Of the two big browsing features of 2008, one seems to run counter to where developers are driving their browsers. The melding of the location bar to the search bar was expected in Firefox and Opera, thanks to beta versions. Chrome has it, too, calling it the Omnibar. What seems to have caught developers off-guard has been the clamor for a universal switch to stop the cache and browsing history from recording anything at all.
Microsoft’s InPrivate debuted in Internet Explorer 8 beta 2, and Google Chrome’s version is the well-received Incognito feature. So far, in Firefox, the feature has only been available via the Stealther plug-in, which basically copies all the features of InPrivate except that you don’t have to open a new browsing window. Now, Mozilla has announced through the Firefox 3.1 status tracker that a privacy toggle will be a baked-in feature.
It turns out that Mozilla has had such a toggle on its radar since 2004, when Apple’s Safari introduced a cache-avoiding browsing session. So what took so long for Firefox to decide that this should be a rolled-in feature? As others have noted, Firefox director Mike Beltzner declared that the feature would need to take a backseat to keeping the browser on schedule.
Pressure from this being a near-universal feature has no doubt accelerated its importance, although Mozilla plans to put its own spin on what it can do. In addition to turning off the page cache and the browsing history recorder, there will be no autofill for passwords and new passwords used will not be saved. Also, all cookies acquired during the session will be discarded, as will downloads in the Download Manager. Essentially, pages visited will be stored in the memory, not on the hard disk–although there’s no word on if or how this will affect performance.
Another aspect of the current unnamed feature will save all tabs and close the session, re-opening a new blank browser window. When the private session is finally turned off, the older session will re-open. One difference from Microsoft’s InPrivate will be that there won’t be any neon advertising that private mode has been activated, according to Mike Connor, the lead developer on Firefox. The fact that you are using a privacy mode will remain private.
Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and who rarely gives public interviews, spoke with Michael Arrington at the TechCrunch50 conference today.
Topics ranged from politics to finance and technology. On the item of the stock market, Thiel is concerned that our economy keeps producing bubbles — technology, housing, foreign investing, etc. — yet he does not feel the current technology market is a bubble. Referring to the valuation of Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and other tech stocks, he said, “on a relative basis, they’re among the cheapest companies in terms of stock.”
But the 2000 bubble, he says, “set technology back 10 years,” by discouraging people from getting into technology. Thiel raised the political issue here: Why doesn’t our system see and proactively address these bubbles. It’s not like they don’t have precursor signals.
Arrington engaged Thiel in discussing YouNoodle, a project he’s funding that applies quantitative analysis to vetting start-ups. YouNoodle examines a ton of variables, including things like how long the founders have known each other, and then predicts not just success for companies but their three-year valuation. Traditionally an exercise for investors, Thiel says that YouNoodle applies, “a division of labor.” Computers, he says, do some things better in humans, and “there are certain quantitative metrics that work very well in startups.”
For instance? CEO salary. The lower it is, the more like the company is to succeed, since it indicates alignment with growing equity, and also because it keeps the salary cap for all employees reasonable. “It’s been powerfully predictive,” Thiel says. And the magic number: $100,000 to $120,000. Above $150,000, “you start to have issues.”
Thiel, a ranked chess player in his younger years, has interesting thoughts about artificual intelligence and its benefits and dangers. While people used to think that Chess would never be mastered by a computer since it was a reflection of innate human intelligence, clearly people were mistaken about that. And it’s instructive, he says. “How many domains are like Chess, where they can be quantified?” Thiel asked. “My thinking is that there are probably more than we think.”
Responding to a question from the audience about computers taking over the world: “My own sense, it’s not going to happen. But I was wrong about chess.”
Concept cars give automotive designers a chance to let their imaginations run wild, often with outlandish results. But even by that measure, BMW has come up with something as strange as it is innovative — a shape-shifting car covered with fabric.
One more spammer is heading off to jail, but not before he managed to bilk at least several hundred people out
of $400,000 or more. Michael Dolan, 24, has been sentenced to seven years in jail—the maximum he could have received—followed by three years of supervised release. Dolan and a group of co-conspirators ran a scheme from 2002-2006 in which they first trolled AOL chatrooms for user names, then bombarded these users with phishing attempts.
As Infoworld reports, the scheme ran as follows. Victims typically received a link to a false greeting card which, when opened, installed a malware package. The next time the target attempted to log on to AOL, the program would request credit card numbers, bank account data, or other personal information. Users who refused to enter the data were prevented from logging into AOL. As schemes go, this was a fairly novel idea at the time, and I actually remember running into several systems infected this way. Dolan also sent spam purporting to be from AOL’s billing department, asking customers to please reenter their billing details due to a server meltdown. As you can imagine, all of this left AOL feeling a bit perturbed.
Dolan himself has something of a history of bad behavior. He was first sentenced to two years of probation after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor count of accessing a computer without authorization. His probation was revoked in 2006, after the ruling judge discovered that he had taken several trips out of state, including at least one trip overseas. Dolan was then sentenced to nine months of imprisonment, and was charged in the AOL scam on September 28, 2006. Considering that the scam itself ran from 2002-2006, Dolan was likely making money from computer fraud both while on probation and in jail.
The federal government claimed that Dolan masterminded the scheme, but if he did, his intelligence appears to be confined solely to computing. Assistant US Attorney Edward Chang stated in a sentencing memorandum that Dolan attempted to variously bribe, coerce, and threaten various witnesses, and succeeded in convincing his girlfriend to perjure herself. Combined with his modus operandi of committing computer fraud while directly under the nose of the authorities, Dolan simply doesn’t seem to be the sharpest crayon in the box.
Sharp or dull, however, he’s headed to jail. Five years for fraud, two years for aggravated identity theft, followed by his supervised release, which is essentially probation. Judges are allowed to impose conditions during a supervised release, and can bar the individual in question from engaging in activities which are otherwise lawful. The judge in Dolan’s case has not set the terms of the release yet, but based on his record, it’s a safe bet that Dolan won’t be touching a PC until 2018.
Digital Web Magazine posted a nice article comparing Photoshop to Fireworks through a debate by two groups of designers each supporting one of the programs. Photoshop has always been the industry standard for digital image editing, even though it was primarily made for creating print material, while Fireworks on the other hand was specifically made for creating web friendly graphics. It is possible in theory to do almost everything you do in one of these in the other, so which one should you use?
I have personally been a Fireworks user for years, I had never gotten into Photoshop and Fireworks never gave me a reason to force myself to go and try and learn Photoshop seriously. Fireworks was in fact made just for web design and it does that one thing extremely well. In addition to this, the introduction of CS3 has provided tighter integration between all of Adobe’s Creative Suite, so it is now easier than ever to juggle from one program to the next so you do not need to use Photoshop just because you are working on a project with other people using Photoshop.
I personally think its best for new web designers try using fireworks before photoshop, You would end up never trying photoshop. I’m not sure if you can say the same for photoshop most photoshop users tend to use fireworkws quite often.
What about you guys, do you use Photoshop or Fireworks, and why?
There are plenty of free ways to build an average photoblog, but if you have dreams of creating one that meets your needs and not just the masses, check out Pixelpost 1.7.1. Updated earlier this year with a bunch of new features including an Install Assistant, this MySQL/PHP-based application is a free download and needs only a modicum of technical knowledge and some server space to use.
Everything is tweakable and functionality can be extended with a number of free downloadable add-ons for everything from the ability to use PayPal to let visitors buy photos to adding histograms to images to an Adobe Lightroom exporter. All of them have easy-to-follow instructions for installing them, too.
If you’re not the tweaking type, simply pick one of the available templates (also free) and start publishing your photos.
Well I’ve been kinda busy these days with my new project which is a shoutcast/web dev/web hosting service, currently we have only launched our shoutcast hosting platform, we got some of the cheapest prices in the industry, it like we are giving away free shoutcast hosting.
We expect to launch our web hosting platform in the coming months. I’m expecting a lot out of this we are live for only a few days and already we are a success.
About Shoutcast :SHOUTcast software allows users to set up their own Internet radio servers using provided software. The output format is supported by multiple clients including the widely popular Nullsoft Winamp. Current uses include listening to music as well as live broadcasting of events for the average person.
Are you a .Mac subscriber who’s been using the built-in bookmark syncing app? Come Sunday that service will no longer exist as part of the MobileMe transition, so if you want to do one last sync you’ve got to get it done this weekend.
Shortly after the MobileMe announcement last month Apple sent out an e-mail to current .Mac subscribers detailing this change. Friday, the company extended the transfer deadline to July 6, along with providing a how-to guide to make sure you’ve got everything synced up one last time. You can get full instructions on how to do the sync here.
The July 6 deadline, which is Sunday, leads me to believe that the MobileMe changeover may be dropping a day or two early from the expected July 11 release date.
