Ocram's Blog

I think that Google Chrome is on the verge of replacing Opera as my browser of choice. The only features I would miss are mouse gestures (really only the back/forward navigation), opening the last active tab when closing a tab and built in content blocking.

It seems to me that somebody dropped the ball with Steam.

If it can’t connect to the Steam network, it offers to start in offline mode. However, it can’t start in offline mode unless it can connect to the Steam network.

According to the BBC, Google has started to warn users when they are about to click through to a site which contains malware.

This raises two questions:

Why include ‘bad’ sites in the listings at all? It is already part of their quality guidelines that a site must not contain viruses, trojans or ‘badware’. They already remove or penalise sites for infringing on other guidelines (and occasionally for no reason whatsoever), so why not enforce this one as well?

How will this affect Google Adwords? Going purely by SiteAdvisor, the majority of the sponsored links for the ‘dangerous keywords’ given by the BBC are rated as ‘Use caution’. If Google was really acting with the searcher’s best interests in mind, they wouldn’t accept advertising from sites which attempt to either scam a user by charging a subscription for products which are available for free, or spread malware. But of course, they couldn’t possibly do that, it might hurt their bottom line.

In my admittedly short testing period, I could only find one site, which I had to search for by domain, which triggered this doorway. The SiteAdvisor plugin however listed several bad sites for each search, as well as a link to why the site was marked as such.

If you are an IE or Firefox user on Windows, I highly recommend the SiteAdvisor plugin from McAfee. (Probably the first and only time I will recommend a piece of McAfee software. ) It has a much more thorough collection of sites, warns of spam and scam sites as well as malware, and checks every site that you visit. If you are not paying attention, you might miss the SiteAdvisor warning, but it also alerts you if you attempt to download anything from the site.

I applaud Google for taking these initial steps against malware, but if they want to do so, they should do so properly. Integrating something similar to SiteAdvisor into the Google Toolbar would be a good start.

In the next few days the French Senate will vote on a copyright reform bill will which will effectively outlaw DRM, as well as bringing more reasonable fines (€38 to €150) for pirating music.

This whole story has been horribly twisted by the US media, being referred to as a war against Apple and iTunes by the New York Times, and state-sponsored piracy by Apple.

How this bill became an attack on Apple at all I don’t know, the iPod isn’t even the dominant portable media player in France, and it targets DRM in general, so everybody is affected equally. With the US expanding the DMCA to increase the maximum prison sentence for attempted piracy to 10 years, there is finally a country setting sensible laws with the consumers, rather than businesses in mind.

Let me make one thing clear: I don’t condone piracy. But I like freedom, and I don’t believe people are predisposed to break the law. Fair use has been steadily eroded over the past few years, and things are only going to get worse in the future. We have a country which has stepped in, and is trying to pass a law with the consumers interests in mind, rather than those of big businesses. Go after pirates, but those who are doing so as a commercial venture. Don’t sue your customers, really. The concept may seem strange, but trust me, it will make sense if you think about it.

Are people going to start sharing all of their music on peer to peer networks because there are no restrictions on them? Only time will tell, but I feel the answer will be a resounding no. There will always be people who will obtain music illegally, but the vast majority of people are law abiding, and this law serves only to make things easier for them.

I for one hope that this bill is passed into law in France. While it will not have any direct effect on me, it will prove an interesting test case, and hopefully politicians in other countries will sit up and take note.