In another marketing gaff, this is a real Microsoft ad that they recently pulled because people found it, well, um… tasteless. It was meant to be promoting their newly released browser IE8 which they’ve tried to sell people on in other shonky advertising. It seems Microsoft is realizing it is really behind in the browser race / war and is desperate enough to try any trick to get you to use their browser. I think I would do the same thing as the woman in the ad if I too had to use Internet Explorer.

Internet Explorer helps you explore your stomach contents.

When you exit Private Browsing mode in Firefox 3.5, you cannot pick up the trail again from where you left off — anything your browser remembered up to that point, has vanished.

Does the Incognito Window in Chrome work the same way? Surprisingly, no — and this is where one starts evaluating the browser makers’ design decisions. If you exit the Incognito Window (”Nothing, honey, wasn’t doing anything…just checking statistics”)re-enter it again, and then re-enter the page you were on, you’ll find your shopping cart is intact, right where you left it. So exiting that window did not erase your trail.

Read the full article here:

Firefox 3.5 vs. Chrome 3 Showdown, Round 1: How private is private browsing?

The forth coming Firefox 3.5 brings with it a slew of DOM and CSS advances, while not forgetting to mention the rendering and JavaScript speed improvements. These improvements ratchet up the competition for Adobe’s Flash and Microsoft’s Silverlight. (Silverlight? I’ve never found a site that uses it yet.)

Firefox 3.5 adds support for the HTML 5 audio and video elements and now fully supports the HTML 5 offline resource specification. Rich internet applications here we come.

The full list of improvements can be found on the Mozilla page Firefox 3.5 for Developers.

The famous and infamous Pirate Bay has recently lost its legal battle in which the site’s owners are accused of aiding and abetting copyright infringement. However Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundström who were found guilty and sentenced to one year in prison and payment of a fine of 30 million SEK (app. $3,620,000 USD), after a trial of 9 days, will appeal against the verdict. The website to date has been unaffected and remains online.

The Pirate Bay verdict appears to be achieving the opposite to the outcome intended by the copyright advocates with support for the site and its political offshoot, the Pirate Party reportedly going from strength to strength.

Future victories for copyright holders are looking increasingly shaky as Bittorrent tracking sites such as The Pirate Bay are about to be replaced by applications such as the Tribler which uses no centralized server, making it harder for authorities to track and prosecutions be braught against any one body of focus. Anonymous VPS services such as iPredator, will also offers file sharers protection. So its an ongoing arms race.

Piracy

Exciting things lie ahead with emerging browser technologies supporting the new HTML5  standard.

I found this blog post “Video Tag and Subtitles” which demonstrates the new video tag, but also uses JavaScript to add subtitles.

The demonstration requires a standards compliant browser supporting the HTML5 video tag, which currently is Firefox 3.1 / 3.5 or the nightly build versions of Safari (Webkit) or Opera.

This is so cool and Nerdy.

Darth Vader’s imperial march played with a Tesla coil. Vader would be so jealous.

That’s the impressive party trick demonstrated by ArcAttack, a group that uses Tesla coils to make music.

Original story “This new-fangled electric music“.

You know its strange how some people think that the internet, with all of its interactivity, user colabration and social networking, is the place more of the same old, pump and dump.

The Smarthouse post, “Banned Freeview Video Reappears On New Web Sites”, explains how Freeview requested YouTube to pull a parody video of their advertisement. Freeview are promoting an internet TV service, where you can watch, as the parody puts it, more of the same old stuff that you can see on the standard free to air TV stations, but wait for this, you still can’t skip the ads.

And so now in true internet justice the same banned ad is now appearing again on many more sites on the internet. It reminds me of 2Clix’s attempts to stiffle public opinion. Some people just don’t have a clue.

Here’s the clip.

While the other browsers are screaming ahead in developments and speed, there is still no sign of Internet Explorer 8. There are dribs and drabs of information that surface from time to time. And the latest one is not encouraging at all.

It seems Mircrosoft think it a good idea to turn their browser into spyware, after of all these years of monthly security patches to protect users against those with malicious intent gathering your personal information, they will go ahead and do it themselves. “Trust us”.

The component in the next version of Microsoft’s browser software “discover websites you might like based on sites you’ve visited”. Collecting a user’s browser history and using it to create profiles that steer users towards one website or another may seem like a useful pointer to Microsoft’s developers, but the feature is giving some privacy-conscious surfers the fear.

The addresses of websites visited are sent to Microsoft, together with data such as IP address, browser type, regional and language settings. Microsoft cautions (in a draft for its IE8 privacy policy here) that “information associated with the web address, such as search terms or data you entered in forms might be included”.

It sounds like a security disaster in the making.

More on the story from the Register.

Just when I’d thought most ill conceived internet censorship laws, New Zealand tops them with this one.

Section 92A of the Copyright Amendment Act forces the removal of material from websites following any accusation of breach of copyright, even if it was not proven. However, it is up to the ISPs to play proxy policeman.

It is a growing trend of governments worldwide to force ISPs to do their dirty work in censoring online discussion and to pay lip service to large corporations. Something I predicted over a year ago.

But the question that remains to be answered, is whose side will the ISPs take?

Our politians (law makers, a good joke) are lacking any real understanding or education when it comes digital society which shows in the headline grabbing polices they tout and hair brained legislation they are ever so quick to ram through their assemblies without any informed community consultation.

Much of these numb skull ideas seem to be pushed by the major media outles. I have increasingly seen “journalists” complaining on their media websites about the blogsphere appropriating their content. I agree it is only fair that original source be cited. However, these same whining journos say nothing of the fact that modern journalism is increasingly turning to and drawing from the same digital pool that bleat about their content disappearing into.

“Airline passenger tweets about jet crash landing“, “Facebook community protests change in TOS”, all make it into the mainstream media these days.

More on the situation and community action can be read in this article… if it hasn’t been removed in breach of copyright that is.

NZ blogs in copyright law blackout demo

Mozilla Labs revealed a new open-source project called Bespin, a Web-based programming environment they hope will combine the speed and power of desktop-based development with the collaborative benefits of cloud computing.

Bespin proposes an open extensible web-based framework for code editing that aims to increase developer productivity, enable compelling user experiences, and promote the use of open standards

They appear to have build their own extensible GUI using the HTML 5 canvas element and JavaScript. It looks exciting and promising. Programming development where ever you are.

Then again, it means there’s never any excuses about not being able to access your computer and your projects when you are wanting to be unavailable.

Introducing Bespin from Dion Almaer on Vimeo.