For Browser Stats go to: WCSchools

I’ve just been introduced to sFIR.

How to set background as transparent: sWmode:”transparent”,

Use this: text-transform: uppercase;

WARING: Geek speak coming up.

If your visual text editor isn’t showing up in Wordpress then you got problems man.

Step 1. Stop using Safari - login via Firefox.

Step 2. Make sure that CHMod setting for you TinyMCE directory are set to 755. Find them using an FTP client.

Step 3. Enjoy!

WARING: Geek Speak ahead.

Changing server permissions to 777? It ain’t the way to roll dude. You gotta keep your server locked down tight ya’ll. Some servers even automatically disable a 777 chmod change - it’ll look like 777 but it ain’t. The end user will get a HTTP Error 500. This is common on University servers.

We recommend you set your chmods to 755.

Still using Netscape Navigator? Ha! As if you would. Get Firefox. Any way I’m testing a site that uses good ol’ frames, and I’ve got a useful bit of code to add into your frame set. It’s called noresize=”noresize”, and it make your frame sets automatically resize to the size of the browser.

But if you are still using framesets then I have some advice for you -  don’t do it.  Its the 21st century.

As you ‘all’ must know, Leopard is out! The long awaited operating system from Apple was released last week and people have been rushing to stores to get their grubby little graphic designer paws on it.

One of it’s most anticipated features is the Time Machine. “So does this mean I can go back to the seventies and bliss out with John Lennon in London town and assassinate the inventor of the intranet so we could all be doing way more productive things than reading blogs these days?” No. (But what else would you do if you had a Time Machine? )

The Time Machine lets you go back in virtual time on your computer and retrieve any file or version of a file and bring it back to the future without tearing a hole in the space time continuum. Provided you have an external hard drive jacked into you’re baby Mac.

But for all of you out there who don’t have the newest time traveling big cat on the block you’ll have to settle for this delightful program… It’s called Exif Untrasher and it’s totally the tool you use when you’ve just deleted like a billion of the gnarliest shots from your digi cam.

Exif Untrasher < get it here

The first in a series of font grabs brought to by Marco Polo.

edwardian_script_itcttf.zip

What do Purdue University, Cornell U, Iowas State U, Texas Tech U, Kansas State U, (etc) have in common? Hint, it has nothing to do with education or sports. They’re all advertising Viagra for sell online and don’t know it. Some are also advertising something much worse.

Until recently spammers were content to use automated bot programs to surf the Internet looking for email addresses to spam. There have been always been individual spammers cluttering up message boards, listservs, and chat rooms. But now spammers have started paying low wage off-shore labor to surf the web and post their clutter where ever they can. Because this is very labor intensive (compared to automated bot programs) and the payback per ad viewer is generally very low (below 1% of people viewing Viagra spam ads are dumb enough to order this way) the spammers are going where the labor is very cheap. China, Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia and some of the previous east block countries are the big players in this game. All they need is a very low end computer, an Internet connection, and someone willing to work for pennies per hour.

Though college kids would certainly jump at the chance to get paid to surf the Internet even they won’t work cheap enough to make this worth the spammers time. So how do the above listed universities fit in to this? Spammers have found orphaned applications at these universities that allow them to mask their activities from human eyes and spam fighting software.

In some cases the application is a long forgotten message board that no one has used in years (some haven’t had a legitimate message posted to them since 1998). The spammer uses this message board to post advertising for Viagra, etc. They then pay the cheap labor to post links to these ads at message bulletin boards, usenet forums, in user news submission forms, comment forms, etc. The posting may be something as simple as “nice site”, or “interesting story” and include a link to the ad. Spammers will also include links to these ads in standard email spam. The fact that the ad is hosted on a major universities server may trick more people on clicking on the link. It can also trick anti-spam programs in to allowing the email through to the end-user. The cheap labor also creates thousands of ad pages on these university systems so that the spam email messages don’t always contain the same link. This is another technique used to help defeat spam filters.

Another orphaned program useful to spammers and phishers is called Persistent Uniform Resource Locator (PURL). PURL allows them to create a redirection URL that looks like its hosted on the university’s server but in fact when visited the user is redirected to another URL on an entirely different server. So when you see a comment left by some kid in China that includes a link to visit http://purl.lib.majoru.edu/sororityhouse you’re actually redirected to a Viagra ad on a server hosted in Russia. Of course you thought the comment was left by Tiffany at MajorU. The recent versions of PURL can use access control lists (ACL’s) so only authorized people and groups can add or modify redirect URL’s. Either the systems below are using a very old version or chose not to implement any security, thus allowing anyone to create the redirects on their system. In either case this should be fixed.

Orphaned online applications are dangerous. Most were put up by people with good intentions long before the Internet became as hazardous as it is today. None have been patched or updated in years which means some have vulnerabilities that allow them to be easily hacked. Spammers often take complete control of some of these applications allowing them to hide their tracks.

All of the Universities above (and many more) are being used to facilitate spam such as Viagra ads. Some are being used to help phishing scams. Never the less, these spam campaigns can be damaging to your website. So make sure your websites are safeguarded against this threat.

By John Herron.

Marco Polo Design can perform a threat assessment to see how vulnerable your website is. Call us on 0755 397 861 for peace of mind. Alternatively, send us a message from here. 

An RSS gets live information directly from the web to your computer. RSS takes the latest news from different web sites, and sends it to your computer without you having to go to all those webpages. Instead, you sit back and let the information come directly to you.

The acronym RSS stands for many versions of the same thing.

Really Simple Syndication
Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91)
RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0)
Real-time Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)

In each of the above meanings, the purpose is the same: to have web sites of your choice deliver their latest news directly to your monitor. So instead of having to visit 14 different places to get your weather, sports, favorite photos, latest gossip, latest hotbutton political debate, or most recent headlines, you just go to one screen and see it arranged (”aggregated”) according to your tastes.

The RSS headlines and stories are immediate, and in real time. The moment it is published at the source server, it is on your screen.

Why You Would Use RSS:
To get the freshest news on your favorite celebrity, the country you are about to visit, or your favorite sports team.
If you are a motorcyclist, a skier, a pottery enthusiast, or perhaps a dog trainer, hundreds of conversations and bits of hobby advice can be fed directly to your screen. If you like to change your computer wallpaper daily, then RSS feeds are an excellent way to get the latest from photographers on the Web. If you have loved ones around the globe who do blogging, then you can have all their latest entries fed directly to your screen.

How it Works:
You choose an RSS reader tool for yourself. Internet browsers like FireFox and Safari have RSS readers built into them. You load the RSS feeds into your reader tool. This is achieved through multiple different ways. You can visit the web feed site directly, you can copy-paste the special code from an email, or you can load copies from your friend’s RSS reader screen.
Then you start reading your web feed news! You can arrange the RSS feeds into folders, just like email, and you can even set alerts and sounds for when a particular web feed is updated.