasoft.com/sig/fookitnow.jpg"
style="border:1px #000 solid;" />
</div>


ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, has come out with an announcement about the new .jobs and .travel domain suffixes, while considering .asia, .mail, .tel, and .xxx.

I previously criticised ICANN (registrars particularly) about making things worse. They allow virtually anybody to take over an unsuitable domain name; now they consider the .xxx suffix. Is that what the Internet involves? Jobs, leisure and pr0n? It is about time the Internet adopted a tree structure to clear up the chaos.

have spotted potential in unifying newgroups and feeds. Much of my reading involves newsgroups and aggregators as I do not require much beyond plain-text and a few references (links) to richer pages.

Feeds on the left and newsgroups on the right; click images to view in full size

The two applications are separate, yet they are similar in nature (see the screen-shots above to convince yourself). Will someone consider combining them? Web sites viewed as newsgroup threads? Perhaps newsgroups aggregated with abilities to participate?

The Firefox community has become aware of ‘new-style’ pop-ups that manage to fool various built-in blockers. Here is a tweak that can make your life pop-up-free once again:

• In the address field, type in about:config and press ENTER
• Open a context menu (mouse secondary button) and hit New -> Integer
• Type in privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins at the first prompt
• Type in 2 at the next prompt (value)
• Also find privacy.popups.firstTime in the list and change its value to false

You can now enjoy the Internet without seeing its ugly sides. Also make sure that advertisements are blocked.

y relative passed me a message concerning Internet policies. It discussed the loss of privacy among sites with the .us suffix. The message came from GoDaddy, who apparently sent all their clients a self-promoting E-mail — one example among many of mail that that is uncalled for. Other organisations exhibit similar, let us call it, “aggressive behaviour”.

Bob parson, the man in charge of GoDaddy ‘broadcasted’ in this mass-E-mail:

…On my personal Blog, www.BobParsons.com there are a number of articles where you can learn more about the NTIA’s unfortunate decision and what you can do to help get it reversed.

I also will be talking about our right to privacy on Radio Go Daddy, our weekly radio show that debuts today, March 30, at 7 PM PST. To find out how to listen in, please visit the Web site dedicated to the show, www.RadioGoDaddy.com…

The above is shameless self-promotion. GoDaddy, the very large and successful domain registrar, have demonstrated tactless behaviour.

he World Wide Web is becoming more open, but there are still sites which refuse to accept it. As an example, Microsoft included some sick humour in the download page for .Net specifications. When entering the page with Mozilla Firefox, the download button intentionally gets a bad placement (see screenshot, click to enlarge).

Once the button is clicked, it disappears outside the screen in an animated fashion! No download is possible until the 3^rd click.

Google made their toolbar available only for Internet Explorer. More recently, they were kind enough to refer to the open Google bar, which builds onto other browsers.

The excellent Google Desktop is only available for Windows. A message from Google said that they work improving it, rather than porting it to work under more operating systems. *sigh*

Finally, have a look at this offensive page from Yahoo.