This blog gets updated slightly more often than my web site, which says more about the web site than this blog! Readers used to less than one post a month may wonder about my relative bloggorrhea of late; I guess it's catch-up time, and there's more to talk about. I often find I have not enough time to go through the newsgroups, but enough time to post a blog or start on a web page, and now that is what I'll do.
Often long blog silences are because I've been (far) away from keyboard, as I'm blessed with reasons to travel combined with an ongoing enjoyment of doing so. I'd love to tell you about some excellent news in Vista, but I still need to pin down what/how I can tell you and what is still NDA.
One thing I can tell you, is that there are 200+ fake anti-spyware programs out there, and one of these is likely to be what my recent dogged commenter is pushing:
Simon Scatt said...
Many programms include spyware modules. Use anti-spyware for protect your privacy. As for me, I like professional anti-spy software like PrivacyKeyboard by Raytown Corporation LLC. You can download it here (URL snipped)
The thing is, "Simon Scatt" posts exactly the same comment to every post I make, no matter what that post is about - which smells like a bot. A combination of tech skills required to bot past the OCR challenge, plus the ethical dubiousness to actually do so, bodes poorly for the safety of whatever they are trying to push at you. Just Say No, and don't click that link!
Speaking of links clicked, I got a fright the last time I fired up this blog at http://quirke.blogspot.com to edit it. I thought "uh-oh, it's finally happened..." until I realised the link I'd entered should have been http://cquirke.blogspot.com
HTML being what it is, I could quite easily show you http://cquirke.blogspot.com as a link, which is reason enough to consider HTML unfit for use as a generic "rich text" medium between arbitrary (untrusted) entities. Retro-fitting anti-phishing logic to web browsers is an appropriate way to run after the horse after it's bolted from the stables, because web browsers have to live and breathe HTML. But a horse has no place in the living-room, and using HTML throughout the system as generic "rich text" (e.g. for email message "text" and elsewhere) has exactly that effect.
A bigger risk is that folks rarely type explicit URLs anymore; they either re-use links like the ones above, or they increasingly search rather than link. I wanted to link my text "200+ fake anti-spyware programs" to the CastleCops article that raised this issue, but as I didn't keep the link, I tried to search for it instead. I found something else I used that is a bit more topical, but the same search results could just as easily lead me to click something that bites.
Microsoft's been in love with search since MS Office started pushing Find Fast. A search for "Find Fast" is revealing; first comes an unrelated bit of foistware, then comes a flood of "how do I get rid if this thing?" links, starting with one from Microsoft themselves. Yet with each new version of MS Office, Find Fast has been more difficult to get rid of, and XP has the same thing built into the OS. Now that "Google envy" is kicking in, search is likely to pervade Vista's UI.
I do see some logic in this, in that the newest computers may better carry the overhead of search indexing, and Microsoft has leveraged deep new OS features (i.e. beyond the efficiencies of NTFS) in Vista to minimize this impact. We may well find that once we use it, the expected adverse impact isn't as bad as we'd expect and we may choose to live with it.
But performance impact is only one objection to dumbing down computer use from folder navigation to guessing at names or content. More worrying are the safety implications - an opportunity is created for incoming files to do what that top link in the "Find Fast" search does; thrust something inappropriate (and probably dangerous) into your face instead of what you wanted or expected.
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