Mark Gilbert’s Blog

It would appear that the eBay owned payment service PayPal is planning to block what it deems as unsafe browsers. PayPal is one of those websites and services which features most prominently in phishing attacks. PayPal said that

“browsers that do not have support for blocking identity theft-related Web sites or for EV SSL (Extended Validation Secure Sockets Layer) certificates are considered “unsafe” for financial transactions.”

Michael Barrett, PayPal Chief Information Security Officer was quoted as saying

“In our view, letting users view the PayPal site on one of these browsers is equal to a car manufacturer allowing drivers to buy one of their vehicles without seat belts,”

Sadly since the Safari browser doesn’t support EV SSL or have any kind of phishing protection then this may be on the list of banned browsers. Obviously older version of IE would also be included and as far as I am aware current versions of Firefox and Opera do not support EV SSL although both have pledged to in future updates.

I am really enjoying using the latest Firefox beta at the moment though, so for now anyway Safari is hiding away on my system. Whether this is all just talk remains to be seen, I don’t think they will do it though.

Cheers

What the bloody hell is wrong with IE you may say, why would Mark, a seemingly nice guy, refer to IE in such a cruel way. Well my friends, this time it is down to IE’s poor handling of modern MIME types.

XHTML web pages should have their MIME types set to application/xhtml+xml instead of the far older text/html. Try using application/xhtml+xml with IE though and it simply does not know what to do. I asks the user if they want to download the file rather than render it like it’s supposed to.

the modern javascript MIME type is also not handled correctly. Instead of the old text/javascript type the newer application/javascript should be used, but instead of working like a modern browser IE simply doesn’t render any application/javascript elements, it just skips over them as though they were not there.

The thing is this is not the bleeding edge of MIME types. application/javascript was registered by an informational RFC in June 2005. application/xhtml+xml was registered by an RFC in January 2002. These are not new things, in January 2002 IE 6 SP1 had not even been released yet. Microsoft have had a lot of time to get things right with regards to standards.

I want to serve my MIME type correctly on my site. I want to use application/xhtml+xml, but I cant because IE doesn’t support it. So instead I’m having to sort some horrid backwards compatible script out to server text/html for all those Internet Exploder users out there. Please IE users, take this advice, switch browsers to something more standards compliant. Safari for Windows and Firefox are both excellent choices and work far better than IE for web standards compliance. Why should you care about standards? Because if nobody followed any standards on the net then simply put the Internet would cease to exist, fragmenting into incompatible sections where only people using one certain standard could view certain parts of the net. Imagine having to use one browser to read your e-mail, another to do online shopping and then another one to go to a different shopping website. Not nice, so please for the sake of the earth use something other than IE.

Cheers

Or not as the case may be. I was recently thinking about perhaps switching ISPs, maybe to someone like Nildram, or BT Internet. However as Kay has just tonight had some trouble with her BT Internet connection dropping I think I’ll stick with Zen. I would get quite frustrated if my net connection kept dropping, she’s been having problems with hers all night.

I never have any problems with my Zen connection, and since I’ve been working on my the site all night a constantly failing connection would have been very annoying.

So I’ll just stick with Zen thank you, and keep my unfaltering connection.

Cheers

The Pirate Bay has somehow managed to acquire the domain ifpi.com which used to belong to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, the infamous anti-piracy agency. Quite how they acquired the domain is not quite clear but in an interview with torrent freak Pirate Bay admin Brokep simply said
“It’s not a hack, someone just gave us the domain name. We have no idea how they got it, but it’s ours and we’re keeping it.”
He wants to use the site to spread pirate interests
“The International Federation of Pirate Interests (IFPI) is the new international federation we’re starting in order to get the word of piracy spread.”

So there you go, what happens next remains to be seen.

Cheers

Well, I never thought I’d see the day, Apple’s Safari browser is now available for Windows as well as OS X. You can download a beta of it from Apple’s site.The reasons they have done it are obvious, with iTunes and iPod already a huge hit among Windows users a browser is the next logical step, maybe, or maybe I’m just barking.Either way I shall be installing it at work and having a play with the Windows version later.

Cheers