Archive for January, 2007

“An operating system has never had parental control features before” - Bill Gates

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 31/1/2007
in Mac, Microsoft and Windows
. 16 Comments

“An operating system has never had parental control features before”

Bill Gates came out with this incredible statement two and a half minutes into the following interview on NBC

Really Bill? So how do you explain this screenshot of the built-in Parental Controls on my Mac?

OS X in-built Parental Controls

There have been Parental Controls on the Mac for at least three years now (that I can remember, possibly longer).

Bill, two possible explanations come to mind. Either you don’t know your competition or you feel the need to lie about your new product. Neither is a particularly satisfactory situation.

Annoying Snaps

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 31/1/2007
in Technology
. 20 Comments

I have mentioned previously, in response to a question, that I don’t like the Snap Preview plugin for blogs.

It seems that I am not alone in this. Nick Wilson has written a piece on his blog about why he can’t stand the Snap Preview and while some of the commentery is tongue in cheek, some hits the nail right on the head.

Anyone else dislike the Snap plugin (or is it just Nick and I who are grumpy, not-so-old men)?

UPDATE - I see a discussion is taking place on TechMeme about this too!

FURTHER UPDATE:

Donncha added a really cool possible solution to the Snaps Preview issue in the comments, he said:

One quick and easy solution would be to add a hosts entry for spa.snap.com pointing at 127.0.0.1 on your computer so that the Snap preview Javascript is never loaded. I haven’t tried it myself but that should work!

Slow news day at Valleywag

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 31/1/2007
in Technology
. 3 Comments

It really must have been a slow day at Valleywag yesterday for them to put up a clip of Bill Gates leaving the stage after his interview with Jon Stewart’s Today Show.

The title of the Valleywag post was “Bill Gates walks out of Daily Show” - implying that he walked out in the middle of the interview after taking umbrage at some of Jon Stewart’s comments.

The truth of the matter is that he exchanged pleasant goodbyes at the end of the interview, got up and left.

Judge for yourself

EDIT: - D’oh! Post updated to correct an error made when embedding the video.

Microformats and spam

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 31/1/2007
in Technology
. 8 Comments

Paul Walsh poses an interesting question on the Segala blog when he asks are Microformats perfect tools for spammers?

Machine readable contact details using the hCard format, for example, potentially make it very easy for spammers to automate harvesting of info to populate their databases.

I have already made it very easy for spammers by including my email address on this site and consequently I do get a lot of spam.

I don’t know enough about microformats to comment on this.

Conor, Chris, anyone else care to comment?

UPDATE: I see Paul is giving away free dinners at one of his restaurants in Dublin for anyone who happens along. This may be a chance to educate him on Microformats and get some free food while you are at it.

etenders site hacked/phished?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 30/1/2007
in Technology
. 28 Comments

I received a troubling email this morning from a friend of mine. He ran into a problem when he tried to log in to etenders this morning (etenders is an Irish government website where you can find tender notices on government and public sector procurement).

He said:

I went to log on to the etenders website this morning. I typed in www.etenders.ie and didn’t look carefully as I then entered my username and password. Nothing happened. I quickly realised it wasn’t the official site (www.etenders.gov.ie). So now “they” had my username and password. “They” are a company called Segaps Limited, registered no. 410457 - in Clare. Why are they doing this, what happens to my username and password (quickly changed and not one I use anywhere else) and how does the government allow a site like this to exist? Why does the .ie domain registry allow it to be registered? Why do webhost.ie host it?

It turns out that Segaps is registered to a guy called Des Crosbie who also appears to be the registrant of a software company called Ardlee Ltd.. Ardlee, according to their About page:

provide a range of services that complement your existing business model.

Now I have no idea why someone would want to register etenders.ie (or how they would be allowed to in what is supposed to be a managed tld!) but there very well may be a legitimate reason.

Does anyone know anything about etenders.ie, who is behind it, why it was registered or what is happening to the usernames and passwords being accidentally filled in on their submission form?

Is it possible that etenders.ie is a legitimate site who themselves have been hacked/phished by someone trying to harvest real etenders site logons?

Spam Assassin on Direct Admin problem

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 28/1/2007
in Technology
. 8 Comments

As I mentioned previously, I have rolled out a new server for my blog (and a couple of sites I host) in the last few days. I am now being hammered by spam! Spam Assassin is installed on the server.

The hosting software on the server is called Direct Admin and in each hosted domain in Direct Admin I have set Spam Assassin to 5.0 (which I thought would be low enough to catch most spam).

I also configured it to allow all spam through but labelled as ***SPAM***.

I haven’t received a single email labelled as ***SPAM*** but I have received lots of spam. :-(

Spam Assassin setup

There’s obviously something simple missing in the config of SA on the server.

I know it is probably an impossible question to answer without more info but if anyone can think of something I might be missing, could you let me know?

UPDATE: A Direct Admin support staff member emailed me the fix - it is available at http://help.directadmin.com/item.php?id=36

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