Month: August 2006

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TrackMeNot: protection against surveillance and data-profiling

“TrackMeNot is a browser extension that protects web-searchers against surveillance and data-profiling. It does so not by means of concealment or encryption (i.e. covering one’s trail), but instead, paradoxically, by the opposite strategy: noise and obfuscation. […]

TrackMeNot runs in Firefox as a low-priority background process that periodically issues randomized search-queries to popular search engines, e.g., AOL, Yahoo!, Google, and MSN. It hides users’ actual search trails in a cloud of indistinguishable ‘ghost’ queries, significantly increasing the difficulty of aggregating such data into accurate or identifying user profiles.”

D.C. Howe via Knuttz’s

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Recent Comments Plugin and trackback titles

I’m using the excellent Recent Comments plugin by Krischan Jodies on my other blog. It’s been working perfectly until I got the first pingback without a » (a ») in the $comment->comment_author field. That caused it to echo “Anonymous” instead of the actual title of blog doing the pingback.

Strangely, of the macros defined by Recent Comments, %trackback_title seems to have the correct title already for the one ping coming from outside my site, but for in-site pings it displays the title of the post being pinged, so replacing %comment_author with %trackback_title wouldn’t help.

So I edited the plugin to fix this. $comment_author is set on line 659:

659			$comment_author =
				trim(substr($comment_author,0,strpos($comment_author,'»')));

Apparently, if the title doesn’t have a » in it, this nullifies comment_author, causing the soon to follow if (! $comment_author) test to fail and subsequently $comment_author being set to “Anonymous”.

So I wrapped the trimming clause (the one on line 659 in the original) inside a conditional, which tests for the presence of »:

659			if (strpos($comment_author,'»') !== false) {
660				$comment_author =
					trim(substr($comment_author,0,strpos($comment_author,'»')));
661			}

Now the title of the page doing the pingback is preserved in %comment_author.

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Gaim Crash w/MSN login

“Yesterday [15.8.2006], Gaim started crashing for a bunch of people (most notably Windows users) when trying to connect a MSN account. […]

Gaim 2.0.0beta3.1 has been released which fixes this and other bugs in beta3. You can download it from its SourceForge file release page.”

Gaim via S. Harman

I’ve been suffering from this too. There was one day since the problem began, when I was able to login to MSN using Gaim, but thereafter it’s been crashing each time again.

Just tried the new Beta, and it does fix this as promised.

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A fraud attempt at VirtualDub trademarking?

“I have just gotten word that someone has registered “VirtualDub” as a “word mark” in Germany as of June 6, 2006 and is now sending out notices to people in that country demanding money for so much as mentioning the program and linking to the SourceForge download from their website. I, Avery Lee, have nothing to do with this and am vigorously opposed to any such registration. This is an attempt at fraud. Both the first public release of the program and the website registration far predate the word mark’s registration, and I have not authorized anyone to be a software distributor or representative on my behalf with regard to VirtualDub.”

virtualdub.org via /.