Apparently if you have a web site, “15% of your visitors are thieves”, or so say Anti-Leech.

Welcome to Anti-Leech.com! Internet today has big problems. An average of 15% of your visitors use advertising blocking tools when visiting your sites and the major part of all webmasters will try to copy the content you publish. Therefore we have engineered several ways to protect your website.

Apparently these fools believe it is theft to use pop-up blocking or banner blocking software! Just like it is theft to change TV channels when the adverts come on. It must also be theft to not read every word of every advert in the newspapers you buy! Does this mean that all blind people who browse the web are thieves because they can’t see the adverts?

A major part of all webmasters will try to copy your content

Surely that includes the people they are selling to? So we have only 15% of visitors are thieves but a major part, lets say 51%, of all webmasters are thieves!

These people also sell “Anti-HTML” which consists of a pathetic right-click javascript popup and outputting your html content in fragments with javascript document.write()’s.

Their “Anti-Theft” product will also “Limit Access to Certain Countries” wow! Just what I want: a reduced market place!
They also do an “Anti-Spam” product which is “Completely free from ads”. That’s a selling point which seems completely at odds with the rest of their products!

I’ll finish with a final quote:

All actions are also logged, so you can catch everyone trying to break through the defense.

Avoid at all costs!

Link from slashdot

Update: For those looking for a proxy. I have set up an experimental proxy here

There is a very interesting article over at The Globe And Mail entitled Is there a ‘Geek’ Syndrome?. A well researched piece on the high incidence of high-functioning autism or Asperger’s Syndrome in Silicon Valley.
Hmmm, some of the indicators feel remarkably close to home…

Link from Geek Ramblings

Whilst reading an interesting article about XHTML 1.1 and content type negotiation over at Dive Into Mark, I noticed he mentioned gzip-compressing and featured a link to a gzip encoding checker at leknor.com.
So without hesitation I (g)zipped over there and popped my largest page into the box: The results were encouraging; Content-Length: 42350. When I loaded the page in my browser and saved it to disk it was a massive 243 KB (249,232 bytes)! BTW, that page has an incredible 846 links on it!
So, the gzipped output is a mere 17% of the original size! That’s a huge saving in download time. Recommended!

Find out more about gzip, mod_gzip, and which browsers support it.

Yet another new version of the B2 Link Manager released . Version 0.9
You can obtain it from the B2 Link Manager page.

New features:
* URLs are optional.
* Delete asks for confirmation.
* You can now turn off the descriptions, even if you have no image defined or have images turned off.

Feedback, bug reports/fixes, and general comments appreciated on the B2 forum.

I’ve just released a new B2 hack. Inspired by a conversation on IM about the recent request to be able to turn off a blog from the admin tool; I have produced a hack which will allow you to define arbitrary extra options, set their values in the admin tool and use them in your templates.

You can see my announcement on the B2 forum here.

You can find details, and download it from the B2 Extra Options page.

Please post bug reports, fixes, comments, questions, etc. to this topic in this forum.

Update: There is a JavaScript problem see the forum

I was pointed to a new report from the Aberdeen Group: entitled Open Source and Linux: 2002 Poster Children for Security Problems (requires free registration to read the full report) by Aamir

It’s interesting that the report never seems to come out and clearly say exactly who the poster children are. It mentions “Security advisories for Open Source and Linux software accounted for 16 out of the 29 security advisories”. But then goes on to say “Keeping pace with Linux and Open Source software are traditional Unix-based software products, which have been affected by 16 of the 29 advisories”. So that’s 16 out of 29 for Linux & Open Source and 16 out of 29 for traditional Unix!

Hmmm. It doesn’t seem to mention the combination of Windows and Open Source which was also affected by, for example, the last two Apache security advisories.

Interestingly, it doesn’t mention the fact that most Linux distributions ship with at least 1000 more applications than Windows. More applications means more bugs (including security related ones).

It doesn’t mention anything about the response times to get these vulnerabilities fixed. I am on about 8 security mailing lists, and I see how fast these things are reported, and how fast the fixes are released. Often within a couple of days.

It doesn’t mention the fact that security issues and bugs are found much more quickly and easily in Open Source software simply because you can see and examine the source code. It also fails to mention that it is equally as quick to fix them for the same reason.

It then quotes some much more alarming statistics about incidents (occurrences of the same vulnerabilities), but fails to assign any OS or development model labels to the numbers.

“One of these realities is that no one vendor or supplier is more at fault than another.”

Funny I didn’t get that from the headline.

“Moreover, the scourge of past days, viruses, has been replaced by active Internet content that worms its way into any Internet-aware software utilities and services”

and we all know which Internet-aware software suffers most from this don’t we? IIS, IE, and Outlook.

BTW, This is the same company that published a report attacking the Athlon XP’s processor rating system, which it turned out was funded by Intel. Stories on ZDNet and slashdot.

I’ve had an idea for a new project! Another add-on for B2. It should be quite simple to do, and very useful.
More when I’ve coded it! 🙂

There is now a new version of the B2 Link Manager available. Version 0.8 You can obtain it from the B2 Link Manager page.

New features:
* You can now choose the order of the links as they are output.
* The link manager also allows you to sort your links for easier editing.
* The user level visibility now controlled by a variable at the top of b2linkmanager.php
* The whole package is now available in zip and tar.gz formats.

Feedback, bug reports/fixes, and general comments appreciated. Post them on the forum as usual.