Firefox

If you have a real browser, it just got easier for you to check your mail. An extension is out that notifies you of how many e-mails are in your Gmail inbox. I just leave a tab open and check the title every so often to see if there's new mail, but this is a great next step.

Sarah Lane posted some links to cool apps that you can use with Gmail.

Among them are a POP client, notification app, e-mail importer, and a registry hack that makes mailto: links go to GMail.

Second, these functionalities that you refer to as "bugs", are in fact functionalities. Microsoft, for the first time in their history, is making a serious push to security. So far, they have released anti-spyware software, upgraded the windows firewall, made significant improvements in IE popup blocking, and they are currently in the works to release a virus definitions. Maybe I missed it, but where are the "bugs"? Don't forget, FireFox has had security holes, Linux has had security holes, Mac has had security holes. ...

For those using Bittorrent, this really scares me. If they’re only targeting people using Bittorrent for movie, music, and application downloads, then why are TV sites pulling themselves offline? Thank goodness a few are sticking around like tvtorrents. Did you hear? The MPAA is blaming BitTorrent on the illegal Star Wars vid floating around. Next, they might blame the internet or everyone’s computers for accessing the internet. Blame the people who misuse it, not the software itself.

The first search I attempted was for something legal, Firefox. The entire site, front page and results page, look a lot like Google, but I suppose that's typical of most any search engine these days. Anyway, there were 22 results for Firefox, and not one of them was the latest version. In fact, the latest version I could find was 1.0.2, which is two versions behind.

Somehow, having had a look at some of this stuff, Bleeding Edge is pretty sure it's going to end in bitter disappointment for them. The Web was a great place to find TV programs and download them via BitTorrent - before the studios turned their attention to destroyhing that - but we just can't see it replacing the television set.

You can get a compiled version of firefox for almost any platform (mac osx/linux/windows). Microsoft should really be using their old Internet Explorer strategy and make sure that IE7 runs on all the aforementioned platforms. That is not going to happen though, we all know about IE’s nasty habit of binding to the Windows Operating system.

If you use Firefox, there is a great solution - PDF Download, an extension for Firefox by Denis Remondini, which lets you choose whether you want to view the PDF file inside the browser (as PDF or HTML) or download it.

I’ve just started a new job and they are heavily based on Microsoft technology. Some in the company may not think so, but install a version of the fantastic web browser Mozilla Firefox and watch all the Internet technologies come crumbling down. Internet technologies that should be standard.

What is also interesting about the Netcraft article is that this is the first time an organization such as Netcraft took it's screenshots using the Mozilla Firefox browser rather than Microsoft Internet Explorer.

What's not to love about a band who uses the Mac start-up sound in a track and who openly supports Firefox in their website's opening page?

Jumping forward to the present date we can see a very interesting situation forming. IE has slipped below a 90% market share for the first time in years and Firefox has been quickly rallying support from users across the internet. Whether you are "taking back the web" or rediscovering it, FireFox is en vogue right now with groups as diverse as IBM, web developers, and college campuses. This is due to its tight security, quickness, extensible platform, tabbed browsing, and accurate reproduction of page coding.

Weather forecast plugin for firefox now has doppler radar and severe weather alerts. Nice.

Ten people suspected of involvement with the EliteTorrents webserver were served warrants by homeland security agents. According to the U.S. government agency, this is the first criminal enforcement action taken against violators of copyright law who use the BitTorrent peer-to-peer (P2P) file swapping software. The operation, codenamed D-elite, targeted administrators and content providers working through the EliteTorrents website.

Bram Cohen has posted a beta of a trackerless BitTorrent client. Once it goes final it’s expected to make the MPAA, BSA and RIAA’s elaborate game of litegation Whack-a-Mole even more difficult, as noted by ZDNet Australia. As well as that, it should speed things up, presuming that torrent files will now get wider distribution and swarms will become bigger. Here’s Slashdot’s lowdown:

I've been testing out a great new product called Onfolio 2.0 for about a month now - these guys have done some terrific work.

Onfolio lets you capture website links (like IE favorites), save web content (for offline or permanent reference) and includes a top notch RSS reader. Onfolio integrates with IE and firefox - and is very effective for consolidating web research and staying on top of industry developments.

So we have My Yahoo that everyone knows all about, but now Google has Google Personalized. It is still in beta, but it is a step in the right direction. As soon as they put RSS feeds in, it will be really nice. But the reason I put this is that you can now get a Gmail account. You don't have to have an invite from someone or anything. You just have to go here and then go to Sign in and get an account. Gmail is nice and getting nicer.

So, back to GMail - never before has it put an email from a private address in the Spam folder. However, on this occasion an email request for private assistance went directly in there. Now, I want you to know that I have never hit the "Report Spam" button on any email like this, so I have never trained it for these emails. I simply respond to them suggesting they move back to the forum and let the message float away into the masses of email in my GMail account.

A German court ruled it illegal for Google to use the email domain “gmail.com”, as Golem reports. Google already changed their email’s name to “Google Mail" for German users, but the gmail.com extension prevails so far – now the state court of Hamburg said Google may not offer emails with this extension to German users. Daniel Giersch owns the trademark “Gmail” in Germany and isn’t willing to give up easily. He already rejected an offer from Google to buy the name from him, Giersch said on Golem. I wonder if he should truly have any more rights than to the domain Gmail.de?

In these days of such worthy IE alternatives as Firefox, I’m not sure why anybody would bother wanting to use it, but before you try Netscape 8 (which is not actually related to previous versions), be ware that it breaks IE’s XML capabilities.

Then we get on the subject of standardized specification - something that FireFox and IE can't agree on. FireFox is very rigorious with the way it interprets the javascript language. The problem I ran into is the onChange event for a drop down control. The spec states that the onChange event is only suposed to fire once the value of the control is changed and focus has been lost. FireFox does this. The problem is that IE doesn't, and personally the IE model makes more sense to me. The onChange event fires whenever...

Netcraft is now offering a Firefox version of its excellent anti-phishing Toolbar.

The toolbar runs on any operating system supported by Firefox and displays the hosting location, country, longevity, popularity, and an abstracted risk rating for each site visited.

well since the downfall of #BT on EFNet I have been in depression mode. However, tonight I decided to end the depression and create a pseudo-BTonEFNet by using other torrent sites’ rss feeds. I’m not too sure about the legalities of this, so to take a precaution I won’t be hosting it myself. The site is yet to be named, I have to test it out on the site first since I have a feeling that the outbound rss read may not work properly on all sites. The database tables however are created and it shouldn’t be long before everything is ready to go.

This kind of thing has a limited lifetime, because Bittorrent has gone trackerless. What this means is that once a full copy is out there somewhere, the network becomes very resistant to taking down any particular copy. I’ve written about the MPAA’s problems with this before, but I feel the need to reiterate: this is not something that you can just make go away. It’s not a technology, it’s a technique. The ability to reconstruct a whole from disparate parts, without a central resource means that it doesn’t help to shut...

I have feeds from Blogdigger, IceRocket, MSN, Technorati, PubSub, Feedster, Yahoo News, as well as feeds from our customer forums. I read every single one of the posts that come into these feeds. If you forced me to stop using Onfolio (or any other feed reader), this is what I would miss more than anything. Interestingly, these are also the feeds that generate the most junk for me (ads in some, 30% junk rate, etc...). I can live with that to be notified when someone writes something about Onfolio, though!

On the other hand, if well done, free software can be a liberating force in the developing world. Namibia was lucky to have Schoolnet.na, a home-grown organization that focused as much on the human side of computing as the actual hardware.

The Netcraft toolbar is one of my current favorites and now it’s available for Firefox:

New release of Piggy Bank, the Semantic Web extension for Firefox. It harvests data as you browse (when you click a status bar indicator), which can later be searched and viewed in a facetted browser.

One of the headlines they offer is Slashdot. As a frequent visitor to Slashdot, I went ahead and added that headline to my page. The very next day I started Mandriva up, opened Firefox, and there was my new home page…with a notice from Slashdot saying that my news aggregator had been banned. The statement from Slashdot said that this action had been taken because of the frequency of the pulling of headlines. I suppose Google checks for headlines as often as it checks for new mail in Gmail, once a minute. Some servers won’t put up...

Apparently the MPAA, no longer content with getting Spanish academics fired, has decided to up the ante. They’ve convinced the Justice Department to start filing criminal charges against organizers of BitTorrent networks. In a press relase pulished to the interestingly named file starwars52505.htm, (at least they’re honest about what’s really going on) the Department of Homeland Security – who knew? – announced the “First Criminal Enforcement Against BitTorrent Network Users” yesterday. The sad thing is that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to defend people who put up torrents of “Revenge of the Sith” six hours before it was released so the important points will, as usual, be overlooked, such as the outright silliness of shutting down networks because to get at criminals use them as means of transport.

More discussion about 'river of news,' this time coming from Nick Bradbury, author of FeedDemon. Looks like the new surfer view has the goodness of the 'river of news' and the some of the interactivity of the Onfolio Newspaper (and it looks nice too). Nice!

It is curious that everyone focuses on open development and open source as the potential source of free software for businesses, when in fact it is also possible that this software will come from business service providers who want you to use their services, and where developers will get paid for their work. It also suggests an alternate business strategy for an organization like Compiere.

By the way, if you're using Firefox/Mozilla, the best RSS Aggregator I've come across after some reading has been Sage. Very nice.

The Elite Torrents network, found online at www.elitetorrents.org, relied on a technology called BitTorrent that allows users to quickly download digital movies and other large files by copying them from many computers at once.

BitTorrent rocks. So many people use it to exchange movies, commercial games and seedy seedy porn. And why not? However, finding torrents has not always been that easy (although suprnova.org made it easier — thanks government for shutting that one down). Anyways, BT inventor Bram Cohen has launched bittorrent.com/ - a sweet BitTorrent search engine.

Some other research on website design showed that high uncertainty avoidance countries prefer restricted options and simple controls, while low uncertainty avoidance countries prefer multiple options and complex controls.

Whats another example? Well I guess I can mention Safari, since I haven't for a while :). Sure Safari is also a "fork" but let's ignore that for a while. The main developer of Safari, David Hyatt, worked on the Netscape, Camino and Firefox browsers prior to working on Safari (and KHTML). The man obviously knows his stuff, and hence MacOS users get a browser that is compliant with the latest web standards (plus it's open source as well). Whoever hired Hyatt was pretty smart. I'd bet than even if Apple didn't get the head start they did from...

And Firefox does have one clear advantage over Galeon: it can read RSS feeds. As I mentioned before, I’m reading RSS with Gnus in XEmacs these days. Which is better than not having an RSS reader, but it feels a little silly, because when a new article appears in a feed, I just click on the link to bring it up in Galeon. So why not eliminate the middle-man? Also, I’ve run into one annoying bug, and Gnus doesn’t handle new versions of RSS (Atom), which is occasionally an annoyance now and will, I suspect, be much more of one in the future.

"...the content industries may find the [new] BitTorrent search engine too useful to mess with. "The copyright owners can now identify the most-trafficked materials that are infringing their copyrights and go after them in a more efficient way," says Lemley. "It's kind of ironic.""

Greasemonkey can add persistent searches to Gmail with such transparency that you forget Google doesn’t provide this feature.

Book Burro is awesome! If you’re using Firefox and you’re a bookaholic, then you’re going to love this great little script based on the Greasemonkey extension. When you are buying a book online, Book Burro automatically finds prices at other bookstore sites and lists them in a transparent window.

For some reason my ISP software made Firefox stop working about four months ago. Tonight, while cleaning/rearranging my desk, I disconnected the phone line from my laptop then plugged it back in post-cleaning. When I started Netscape online software again after doing this simple unplug-plug, Firefox worked again. *shrug* I'm just glad I can finally rejoin the 21st century by using Firefox and stop using IE, the web browser that is the equivalent of a rusted-out Datsun with no wheels.

And, it's getting safer. Since it is not a peer to peer network (like Kazaa, BitTorrent, and others), it is harder for the Authority figures to track the people who download files from them. That can mean less liability for the end user, and a huge freaking headache for said authority figures.

It looks like TorrentSpy was sent a DMCA takedown notice. (I haven't seen this covered anywhere else. )

When you search for "Family Guy" you get a nice friendly error message:

A friend of mine who’s brand new to the whole fansubbing thing was asking me what anime’s are out there worth downloading right now. So, I’m going to start slapping together lists a few of my current faves and posting them.

But the MPAA wants to make my life much more difficult. One of the biggest things that gets me going besides the whole evolution debate is this one. First the MPAA sued the site that I used to find the shows, btefnet, which caused them to stop releasing them. Actually, this site didn’t contain the shows. It contained links that opened up Bittorrent, which is a program used to transfer files. It is fundamentally different from programs like Napster, in two ways. First, unlike Napster, there are no “central servers” for Bittorrent....

If you use Firefox, get the plugin from Mozilla extension update and start stumbling. What a name, what an idea, what an execution. This is definitely one of my "woah!" in a long time.

Web Browsers is another field where they entered late, but managed to beat everyone else to become the most used brand around. So much so, that they became complacent and as a result, we have not seen any real development in the browser for years now. If it was not for the pressure from the alternative browsers Mozilla Firefox and Opera, they might not have even considered developing the Internet Explorer 7 for the current generation Operating Systems.

Remember all those things RIAA used to say about music piracy and Napster. Well, do a “find-replace” with MPAA and BitTorrent, and you get the same hysterical statements. MPAA president Dan Glickman says, “We must stop these Internet thieves from illegally trading valuable copyrighted materials on-line.” MPAA is blaming BitTorrent for Revenge of the Sith piracy. That’s like calling matches, not cigarettes, cause cancer. How about learning from music’s mistakes, and figuring out ways to sell the content legally?...

Disruption in the media and technology space is trending towards putting control in the hands of the user. Adoption of technologies like BitTorrent, RSS, and web services are providing the foundation on which users are building tools to consume content on their own terms. To figure out what users want in this space, it's often useful to look at and think about user behavior (not user opinion) to figure out how to fill unmet needs.

“There is no better example of how theft dims the magic of the movies for everyone than this report today regarding BitTorrent providing users with illegal copies of Revenge of the Sith. The unfortunate fact is this type of theft happens on a regular basis on peer to peer networks all over the world.

At least two copies of the film, which was first shown in theaters in the early hours of Thursday, have been posted to the BitTorrent file-sharing network — a new and increasingly popular technology that allows users to download large video files much more quickly than in the past.

[deadpan]Wow. I’m shocked. Who would have thought that somebody would steal the Star Wars movie?[/deadpan]

Azureus is, bar none, the greatest BitTorrent client ever. Of all the BitTorrent clients I have ever used, it has the most pleasent and extensive UI for the most demanding torrenters, and a number of awesome plug-ins. Version 2.3.0.0 of this torrent beast finally gives us decentralized tracking… so now, torrents from the long-dead SuprNova or Lokitorrent now have a way to “finish business.” Thus, it can also encourage the speed of today’s torrents by introducing us to a wider audience. Words can not express how much joy this program gives me.

Con la nueva versión de BitTorrrent publicar contenidos se vuelve muchísimo más fácil ya que no hay necesidad de usar trackers. Esto representa otro gran paso a la distribución masiva de contenido independiente por todos y para todos. Por la forma en que el BitTorrent funciona, no es necesario tener contratado servidores o mucho ancho de banda para poder distribuir música, software o videos.

I'm sure everyone knows what BitTorrent is, but it is the most popular peer-to-peer file sharing protocol for sharing large files. Before you had to have a tracker to create "torrents" which coordinated this sharing, but now you don't. This should make it even easier for people to make BitTorrent enclosures in blog entries and otherwise use BitTorrent to share files. Having said that, there are value added trackers like Prodigem which I'm sure people will use to charge for and otherwise track their files.

It takes pretty big balls to hand out pirated copies of the final Star Wars movie. I won’t deny I’ve “borrowed” and “shared” a few movies in my time. But I’d be hesitant even just googling “Revenge of the Sith DIVX”, let alone firing up a bittorrent download of it. George Lucas is the Metallica of the movie industry. He’s just itching to get somebody’s nuts in a vice over movie piracy.