Adblock Plus and (a little) more
New job · 2007-06-15 17:49 by Wladimir Palant
I have been very silent recently, but I think it is time to give an update on what I am doing. Today is officially the first day on my new job — I am joining the developer team behind TomTom HOME. Nice at least one of my hobbies (Mozilla) has made it to a job. TomTom allowed me to stay in Cologne but I expect going to Amsterdam rather frequently.
PC World chooses Adblock Plus as one of 100 best products of 2007 · 2007-05-23 19:08 by Wladimir Palant
It seems that Adblock Plus was chosen as one of 100 best products of 2007. This is pretty remarkable since the list consists not only from software solutions but has lots of hardware and services as well. From what I can see, Adblock Plus is the only Firefox extension chosen this year and the second altogether (first being Greasemonkey last year). Also, it seems that I was the only physical person who received the award this year, most others being larger companies like Google or Intel.
Moving again · 2007-05-16 16:11 by Wladimir Palant
I am finished here in Oslo, so I will move to Cologne next week. In some way I feel sad about it, I really liked Oslo. On the other hand, I will finally be in the same country as everybody I care about, it has been too long. Anyway, goodbye Norway and welcome Germany!
On a related note, it seems that I won’t have internet access the next week. My internet provider wanted to get rid of me so much that it decided to disconnect me one week before the date I asked.
The hazards of MIME sniffing · 2007-04-29 03:30 by Wladimir Palant
Webmasters probably know one particularly “helpful” feature of Internet Explorer — if you happen to misconfigure your web server and it sends HTML files designated as text files, Internet Explorer will silently correct this mistake and display the files anyway. Of course, if you wanted to display HTML as text (because you want to show the source code, or because it really is a text file with HTML snippets in it) it still will be displayed as HTML. And if you, as a user of a non-IE browser, ever came across a misconfigured server that displays HTML/images/Flash as plain text — now you know why nobody bothered fixing the mistake. This feature is called “MIME sniffing” and many articles have been written about it, so I don’t need to repeat them.
Why you really should not hotlink · 2007-04-24 06:13 by Wladimir Palant
If you run a web site, you probably see this occasionally as well — people use your images, and instead of copying them over to their own servers they simply hotlink to your server. Now I don’t mind it when people use my images, nothing really worth protecting here. But I don’t like it when they start stealing my bandwidth and spamming my access logs.
Firefox 2.0.0.4 closes ad blocking loopholes · 2007-04-19 00:57 by Wladimir Palant
Adblock Plus has just got a little more useful. Yesterday two patches of mine landed on the Mozilla 1.8 branch which will be used for Firefox 2.0.0.4. What are they good for? They close loopholes that advertisers could use (and some already do use) to initiate requests to their servers without Adblock Plus interfering.
Yet another round of extension recommendations · 2007-04-16 10:04 by Wladimir Palant
ComputerWorld managed to generate quite a lot of buzz with its list of must-have extensions and extensions to avoid. But, as many commenters noticed, the extensions listed appear pretty random. The first list contains a number of extensions that are based on good ideas but either didn’t manage to implement these ideas properly or are simply useless to most Firefox users. On the other hand, some extensions that these users would really consider absolute “must-have” like Adblock Plus are simply missing which undermines the credibility of this article.
Legal implications of security research · 2007-04-08 16:23 by Wladimir Palant
The Chilling Effect is quite interesting read (yes, the article is a few months old but I only discovered it now). It shows nicely how security research on web applications is different from research on software you install on your computer. It also shows why responsible disclosure of vulnerabilities is so rare in this field. I also find it very interesting how it explains that most software is of a low quality.
Java and Firefox memory usage · 2007-04-04 15:59 by Wladimir Palant
I have been using Sun’s old Java 1.5.0_06 runtime for quite a while, there simply wasn’t a good reason to waste time updating it. When investigating a Java-related crash I decided to check whether it will happen with a newer runtime (1.6.0-b105 was current at that time). Surprisingly, the crash disappeared even though this crash happened in Gecko code and not in the Java plugin.
Why you should not get married in Germany · 2007-03-31 02:32 by Wladimir Palant
Until recently I thought that the low number of marriages and the relatively high age of people getting married in Germany was solely an expression of the mentality where everybody only relies on himself. Now I have learned that there is another factor as well — getting married in Germany is just difficult, despite all the talk about “improving family-friendliness of the state”.