The Zero Room

Five minutes into the last computer club meeting, I was in the process of showing somebody a website distributing some software for running a library, and found myself instead showing them a web page telling us that we weren't permitted to access this site because it was in the blocked category of "freeware/software downloads".

Max said that he'd earlier had a similar problem while trying to show somebody an auction site. I tested this out and sure enough eBay, et. al. were similarly inaccesible because they fall in the blocked category of "auction sites".

The club has installed web content filtering "censorware" on the gateway between it's local network and the outside world. As a club member, I'm appalled by this for a number of reasons:

• censorware doesn't work to significantly reduce IT security risks
• censorware is an attack on freedom of thought and expression, and is morally wrong, regardless of how well it does or doesn't work

Of course this makes running a computer club from within the club's network practically impossible. Or rather it would if circumventing the censorware hadn't been ten minutes work.

In principle however, it is outrageous that an organisation with a commmunity service mission should opt to control the behaviour of it's members and staff using techniques favoured by brutal dictatorships.

In the first part of this article, which I stress reflects my own personal opinions and not those of the Coffs Ex-Services Computer Club as a whole, I will go into detail about how and why censorware doesn't work as a solution to percieved IT security problems that arise from unrestricted access to the Web.

In future posts, I shall examine the ineffectiveness of censorship as a solution to low employee productivity, why it shouldn't be used even if it was effective, and outline a few of the multitude of trivially easy censorware circumvention techniques.

There's a nifty introduction to digitising your your records and tapes with Audacity over at Linux.com (the instructions will work unaltered with the Windows or Mac versions of Audacity). It's not certain that you won't be breaking the law by doing so, so if like me you have a lot of out of print music on vinyl, you will have to choose between keepng record companies happy or helping to preserve for posterity the work of the musicians they claim to represent.

I'm possibly the worst email writer in the world. That's not to say that I can't spell or string a sentence together; the problem is that I do these things with altogether too much enthusiasm. An email to a client telling them that I've completed some simple little task can run to pages, covering the process in exacting detail, with numerous digressions, humorous asides, and one or two mini-dissertations on the fascinating history of the technologies employed. After enough fastidious revision and style-checking to make Jane Austen look like Jack Kerouac, I finally hit the "Send" button in time to clock in at least twice as much time spent on the email as on the work that was it's subject.

For people sufferring this debilitating fascination with the sound of their own voice in print, Wired Magazine's How-to Wiki has a useful guide on writing a prefect email. Keep it brief, give your reader some context, something to act on, and a deadline, and you'll be saving your acquaintances a lot of time and bewilderment.

BoingBoing does us the dubious favour of reminding us just how sexy the IT industry can be.

Pictured here is Apple's Steve Jobs during his rugged, Kris Kristofferson phase, and Microsoft's Bill Gates overcome with feelings of tenderness towards Windows 1.0. Of course these photos are twenty-odd years old. Steve has long ago traded in the beard and denim for bohemian black turtle-neck skivvies, and Bill... well, actually, I think he still wears that jumper from time to time. Rumour has it that the Microsoft CEO used to go through an average of one PC a week due to the damage caused by the static discharge from those 110% polyester pants.

It's been months now. I swear I will never get tired of this Internet meme:

• http://icanhascheezburger.com
• http://lolcats2.com
• http://www.macrocats.com
  

Anil Dash, who is too clever by half, analyses the grammar of kitty pidgin, you can even write software in LOLcode, and Ape Lad reveals the true origin of LOLcats.

kthxbai

• Tim Berners-Lee's original proposal for the web - You'll note that the original version of this document is now effectively undecipherable, due to being stored in a proprietary file format. This is just one of the perennial problems that the Web solved.
• XAMPP - Convenient installer package to run Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Perl on an MS Windows system.
• Scintilla - A syntax highlighting text editor
• Two awesome Firefox extensions for web developers: Web Developer and Firebug
• The Web is Ruined and I Ruined it - A classic article explaining what was going wrong with the web in the mid-nineties, and how it was going to be fixed. See also the Web Standards Project's mission.
  
• W3C - The Web's principal standards body. A huge repository of information. Useful reference documents include:
  • Index of HTML 4 Elements
  • CSS 2.1 Property Table (hardly a day goes by when I don't have to refer to this)
• Obligatory Wikipedia links:
  • World Wide Web
  • HTML
  • Cascading Style Sheets
    

Computerworld has an interesting overview of the new feature in Windows that no computer user has ever asked for: the ability for third parties to control what you can and can't do with your computer.

It's things like this that remind me how much time I spent in video arcades in the eighties, and how much time I spent in meetings in the nineties:

For anybody who, like me, is running a computer five years or more old, every software upgrade is accompanied by a fear that increased system requirements will render your computer so sluggish as to be practically useless. This list of Firefox 2 configuration tweaks includes a few tips to help you wring another year or two out of your old hardware.

Unless I'm very much mistaken, I have received my first ever piece of spam masquerading as a mailing list reminder.

I've never been to this website associated with the email, much less subscribed to a list. A little bit of investigating shows that although this company has a mailing list server, it has (at the time of writing) no actual lists configured. A quick whois query revealed that the owner of the sell-my-stuff.com domain is a company called NH Web Host (who I won't reward by linking to their site), and the domain administrative contact address is baconda@nhwebhost.net.

You should never put an undisguised email address on a public website, as that email address will be harvested by spam bots, and will shortly receive a greatly increased amount of spam. Whoops.