Web design blog

And yet:

“Consortium’s next priority is tackling vexing browser defragmentation for the open Web platform.”

Source: InfoWorld

New Web Code Draws Concern Over Risks to Privacy

Worries over Internet privacy have spurred lawsuits, conspiracy theories and consumer anxiety as marketers and others invent new ways to track computer users on the Internet. But the alarmists have not seen anything yet.

In the next few years, a powerful new suite of capabilities will become available to Web developers that could give marketers and advertisers access to many more details about computer users’ online activities. Nearly everyone who uses the Internet will face the privacy risks that come with those capabilities, which are an integral part of the Web language that will soon power the Internet: HTML 5.

— Tanzina Vega @ New York Times [via Slashdot]

New Tool Blocks Downloads From Malicious Sites

Science Daily Headlines reports that a new tool has been developed (funded by the National Science Foundation, US Army Research Office and US Office of Naval Research) to prevent ‘drive-by downloads’ whereby simply visiting a website, malware can be silently installed on a computer to steal a user’s identity and other personal information, launch denial-of-service attacks, or participate in botnet activity. The software called Blade — short for Block All Drive-By Download Exploits — is browser-independent and designed to eliminate all drive-by malware installation threats by tracking how users interact with their browsers to distinguish downloads that received user authorization from those that do not. ‘BLADE monitors and analyzes everything that is downloaded to a user’s hard drive to cross-check whether the user authorized the computer to open, run or store the file on the hard drive. If the answer is no to these questions, BLADE stops the program from installing or running and removes it from the hard drive,’ says Wenke Lee, a professor in the School of Computer Science in Georgia Tech’s College of Computing. Blade’s testbed automatically harvests malware URLs from multiple whitehat sources on a daily basis and has an interesting display of the infection rate of different browsers, the applications targeted by drive-by exploits, and the anti-virus detect and miss rates of drive-by binaries.

— Hugh Pickens @ Slashdot

ECMAScript Version 5 Approved

After 10 years of waiting and some infighting, ECMAScript version 5 is finally out, approved by 19 of the 21 members of the ECMA Technical Committee 39. JSON is in; Intel and IBM dissented.

– Slashdot

Cameroon the New Hotbed of Malware

According to McAfee, more than a third of Cameroon domains (TLD of .cm) are infested with viruses or other not-so-fun party treats. Given that it’s very easy to mis-type .com as .cm, this puts the computers of a lot of fat-fingered typists in peril. Second place on the most-infested domains list goes to China (.cn), while Hong Kong (last year’s “winner”) is now comfortably middle-of-the-pack.

– Slashdot

Opera 10.10 Released, Includes New “Unite” Tech

Opera 10.10 has been released, and with it their new “Unite” technology, which allows users to share content directly between all of their own devices. Unite wraps both web browser and web server into a single package in an attempt to change the way users think about their browser.

“‘We promised Opera Unite would reinvent the Web,’ said Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera. ‘What we are really doing is reinventing how we as consumers interact with the Web. By giving our devices the ability to serve content, we become equal citizens on the Web. In an age where we have ceded control of our personal data to third-parties, Opera Unite gives us the freedom to choose how we will share the data that belongs to us.'”

– Via Slashdot

New worm targets jailbroken iPhones for Dutch online banking customers

There are reports of a new worm that targets jailbroken iPhones and behaves like a botnet. It targets people in the Netherlands who use their iPhones for online banking with the Dutch bank ING, and the worm affects devices with SSH installed.

– Via BoingBoing

White House Website Switches To Open Source

WhiteHouse.gov has gone Drupal…. ‘This is a clear sign that governments realize that Open Source does not pose additional risks compared to proprietary software, and furthermore, that by moving away from proprietary software, they are not being locked into a particular technology, and that they can benefit from the innovation that is the result of thousands of developers collaborating on Drupal.’

– via Slashdot

Broadband provider sues city of Monticello

TDS Telecommunications sued the city of Monticello, Minnesota after residents passed a referendum to roll out their own fiber optic system.

TDS had earlier denied the city’s request for the company to provide fiber optic service. During the ensuring legal battle, which prevented the citizens from following through with their plans, TDS Telecommunications took the opportunity to roll out a fiber system.

– Via SlashDot

Everything You Know About Web Design Is Wrong – SXSWi 2009

Just as early filmmakers struggled to break free from the conventions of live theater, after 10+ years web designers are still trapped in the structures of the past. Forget pages, linear text and other archaic vestiges of design’s print ancestry; the separation of content from presentation has already changed everything.

– Dan Willis

Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists

Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls. If someone charges you for SEO, you have been conned.

… Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again.

– Derek Powazek (via BoingBoing)

On The Value Of SEO

To succeed in attracting that audience, she should have a great site and great content — agreed. But does she have individual listings? Then she probably needs to kick them out into Google Base, in order to fully be listed in Google. Does your mythical web developer deal with Google Base much? And where’s her web site now? Is she running it off Blogger? Using her own domain? These have impacts on how both the search engines may see her as well as how she’s perceived.

Does she have a blog in addition to a main site? That has an impact. Has she considered some unusual, creative ways to create content around real estate in her area, perhaps some catchy link bait, which may pull in the links she needs to rank better (which, by the way, is a recommended Google practice).

Does she have a local office? If so, has she claimed her listing in Google Local? If so, has she updated her title to reflect that perhaps she has “newport beach homes for sale?”

– Danny Sullivan @ SearchEngineLand (via BoingBoing)

Entire .SE TLD Drops Off the Internet

The SE tld dropped off the internet yesterday due to a bug in the script that generates the SE zone file. The SE tld has close to one million domains that all went down due to missing the trailing dot in the SE zone file. Some caching nameservers may still be returning invalid DNS responses for 24 hours.

– Slashdot

Yoko Ono Embraces Creative Commons

We’re very pleased to announce that thanks to the helpful advice of Xeni Jardin at BoingBoing and Eric Steuer at Creative Commons, the audio elements for Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band – The Sun Is Down (remix) are now being released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License. We firmly believe that releasing the elements under a CC license embodies the true spirit of the competition.

– Imagine Peace (note: site uses jQuery) (via BoingBoing)

Researchers Hijack Mebroot Botnet, Study Drive-By Downloads

The researchers managed to intercept Mebroot communications by reverse-engineering the algorithm used to select domains to connect to. Mebroot infects legitimate websites and uses them to redirect users to malicious sites that attempt to install malware on a victim’s machine.

– SlashDot

Flash CS5 Will Export iPhone Apps

Adobe announced that the CS5 release of Flash Professional, due in beta later this year, will allow developers to write applications and compile the code to run on Apple devices. Getting these into the app store might be tricky, though.

– SlashDot