Mark Gilbert’s Blog

HP is poised to buy BT’s data centres off them in a deal reportedly worth £1.5 Billion. This deal would see BT offload it’ 40 data centres to HP according to the Sunday Times. BT would still have access to the centres under a 10 year deal which would also see BT’s management of HP’s voice and data networks extend worldwide.

The companies already have an outsourcing deal worth $1.5 Billion that was forged in 2004, including worker swaps. Now the ties between the two companies are getting tighter this will bring increased speculation of a merger of the pair. Obviously both companies are playing down this prospect the Sunday Times reports.

BT were unable to comment on the possible tie-up, but HP have said

If there are developments relating to the alliance between British Telecom and HP we will inform you through our usual channels.

Both companies will announce their latest financial results this Thursday, with BT’s announcement being the last for departing CEO Ben Verwaayen. Obvious benefits of an announcement being made now is that Verwaayen could leave the companies shareholders with a large pile of cash, courtesy of HP while making BT’s new developed services division more robust and profitable while HP on the other hand would be able to tout the massive deal to their shareholders.

As said previously both companies are playing the rumour down, but then they would, wouldn’t they?

Cheers

It would appear that after an absence of almost 6 months that the Demonoid tracker is back with us again. It was taken offline in November 2007 after some problems with hosting, but now both the website and the tracker are back up.

If you had an existing account then it will still work, as it looks like they’ve managed to preserve all the old data too.

Cheers

The Web Standards Project has released the latest version of it’s acid test for browser rendering, surprisingly called the ACID3 Test.

Acid3 goes beyond the CSS tests implemented by Acid2 and tests a browser’s DOM Scripting capability, as well as continuing to probe visual rendering of CSS, SVG and webfonts.

The test itself can be found here along with the reference rendering.

The ideal score is obviously for your browser to score 100/100 and have the test rendering look exactly like the reference rendering, suffice to say there are no mainstream browsers out there that pass completely yet. Internet Exploder fails this test in a rather grand fashion, but then that is now the norm for any Microsoft browser and a web standards test.

Cheers

Yesterday AOL finally ended support for the Netscape browser. There will be no more updates, no even security ones from 1/3/2008. From it’s beginning as the Mosaic browser in 1994 right through to the height of it popularity in the mid-90’s, for most people Netscape was “the internet”. Internet Explorer has yet to take off, and Netscape offered the internet in a simple and easy package.

Somewhere along the way though it all went wrong for Netscape, personally I blame bloat. WTF was Netscape Communicator all about? The best thing they did was keep the source alive in the form of the Mozilla project. Then they also succumbed to the curse of bloat and spun off Firefox and Thunderbird. However while Firefox is the top dog in terms of alternative browsers now, their footprint has been growing steadily since the early pre-1.0 releases and they will seriously have to watch they don’t go the same way as their dear departed grandparent, Netscape.

If you long for the olden days when your browser did everything under the sun, including scheduling and e-mail, then take a look at SeaMonkey, it’s what remains of Mozilla.

Cheers

Most of the time I’m a fairly happy and content person, but every so often someone does something that really winds me up. For example Internet Exploder only sites really annoy me, HP’s Channel Services Network site only works correctly in IE. Firefox, Opera and other all fail to render it correctly. Is it beyond the powers of HP, one of the largest technology companies in the world to write standards compliant code? Of course it bloody isn’t but they just can’t be bothered to do things right.

I also find myself quite annoyed by a lot of things the government and it’s minions say and do. Appointing Michael Martin as speaker of the house, for example, mean that an incompetent buffoon who deserves to be removed from the post for his disgraceful conduct. At times during commons debates he seems to have very little grasp on what is going off, and since his position is to enforce and keep some kind of decorum, knowing what’s happening would seem like a key part of his role. During the newly appointed Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg’s second PM’s questions The Speaker completely forgot to call his name. The Speaker has to have wigged clerks pass him advice during parliamentary debates, nothing immediately wrong with a bit of advice but this is becoming all too regular. Besides if the man at the top needs constant pointers on how to do his job, you have to wonder how well suited to the task of advising him the people below him really are.

I could go on down this line but I’d be moving at a tangent away from my main point, which is the latest piece of legislation to come from Whitehall regarding ISPs policing their users. The government has said that ISPs who do no take steps to curb illegal downloads of music and films will face legal sanctions. The suggestion is that ISPs operate on a disconnection after ‘three strikes’ rule. Under the proposals, the first strike would be an e-mail warning from the ISP with the second strike resulting in suspension and finally termination of contract on the third strike.
It would seem that the Labour party has been receiving some rather large donations from the BPI and FACT.
Really how can this be enforced? An ISP would have to block access to every site thought to be offering links to illegal music of films, but this would not do anything to counter the so-called “deep web“. Therefore this would have to be paired with a policy of inspecting individual packets traversing their networks and then block users based on this data. However false positives would be a major problem for all approaches. What recourse would users have if they were wrongly identified as downloading illegal music? What happens when multiple people share the same network, who gets banned? If the person whose name the account is in then another account with another ISP could be opened in a different name.

However the point I think ISPs will be most concerned about is this effectively removes an ISPs “mere conduit” status as set out in the EU Electronic Commerce Directive (Terrorism Act 2006). “Mere conduit” status means that ISPs are not responsible for the traffic going over their network when they are not aware of the content, for example an ISP cannot be held liable if a terrorist attack is planned via e-mail or Paedophile ring is run on it’s network. The same applies to telephone companies such as BT and other similar organisations such as Royal Mail. “Mere conduit” status relies upon the fact that the carrier has no idea at all what is being carried, they are simply there to deliver the message, regardless of what it is. Without “mere conduit”, ISPs face legal action over traffic that’s outside of their control. This could drive ISPs out of business or drive customers out of the EU to ISPs based elsewhere.

In my opinion ISPs should not inspect any traffic traveling across their networks. I would not expect Royal Mail to open my post or BT to listen in on my phone calls. It violates my privacy as an individual. Nineteen Eighty Four was supposed to be a warning, not a guidebook. How far can an ISP go before they lose “mere conduit” status? Is spam filtering going too far? Messages have to be inspected to perform this task. Would blocking spyware infested machine that were spewing spam constitute waiving “mere conduit” status? Are ISPs which throttle bandwidth to P2P apps going too far towards monitoring traffic on their networks?

Will ISPs want to enforce this legislation? Probably not, but if it’s the law they will have very little choice. Will businesses be exempt from this monitoring. I work for an IT Services company which uses remote VPN links to other businesses including insurance companies, pension companies, banks and accountancy firms. I think some of our customer would be most upset that our ISP and their own was looking at their data. In some cases it may even be illegal for ISPs to inspect data since it could be in violation of confidentiality or data protection laws. Will ISPs even be able to inspect data that is encrypted? The government has clearly not thought this through properly, which leads me to either one of a few conclusions. Either the law will come into force and be ignored by everyone. The law will be shot down in the commons as it should be. The law will come into force, and will be enforced rigorously, then the whole UK Internet will simply melt down.

Which ever outcome actually happens this just goes to prove that the government is either not aware of the implications and practicalities of legislation it is proposing or is fully aware of both of these but chooses to ignore them anyway.

If you feel as strongly about this as I do then I suggest you sign this petition to the UK government.

Cheers

The most popular alternative browser on the web has just hit half a billion downloads. Internet Exploder is still the most common browser by a fairly long margin, but Firefox is gaining all the time.

Cheers

Four of the guys who run The Pirate Bay have had legal action brought against them. The plaintiffs in the case include Warner, MGM, Columbia Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Sony BMG, Universal and EMI among others.

If the charges stick the defendants face a maximum of two years imprisonment. The prosecution are also pushing for a fine of £90,000, which they say is the minimum amount of profit which The Pirate Bay has made from the disputed illegal activity.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industries said;

“The operators of The Pirate Bay have always been interested in making money, not music. The Pirate Bay has managed to make Sweden, normally the most law abiding of EU countries, look like a piracy haven with intellectual property laws on a par with Russia.”

Time will tell if the charges will stick or not, although in the past there are more often than not problems with prosecuting charges of this nature.

Cheers

While browsing The Pirate bay today, I noticed that they had changed their logo to include a url, http://iwouldntsteal.net/. I thought it might be worth checking it out and they actually have a really interesting video on there, done as a take off of the FACT trailer shown at the start of most DVD’s and films now.

Have a look.

Cheers

The malicious widget, named “Secret Crush” will first popup as a request when one of their friends has started using the widget, and asks if you would like more information. On clicking the widget installs and before you are allowed to use it you must invite 5 friends.

So far this all seems fairly normal, not all that different from any other facebook widget. It is after this that things turn nasty, no information on who your secret crush is or could be has been reveled up to this point, since finding out who this person is will have been the goal of installing the widget in the first place then users will inevitably have come this far.

The user is next presented with frame asking the user to download and install software that purports to reveal who the person with the crush is, however instead it links to Zango, the spyware application.

Lovely

The lovely Transmission Bittorrent client available for OS X, Linux, Unix and Solaris has now reached version 1.0. I have been using Transmission for a while now on OS X and it really is great, small lightweight, everything a BT client should be, unlike the increasingly bloated Azereus.

Just like most OS X apps it just works, drag a torrent to the windows or double click it and the download starts. No fancy bits, just simple effective torrent handling.

I suggest you check it out if your on one of the supported OS’s

Cheers

Shawn Blanc has an extensive review of Panic’s Transmit FTP application. Have a read over on his blog at shawnblanc.net.

There are many/ things that make Transmit stand out as my Mac FTP application of choice, mainly I have never had it crash, unlike Cyberduck which crashes on a very regular basic when uploading stuff to my webserver. It also is much much faster than Cyberduck for large numbers of small files and just generally a lot nicer to use.

I suggest you check it out.

Cheers

Yesterday Google purged it’s search index of reportedly over 40,000 links to sites containing malware. Over the last few months Sunbelt, the company that produces the Counterspy application, have been tracking the sites and the SEO techniques these sites have been using to get themselves to the top of the Google ranks.

There is some nice dissection of the malware links over at the Sunbelt blog.

The SEO side of things was done using a bot net to post thousands upon thousands of link in forums and comment systems to the dodgy sites in question, which is what nailed them the top Google ranks.

The malware at the heart of it all is called “Scam.Iwin” by Sunbelt, which turns infected PCs into zombie units to join the bot net and post all the needed links to crack the Google Page Rank algorithm.

So let this be a lesson to all of you, keep your machines patched and anti-virus software updated on a regular basis. Personally for Windows users I would have to recommend Kaspersky Internet Secuirty, it really seems like the best product going. High detection and removal rates, and I speak from experience when talking about it, I’ve used it at work on machines and it is leagues ahead of Norton or McAfee.

Cheers

I actually had a good day today at work. We had a good laugh, got lots of work done, and since I had LOADS of coffee that just made it great. I made up little songs for lots of things, and just generally went a bit mad. I tried to see how long I could keep someone’s attention by just holding a piece of plastic and saying nothing to them at all. As it turns out quite a while, sadly I forgot to time this experiment, but next time I will.

On other topics I think I’m just about done twiddling with my blog design. Hopefully it looks better, I tend to think it does and I’m rather chuffed with it all. My only complaint would have to be that I’m having a job getting it to validate as XHTML 1.1. XHTML 1.0 transitional is fine and works very well however XHTML 1.1 fails. It comes down to the democracy plugin which I use to do my voting on the right hand side. Simply put the whole thing needs to be enclosed in a div tag, but I really cant be bothered to alter the plugin. I know I’m just being lazy, but oh well, I’m not that bothered about XHTML 1.1 code.

Going back to what I was saying about Internet Explorer, I did finally get a setup that serves the MIME type as application/xhtml+xml for most browsers and text/html for IE. However that created a small problem. Currently when viewing a single post, such as this one the background of the page didn’t go all the way to the bottom of the page, smaller posts left huge white spaces that got smaller as the post got past one page of screen depth. After one page of screen depth a small white space was left at the bottom of the page after the background ends. But one smaller posts the white space was huge. It is a odd problem, and I know the issue lies with the code used for the royale theme which I didn’t write. Again it comes back to laziness, I can’t be bothered to look at the code beyond a cursory glance and so I’ll leave my MIME type as text/html, but my post about IE still stands, it is crap.

Some people may also notice that I’ve removed the calendar from the sidebar, I just feel with the new tag cloud it’s not so much needed any more, and so it had to go. I also just generally tidied up the sidebar, something which I had been meaning to do for ages now. Most of the other changes came with the theme which did involve some cleanup operations on the database.

Overall I’m pleased with it, hope you all enjoy.

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

Popular torrent sharing site Demonoid.com has finally been shut down. Instead of the site is simply a message that reads,

“The CRIA threatened the company renting the servers to us, and because of this it is not possible to keep the site online. Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for your understanding.”

This is not the first time they have been shut down but it remains to be seen whether this will be the last

Cheers

Zen Internet, my ISP of choice BTW, has revealed a possible fault with the Texas Instruments AR7 chip. This chips is used by many router brands, with some estimates putting it’s usage at around 33% of all routers worldwide including Linksys and Netgear.

Zen have advised their customers not to buy routers containing this chip as unstable connections have been seen. In cases when BT have been called out to test lines, they use a Speedtouch based device, which has no problems and therefore BT determine that the line is ok. This leave the customer with the call out bill of £169 and still with no resolution on the problem.

“We’re not saying there’s definitely a problem [with the AR7 itself], but it does seem to be a common factor.”

That was the official line from Zen, and they went on to add that the problem seems to occur on lines with varying Signal-to-Noise Ratios. Varying SNR levels can be caused by electrical interference, or old wires as a result of our aged telephone infrastructure.

Infineon who recently acquired Texas Instruments DSL manufacturing business insist the chip is fine and that they are aware of no problems with this particular chip.

Kudos to Zen for reporting this potential problem, and for those who are concerned there is a list of routers which contain the chip at Wikipedia

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

Google have recently acquired Feedburner, the company who provide feed readership and distribution statistics to millions. I must confess I haven’t used feedburner for quite some time, but on hearing this news I thought I would check back and see whats changed. Quite a lot apparently, the site has had a redesign and the whole process of setting up your feeds is a lot easier. I will continue to use feedburner and see how many people are reading (or not reading) my website.

Cheers

Google is currently in the process of acquiring a small Silicon Valley startup called GreenBorder which helps protect users against malware.

This coupled with the fact that Google recently started a blog devoted to online security suggests Google may be looking to move into the computer security territory more commonly occupied by the likes of Symantec and McAfee.GreenBorder works by integrating with IE and Firefox and isolates web content in a Sandbox area that can have malware flushed out like temporary files or can be cleared when the browser session ends.Whether Google simply plans to extend on it’s current feature of warning users when they may be about to view a site on which malware is known to reside, or integrate it into their Google Desktop offering remains to be seen.Cheers

This month I came so close to leaving my trusty ISP Zen for new ADSL2+ provider Be. I chatted to friends who have used Be and after hearing sad reports of awful customer service, problems with hardware and constant disconnects I decided against leaving Zen.

Be could have provided more speed, but in my opinion a good stable connection backed by fantastic service levels are more important.

Cheers