Browser Stats

I don't know about everyone else out there, but I am becoming increasing frustrated with having to test web sites in IE6

Surely it is time to call it a day and banish it to browser heaven? The latest browser usage stats from w3schools show it is on a steady decline and now Chrome has been up for a couple of months we can see how it is performing.

Geek out time...

2008	IE7	IE6	Chrome	Fx	Moz	S	O
October	26.9%	20.2%	3.0%	44.0%	0.4%	2.8%	2.2%
September	26.3%	22.3%	3.1%	42.6%	0.5%	2.7%	2.0%
2008	IE7	IE6	IE5	Fx	Moz	S	O
August	26.0%	24.5%	0.1%	43.7%	0.5%	2.6%	2.1%
July	26.4%	25.3%	0.3%	42.6%	0.5%	2.5%	1.9%
June	27.0%	26.5%	0.5%	41.0%	0.5%	2.6%	1.7%
May	26.5%	27.3%	0.7%	39.8%	0.7%	2.4%	1.5%
April	24.9%	28.9%	1.0%	39.1%	0.9%	2.2%	1.4%
March	23.3%	29.5%	1.1%	37.0%	1.1%	2.1%	1.4%
February	22.7%	30.7%	1.3%	36.5%	1.2%	2.0%	1.4%
January	21.2%	32.0%	1.5%	36.4%	1.3%	1.9%	1.4%

Be Aware, of the Free Software Curse!

Every time we use the internet we open ourselves up to vulnerabilities. Viruses, Trojans and other types of malware are increasing at an incredible rate and if that isn’t enough, an internet security company has recently released a warning to users about a new threat.

According to Panda Security, it’s becoming more evident that malware malefactors are using free Antivirus software, music, movies and software downloads to get malware onto users PC’s. The software and files are mostly available as free downloads. The software could then either be installed by the user or run without the user knowing about it in the back ground. Once running though, it displays a report about viruses it supposedly found. The users are then invited to purchase a full version of the antivirus software to be able to remove the viruses.

Users who ignore this will then repeatedly be harassed by reports, pop-ups and invitations to buy the full version and those who do decide to purchase it, will basically be buying completely useless software.

According to Panda Security these programs are increasingly becoming polymorphic - they can automatically change their look on every installation - which points to huge investments by the creators, which in turn means that these fraudsters are making large financial returns on unsuspecting users.

Here are some usefull tips to avoid becomming an victim:

• Ignore e-mails with eye-catching news or subjects: These often invite users to click a link to watch a video or images of the false news. If they do, they may be allowing some kind of malware to enter their computer.
• Be suspicious of unusual behaviour: Be wary if an unknown program begins to display false infections or pop-ups inviting comparisons with some type of anti-virus.
• Keep all programs up-to-date: An outdated program is a potentially vulnerable program.
• Scan computers with a reliable security solutions.
• Never click on random pop-ups that invite you to download any type of software.
• Be sure to have proper Antivirus software installed that is regularly updated.

A social networking site where you are NOT invited...

CNN reported on Friday that the US Government has created a new social networking site called 'A-Space' to allow analysts (spies) from the 16 different U.S. intelligence agencies to share thoughts and opinions on intelligence data.

The report goes on to state:"The goal of A-Space, like intelligence analysis in general, is to protect the United States by assessing all the information available to the spy agencies. Missing crucial data can have enormous implications, such as an FBI agent who sent an e-mail before September 11, 2001, warning of people learning to fly airplanes but not learning to land them."

Moving on from the fact that the US government has 16 different intelligence agencies AND still requires a social networking site to determine that people learning to fly planes and not land them might be a cause for concern, this use of social networking does open up some interesting possibilities.

I have spent a great deal of time in the past working on intranet sites for large corporate clients, where the question is usually asked "how can we get the employees to interact with the site", when surely the question should be how do we get employees to interact with each other? Designing corporate intranet sites to be more like social networking sites could very well be the answer to this problem.

Now the only thing left to see is whether A-Space will include Scrabulous…

Microsoft releases new 3D technology

Microsoft has launched a new 3D technology called Photosynth. The technology basically takes a group of photos of an environment, strings them together and creates a 3D environment with it. Pretty cool, I’d say.

Photosynth allows the users to upload their photos, which can be taken with a standard digital camera, and then strings it together to create the 3D environment. Stringing photos together in the past use to take weeks of processing, but thanks to the new technology it only takes as long as uploading your photos.

Microsoft has been kind enough to give you 20GB of online space for all your photo collections. According to Microsoft this will allow up to 60 different Photosynths.

To get started, the site will ask you to install a small program on you PC. Once done your set to start. Simply take some photo’s as per instruction and upload them to create your very own Photosynth or you can simply scroll through some examples.

Massive Increase in Spam

Like me, you've probably noticed the increase in spam recently. According to Google product marketing manager, Sundar Raghavan, this seems to be an annual event which sees an increase in the amount of spam being sent out world wide.

The fight against spam has intensified for Google, even though they have acquired the services of Postini, for which they paid $625 million. Postini's software services protect, encrypt, archive and enforce policies for e-mail, instant messaging and other Web-based communications. Google implemented this by integrating their software with that of Positini’s. The deal was made in 2007 and according to Google, Postini has proven to be efective thus far.

So why cant Google stop these spammers? According to Raghavan, the pattern in the past was a common topic linked to one or two servers, but massively distributed. "Now we're seeing multiple topics each one linked to different servers," he explained.

Raghavan noted that topics for many spam e-mails are being ripped right from CNN headlines. On the sending end, Google engineers are still trying to pinpoint where all the traffic is coming from, but it's a difficult task. Much of the e-mail is being sent from massive geographically diverse botnets that are constantly changing. Google will be working hard to try and prevent these numbers from rising. Google says that they are currently deleting 10 million spam emails daily before it reaches your inbox.

Some are, however saying, that the increase in spam is due to the report of Dan Kiminsky’s finding a flaw in our DNS settings, but that could not yet be confirmed.

Yahoo introduces new domains

Yahoo released new email domains last week, "Ymail" and " Rocketmail".

The idea behind these two new domains is that people would have the opportunity of owning a unique and easy email address, not one that has fumbled letters and numbers. Yahoo is hoping that with the release of these new domains it would help boost its email growth.

With 266 million user accounts worldwide as of April 2008, Yahoo is the e-mail market leader, according to the latest data from research firm comScore Inc. Microsoft Corp. is a close second at 264 million users. But e-mail accounts at both Yahoo and Microsoft have been growing at a slower pace than Google's Gmail, which has added more than 30 million users in the past year.

HTML - The Basics

Having recently brushed up on my HTML skills, thought I would share this site with the rest of the world:

HTML Center

It has loads of useful tutorials on HTML, PHP, CSS, Photoshop and Usability.

Learn how to bold elements, format pages and write clear, compliant code.

Mozilla FireFox's 3rd Version

Mozilla is currently coding their fingers to the bone as they are working to the final release of the third version of its Firefox Web browser.

With the recent launch of the browser's third beta version, the open source code has made Firefox available to almost 500,000 developers and testers to put the browser through its paces.

Although the third beta version of the browser includes some 1,300 separate changes from the previous beta, Mozilla said it still busy working on additional changes to the browser.

"This beta will give you a taste of what's coming in Firefox 3, but there's still more to come, and much of what you'll see may still be a bit rough around the edges," the company said.

The beta, however, is intended for Web developers and testers for "testing purposes only," Mozilla cautioned.

"We do not recommend that anyone other than developers and testers download the Firefox 3 Beta 3 milestone release," the company warned.

Library of Congress + flickr = The Commons

The Library of Congress is collaborating with website flickr in a partnership dubbed The Commons and the project will see 1,500 photos made available to the photo sharing giant, flickr.

The reason for doing this is to take advantage of the huge user base flickr has who enjoy tagging pictures, increasing the exposure of content currently held by civic institutions and to facilliate the collection of general knowledge about these images. Obviously it also means that the images will be easier to search.

The Commons is a great of example of how more and more people are realising the 'processing/ computational' power that social media can yield. This initiative also illustrates the benifits that can be had from projects being open and collaborative.