It's Fixed in the Next Release - Internet Technology

TD Bank Tries an End Run Around Site Tracking Blockers

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 14:21:26 -0600

I'm well aware of the value of site analytics. Most of my sites make extensive use of them. But at the same time I'm aware of a user's absolute right to not be tracked, be it anonymous or not. When it comes to my personal information, I'm usually happy to let most sites drop in a statistical tracking cookie, but I almost always set the lifetime of those cookies to "session only".

Basically, I'm happy to let someone know how I navigate their site, because that information is likely to result in improved usability. What I don't like is disclosing how many times I visit a site over a period of time, and what my multi-visit user patterns are like.

With browsers like Firefox and now even Internet Explorer providing easy tools to manage cookie acceptance and lifetime, more and more users who don't want to be tracked are limiting cookies. This is giving marketers a more challenging time and skewing their statistics. Poor babies.

Some marketers are fighting back. What's not commonly known is that Adobe's Flash Player lets sites store cookie-like information as well. Now Adobe hasn't quite caught up with the concept of individual liberties, so the default configuration of the Flash Player is to allow local storage without any explicit user permission. Adobe pretty much has a monopoly when it come to this sort of thing, so there's little incentive for them to change.

So now marketers who claim to seek to improve customer service have a method where they can gather data even if their customers have taken explicit steps to prevent it. News Flash: That is NOT good customer service! It's really rather offensive customer abuse.

Some time in the past few months, TD Bank decided to join the ranks of companies who have elected to bypass their customer's wishes. I recently connected to my online banking site, and got asked for permission to allocate local storage to an invisible bit of Flash. So I cranked open the page and found this link: https://easyweb46w.tdcanadatrust.com/dojo111/dojox/storage/Storage.swf?baseUrl=/dojo111/dojo/. At least its name reflects its purpose.

Anyone familiar with the big Canadian banks has become accustomed to dealing with these arrogant behemoths, protected from significant international competition by legislation, and reading from some version of a dictionary where the meaning of "service" is very different from the commonly accepted definition. Really the only surprising thing is that they haven't found a way to charge me 25 cents per byte of information that they want to store on my computer.

But you don't have to be subject to corporate whims. These things are configurable. Don't go looking through your browser, plugins or program settings for the control panel, though. Follow this link to your Flash Player control panel. This looks like a screen shot of what a control panel might look like, but don't be confused: it's a live presentation of your current settings. Click on the second tab, "Global Storage Settings". There's a reasonably good explanation of the settings below the panel, but if you move the slider to the left until it reads "None", then every site that tries to save data in flash will have to get your approval first. If you don't want to be asked, set the "Never Ask Again" check box. Then go to the last tab, "Website Storage Settings" to take a look at which sites have left tracking codes on your computer. Delete all the ones you don't trust.

Now you have control of your information again.

Malware Injection: More Fun With Skype

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Thu, 29 May 2008 13:43:15 -0500

Skype screen capture

This one probably isn't new, but it's worth noting. An associate recently got this bogus "security warning". Appropriately named "irony", the message warns the user that "Security Center has detected Malware" and directs the user to a site where they can download a patch. Click on the image for a full sized version.

The "patch" will install malware on the user's computer. At least they can't forge the link as belonging to Microsoft, but this could easily fool an unsuspecting user.

Online Shopping versus Traditional Shopping

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 13:36:49 -0600

It's interesting how often the question of online versus traditional shopping comes up. A friend asked me this earlier today and I gave him the same answer I've been providing for a decade now.

These days the response seems reasonable, but back in 1998 it was heresy. It used to be guaranteed to make a room full of start-ups and venture capitalists go dead quiet. Of course back then we were in the middle of the dot-com boom, when somehow geeks who don't like daylight managed to convince everyone that their concept of a good shopping experience was somehow universal.

So here it is:
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Sites Need to Custom Brand CAPTCHA Images

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 09:14:46 -0500

In an absolutely brilliant but evil move, a Trojan fools users into solving CAPTCHA images. Infected users think that they're entering codes to see a model undress, when actually they're helping crackers register for illegal Yahoo accounts.
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Don't Trust Salesforce.com (Revised)

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 19:48:07 -0500

In principle, the "network is the system" idea has a lot of merit. The benefits of having all your data stored in some reliable, secure, redundant database that's centrally managed and hooking into it with whatever device is at hand — be it a desktop machine or a cell phone — has a lot of appeal. Keeping a system available on the net, up to date with fixes and patches, and secure is no trivial job. It's exactly the sort of thing that should be left to someone who is a professional at it.

[Revised: Less than 24 hours after I posted this, I received a phone call from a salesforce.com representative, apologizing for the misuse of my information. My understanding is that one of their partners is to blame; that the misuse originated outside their organization. I was looking forward to receiving more details in an e-mail, but in preparing to let their mail pass my spam defences, I messed up -- and all mail has been bounced from late Friday through most of the weekend. Hopefully they will re-send it so I can add more factual information to this. At this point, it's clear that at least Salesforce takes this sort of misuse very seriously, and I have accepted their apology.]

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Fighting Phishing with AJAX - A Call to Arms

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 11:51:08 -0500

I have always wanted to beat "phishers" at their own game. Briefly, a phishing scam creates a page that looks like a legitimate site, requesting user name and password information. The scammers send phony requests via electronic mail under a variety of pretenses, urging customers to follow the enclosed link. Instead of going to your bank or eBay or PayPal, the link goes to their rogue server that looks like a legitimate site and the information is logged there for subsequent criminal activity.

As a rule, if everyone who received a phising attempt (or a mortgage solicitation for that matter) took the time to follow the link, then input bogus data, then the scam / solicitation would instantly be rendered ineffective. The criminals would be faced with sorting through thousands of garbage records in order to locate the actual victims.

Unfortunately as a society, we're don't do all that well at things that benefit the "collective good", so we're stuck with scams in our mailboxes.

But AJAX changes that.

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Developer tip: catching typos in PHP5

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Fri, 18 May 2007 13:59:47 -0500

This post is written for developers who use the PHP programming language. It provides a technique for catching a common class of typo by using the __call() __get() and __set() overloading methods.
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If You Liked "The Secret" is Live

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Fri, 18 May 2007 07:10:37 -0500

If You Liked "The Secret" went live yesterday. Talk about a project that expands to exceed available resources, this was it.

The site is for people who liked the movie "The Secret". It offers some of the classic titles in this field of thought, customized with a person's name and downloaded in electronic format. It sounds like a good idea on its own, but it's a surprisingly powerful moment when you open up a book and find it written for you.
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Rochen Rocks!

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 13:02:10 -0500

As a developer of web sites, I've had experience with quite a few hosting providers over the years. Few of them have been much beyond "satisfactory". After watching how Rochen managed the extraordinary demands of the Joomla community web site (www.joomla.org), and considering that they did this above and beyond the call of duty — as a sponsor Rochen sees no direct revenue from Joomla, I recently decided to open an account there.

The relationship is new, but so far it's looking very, very good.
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Useful Free Web Developer Tool: "Multiple IE"

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 22:44:00 -0600

Those of us who do web development face a daunting task. Even with well defined web standards, every browser implementation has differing levels of compliance, bugs, and differences in interpretation that can make a site that looks great in one browser look awful, or even non-functional in another.

Then there's Microsoft. Despite being a party to the development of many of these standards, they're notorious for going their own way and for ignoring standards when it doesn't suit them. The problem is that Internet Explorer is by far the most installed browser out there, so web site developers are left to accommodate their errors and arrogance.
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Bye Bye Blogger!

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 00:18:35 -0500

Okay so it's been a long time since I've made a post here. There's lots of reasons for that, but one of them has been that I just couldn't tolerate Blogger anymore.

After looking at a variety of solutions, I finally stumbled upon Serendipity (www.s9y.org), and it looks like it's going to do the job very well.

There's still a few things to take care of, a few broken links and style tweaks to get into place, but it was easy to install, fairly easy to extract data from Blogger, and it generates decent HTML.

We're back in business!

More on That Little Block on the Top of the Page

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 14:09:00 -0600

It's always fun to try to decipher how an algorithm works. It's going to be even more fun to write this post without biasing the results: the requirement is to be abstract without being obscure. It seems now that the main page is responding to content, but only that near the top of the page. All linked content pages are still responding as previously described.

This suggests that the top of a page is what's important, which is an interesting observation, both for those seeking higher placement and for those viewing results. The old adage of "put what you want to say in the introduction" holds true more than ever. I suspect "the top of the page" is the text below the second level header.

If the results no longer trigger off topics related to biochemistry, we'll know this is true. What's missing is a way to discover when an indexing event has occurred.

"Sensless" AdSense?

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 12:56:00 -0600

If there's still a Google "AdSense" banner on this page, then this post is less relevant. I've had the banner up for a day or two on a "hey why not try it" basis. So far, all the ads have been related either to blogging, or how to make quick cash from AdSense! Talk about self-referential. If this keeps up, I'll take it off the site (I might try moving the site to another domain just to see if there's a change).

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The True Cost of Commuting

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Sun, 08 Jan 2006 17:27:00 -0600

Every time I see a freeway full of cars, I get angry. Aside from the environmental issues, which should get everyone riled up, I see a great mass of human brain power devoted to nothing. I see lost productivity. By lost productivity I mean not only in the traditional economic sense, but lost time. Time to spend with family and friends; time to play, to create. The "human capital" that we squander in service of our automotive fetish is astronomical. It's just an extra bonus that we're doing grave damage to the planet at the same time.

In the Greater Toronto Area alone, I wouldn't be surprised if we squander a million person-hours per day getting from home to work and back. If we say that this applies to a population base of roughly five million, extrapolate that to a North American population of 300 million, we come up with a cool 60 million hours. Of course, Toronto has legendary problems with traffic congestion, so let's be conservative. Divide by two and call it 150 million as a ballpark estimate for average. If everyone chose to work those hours, using an eight hour day, that represents a workforce of almost 19 million. Of course given the choice, probably 15 million of those would choose to watch television, but that still leaves four million to do valuable things, like think and create, to contribute to society. Even if my estimates are way out of whack, that's a lot.

Clearly there's a huge indirect payoff to building better, faster mass transit systems with comfortable environments that allow people to do something other than play human sardine. Then at least while you're stuck in motion, you have a chance of getting some work done instead of focusing on not getting in an accident. Is this likely to happen? No. Government policies seem to enshrine -- if not deify -- car culture. Support of the automotive sector is taken for granted as "the engine of the economy", when it's really an engine of decay. But trying to change this is tantamount to tilting at windmills, particularly since the capital investment required would probably be in the trillions.

Consumer Culture is Consuming Culture

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Sun, 08 Jan 2006 16:19:00 -0600

The way I see it, there are two classes of activity that people engage in: creating and consuming. These classes apply quite broadly, from creating wealth and consuming goods, to creating art and absorbing information (a form of consumption) by reading a book.

Left to their own devices, I believe most humans have a need to create. Whether it be knitting a scarf or developing a cancer fighting drug, creating is an intrinsic part of human existence.

Yet in our mass-marketed, consumer driven culture, individual creativity seems to have suffered greatly. Cultural gateways such as large publishers and mololithic music and entertainment companies arbitrate and edit our views, selecting what we see based more on economic potential than cultural value. Thousands of people are creating works that may be of value, but we rarely discover them. Individuals who might otherwise be creating their own works are watching television with their minds only partially engaged, or worse, expressing their creativity by assembling the latest and greatest over-branded, over-promoted consumer goods into a "personal statement" of cookie-cutter uniformity.

The Internet is an immensely positive disruptive force that provides hope of to reversing this destructive trend. Once musicians discover that they can both find an audience and earn a substantial living by dealing directly with fans, record companies will cease to add value. They will lose control and become "disintermediated" in short order. New intermediaries who provide value that is relevant to the Internet age will thrive (officialcommunity.net is a good example).

Large entertainment companies will be restricted to projects that require large capital investments, but even then the prevalence of easy copying will limit their potential returns, which will be reflected in smaller production budgets. The days of the quarter-billion dollar blockbuster are numbered.

Sites like lulu.com will revolutionize publishing. Blogging and photo upload sites give a stage to hundreds of thousands of people with something to say, or with images to share; They provide a platform for creativity.

Idealists refer to this as the "democratization" of culture, but they couldn't be more wrong. Any widely distributed, truly democratic process is subject to displacement by larger commercial interests with profit as a motive. Ironically what's required are large, strong, profit-oriented corporations who embrace "quasi-democratic access" as a paradigm, and who find a way to profit without interfering with the mechanics of that paradigm. This is why Google, Yahoo, eBay, and even Amazon have become culturally important institutions. These companies will serve as the seed for a new cultural renaissance.