For love and hate.

For love and hate.

For those not interested in the recent happenings in the soap opera that is the internet. Down below is a post that features merchandise, nice words for nice people and even a picture!

Love: Recently the IMS submited a bid to be the new .org TLD (top level domain) operator. You can read about their bid here. IMS is the only non-profit organization bidding for the position. TLD operators control the domain names on the internet, .com .net .org etc. Most are run by commercial organizations who favor money over fair play. For example, just last month I received a notice telling me that mintchaos.com needed to be renewed, complete with handy form to fill out to make it happen. On closer inspection, the “renewal” form turned out to be from a competing registrar and was actually a transferal authorization form. While this won’t fix my problems and those of other .com or .net customers. The people who run the non-profit organizations that .org is reserved for deserve service from people who won’t screw them over. Help IMS out by signing this petition.

Hate: Microsoft on the other hand is not a non-profit organization. And their latest money making scheme cuts a little too close to home for people who make the web. With the release of windows XP, office XP, and Internet Explorer 6.0 MS is quietly introducing Smart Tags. Smart Tags read documents and when they find a word or phrase they know they will turn it into a smart link. So say you are reading a page about Bob Dylan. When the smart encounters his name it will turn it into a link that might take you to the VH1 page with his latest video. So far so good. But lets say the page you were reading was on MTV.com. Yeah, that’s not as cool. And lets say that the user might not even be able to tell that MTV didn’t put the link there. Essentially Smart Tags can turn any internet content anywhere into free undetectable advertising for Microsoft’s partners. And at this point the only way to keep it from happening to you is to put this tag in every one of your site’s pages:

<meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="true">

Leave it to Microsoft to make web developers do extra work just so their own pages don’t get turned into ads. Sigh. Anyway, you can read about it in great detail in this article from ALA.

Xian 01:59 AM, 06.29.02 - p-link