Our favourite web(ish) stories from the week…
“Further amusing news in the ongoing saga of this government’s continued attempt to become the Galactic Empire of the UK’s internet with this story from Techdirt yesterday – with news that a parliamentary committee is suggesting that websites need to reveal the identity of anonymous posters, or be liable for what’s in those comments.
With this following the recent passing of legislation that will require UK internet users to ‘opt in’ to be able to access pornographic material at home, it seems only a matter of time before we’re level-pegging with China on the internet freedom scale.”
Dave:
“This week I just want to share an infographic with you. Brought to you by the folks at MacRumors, it shows the pricing point of Apple goodies vs the average Windows PC. It goes to show how much more we value Apple. Whether we admire the innovative, highly polished products or simply yearn for the little Apple logo on the back, is for you to decide:”
Mike:
“Seems that my endless moaning about the new Google web app design has gone entirely unheeded – no great surprise there :-) – Google have just announced that the new design will be rolled out to Google Reader shortly – also this video leaked out from somewhere on the web, showing a similar revamp of Gmail.
I like minimal as much as the next person, but after some months using the new design Google Docs, I still find the total lack of keylines and edges pretty difficult on the eye. When I’ve tweeted, lots of people have agreed – but clearly someone at Google has a vision, and that’s what they’re going to do…”
“deviantARt developer David Lynch has discovered an XSS vunerability in third-party ad code used by notable news nodes including CNN, The New York Times, Mashable and Fox News. As an entertaining example, he included an external Javascipt to add spinning CSS animation to all their images; but the method could be misused in a much more mischievous manner.”
Liam:
“Google are going to enable SSL by default for users who are signed in (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/10/making-search-more-secure.html) – Secure? Yes. Web Friendly? No. – You see. By doing this, google are preventing websites find out what you searched for. This is more than a little bit of a pain, because your web analytics software won’t know what you were looking for, which is how we web developers know how to better tailor content to you!”
