February 13th, 2004
Firesomething is an extension that changes the “fox” (or “bird” if you’re using Firebird) into something else. Something else which can be whatever you want.
Check out the concise feature list:
Features: Polymorphs fire animals.
February 11th, 2004
I was checking my referrer logs the other day and came across several peculiar entries. There were mostly weblogs (except for 1), and at first glance would seem to be legitimate. Until I noticed a few things:
- There is no sign of a link back to my site.
- There are links to smut sites which appear to be the same throughout these sites.
- The weblogs are new - in some cases there is only 1 entry, and no sign of an archive.
- Certain elements are repeated across the sites.
Take a look at the sites (all redirected via JavaScript so that search engines ignore them): [1] [2] [3] [4].
Unmistakably, these are sites owned by a single person (or group of persons) who is out to seek referral links back to their sites, what is colloquially called “referral spam”. Whatever for, you say? Well, here’s a hypothesis (obvious as it is, it probably should be called “the truth” rather than a hypothesis).
First and foremost, this person (let’s just say, for ease of writing, that it is 1 person and it is a guy) is clearly someone intent on capitalizing on the weblog linking phenom that allows weblogs to have high PageRanks. A discerning eye will notice how the sites have domain names that can be turned around into sites of pornographic nature. Strong evidence that these either were porn sites before or are going to be once their Google PageRank gets high enough. By putting up some seemingly legitimate content to throw off webloggers, this person hopes to have his referral links unnoticed, unblocked (and implicitly acknowleged as legitimate). Referrer spammers are probably having a hard time with the increased awareness about referrer spam among webloggers, including tools and scripts to stop them. I can almost hear the imaginary light bulb switching on in their minds - why not use blogs as well? Place referrer links from a dummy weblog, link to several sites, get linked back (illegitimately), and get away with it. Just sit back and watch the PageRank and backlinks grow. Smart, but not smart enough.
Notice how the links to smut sites are almost consistent across all 4 sites - dead giveaway. That was what set the alarm bells ringing for me - why the hell would a weblog link to pornographic sites? In this case, this person is getting ahead of himself. The intention, as I see it, would be to make use of these fake blogs to boost search engine rankings for his existing sites by linking to them. Ah greedy, greedy. And what’s more, those links go to a porn site which I’ve blocked. Folly, folly.
Curiousity piqued, I Googled in hope of finding someone else reporting the same phenomenon. Here’s what I found:
So this is not new (4 months old news isn’t news). I wonder, how many webloggers have heard of this or seen this before though. I’m not clear on the how high the level of awareness is, but if you do have a weblog, do warn your readers (who are probably bloggers themselves). (And no, you don’t have to link back to me - hypocrite I am not ;))
As for a solution, I use mod_rewrite to block out unwanted referrers, thanks to kasia in a nutshell. You can view my .htaccess (which contains my list of blocked referrers as well). For an explanation of how this works, check out pippo’s reply to my thread at SitePoint Forums.
February 11th, 2004
Ah Mozilla is buzzing (bzzz!) all over the World Wide Web. More news from yours truly, this time on some tidbits that I found to be useful to the common Mozilla Suite/Firefox/Thunderbird user.
So, in no particular order:
February 10th, 2004
It’s been posted all over by now, even Slashdotted (mozilla.org was down for quite awhile earlier), Neowin-ed, blogged a thousand times over. Yes, Mozilla Firebird is now known as Mozilla Firefox. With the 0.8 Milestone release of the lightweight Gecko-based browser formerly known as Phoenix (now also formerly known as Mozilla Firebird), the Mozilla Foundation has come up with a name which shouldn’t run into any legal tussles like the old Phoenix and Firebird names seemed to attract (well, the Firebird name wasn’t exactly a legal tussle, more like an act of brotherhood among fellow Open Source developers).
Ben Goodger (Firefox Engineering Lead) wrote about the rebranding of Firebird to Firefox. Steven Garrity was drafted in as the new Visual Design Coordinator who developed the new Firefox icon you see below (together with the rest his team). Jon Hicks implemented it (meaning he did the computer graphic design work), as he describes in his journal entry. Yes links galore and more to come.
The rebranding also entailed some new spiffy icons, decals and ads which you can find in the Mozilla Firefox ad webpage. If you had a Firebird button or ad, it’s time to update them! For my case, I had an 80 x 15 pixel Firebird blog button, but the new Firefox one is 94 x 15 pixel large, which was totally out of whack with the rest of the buttons. Photoshop to the rescue…
So what’s new in Firefox 0.8? I won’t repeat what’s already been written, so you can refer to the Firefox What’s New section and Jesse Ruderman’s listing of new features and bugfixes. In particular, one nasty regression that wasn’t fixed was the “Installing 2 extensions without restarting re-launches extension-installer for previous installed extensions” regression. Hell, one of the biggest flaws of Firebird was it’s poor extension management. Extensions often break a Firebird installation, like Tab Browser Extensions (Firefox 0.8 doesn’t seem to work with TBE, so I got this patched TBE extension which you can get as well). Piro Date (author of TBE) has updated TBE and it works with Firefox 0.8. See his post in his forum. And removing extensions has to be done manually (and tediously). Thankfully this will be addressed in Firefox 0.9 where an extension uninstaller is planned.
As for zip builds (as opposed to installer builds) for Windows, there isn’t an official one yet, though Ben Goodger says he’ll have one by the week. Unofficial builds are also being released, and the best place to get them is to check out the Firefox builds forum at MozillaZine.org. jesus_x has a zip build which was highlighted at MozillaNews.
More links:
February 9th, 2004
Look at this Microsoft skyscraper ad for FrontPage 2003:
Notice anything? No? Hint: zoom in on line 28.
Source: David Tenser
Firebird? Firefox? How about Firegoat?
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