Why Corporations Ban JPG In Email

So, you’re at work and a friend sends you an email with a couple of pictures attached. When you receive the email, no pictures. Whilst not surprising, it’s still annoying:

“Why? They’re harmless. It’s photos of his new car. Nothing sinister. Please can I have the pictures?”

The admin refuses. You call the admin all sorts of names thinking that he’s a grumpy nerd who simply spoils everyone’s fun. Actually, he’s not. Apart from the obvious, these files aren’t work related and they could be porn (yes, it happens!) there is a potentially more sinister reason. The image JPEG could have files hidden within it. These files could be anything, plain text, a virus, an MP3, instructions for blowing something up. Worse than that, most anti-virus applications don’t recognise the embedded file and ignore it without flagging it to the user.

Here’s an example. The Windows 98 Blue Screen of Death image at the bottom of my previous post isn’t as innocent as it looks. Embedded within that picture there is a hidden file that looks like this:

And this is the content of that file:

Think I’m kidding? I’m not. This post, this image:

Try it for yourself. You will need Winrar or something to open a RAR file. (Windows users) Right click and save the image to your desktop then right click it on your desktop and choose Open With, locate “Winrar” in the list and click. I won’t give Linux users instructions as they are 1337.

Scary isn’t it! That’s why Admins ban jpeg attachments. And because all IT admins are complete bastards…

Geek Tattoos

I am a geek. I freely admit that, have no problem with it at all. Why? Because I’m not a nerd. What’s the difference? Well, there’s two versions:

A Geek is a nerd with a social life.

And this version from Wil Wheaton’s son Ryan that I saw this morning:

Nerds don’t know they’re nerds, but geeks know they’re geeks, and they embrace it.

So, when you get a Windows 98 BSOD tattoo you MUST be a geek. There’s no way not to embrace it with a tattoo like this.

Found via ModBlog, this is the exact text from a Blue Screen of Death, circa 1994. I’m really not too sure what it’s supposed to mean. Perhaps Paul was just bored, or maybe he was feeling nostalgic for the death of yet another Windows 98 installation.

Just in case you’re interested, this is the where he got the text. Even the memory address matches:

Update: The first comment here is from Sam Rulz, the tattoist who inked Paul’s arm. She has written about it in her MySpace blog here. Awesome information, thanks Sam.

What Is A Moderator?

According to Wikipedia a moderator (aka Forum Moderator or Mod) with reference to Fora (yes, that is correct!) is:

The roles of moderators can vary from forum to forum, just as the purposes of the forums themselves can vary. However, on boards intended to be public, moderators are generally accorded additional powers. This allows them to enforce forum rules and conduct administrative tasks that the forum owner does not trust ordinary users to perform.

Among a moderator’s enforcement duties is often the duty to stop flaming and keep the board a friendly place, free of personal insults (but different boards have different standards, and what is acceptable on one will invariably be prohibited on another). Most boards also ban illegal material (such as warez) and outright pornography, and many also restrict the use of profanity and any violent or sexual images, however in other boards this is considered perfectly acceptable, or even the norm.

Did you read all of that? Yes? Well, go read it again. Nowhere in there does it mention anything about a moderator necessarily knowing everything about a particular subject.

Why then, when a poster in a forum doesn’t get the answer they want do they call a moderator?

The poster in this case was in the support forum for wordpress.com. He obviously didn’t like the answer they got so thought they would call out the moderator on it.

moderators -> can’t there be an option where one can tick wether or not allow for this…??

The moderator in this case would give you exactly the same answer. Which is exactly the answer that I gave and exactly the answer that The Powers That Be would give too.

What this blogger has done is essentially asking for the responder’s “manager” to have a blast at him too and tell him to change the way the software works just to suit him. As far as I know, this particular request has only been made twice. In all the time I have been here and trolling the fora.

Posters in the wordpress.com forum need to realise something. Currently we have one Moderator. His name is Trent. He does a great job according to the definition above. It just so happens that he knows the WordPress software too so can provide techie help. If you don’t like the answer that you got in the forum, do try running to Trent, he’ll probably give you the same answer (unless he does happen to know better!).

What you should be doing if you want to make a suggestion (preferably more politely than the poster in the thread above) is sending it to the Key Masters. They can be contacted through “Support” from your dashboard.

Improvement Suggestion for StumbleUpon

I have been Stumbling for 13 days. Yes, every single day in the last 13 I have hit the Stumble button at least 50 times. There is some fantastic content to be seen, only in the categories that you want to look at.

What really pisses me off though is duplicate content. There are so many sites that carry similar news stories (I believe it’s called Viral Reporting) that eventually you’re going to see duplicate content. I truly believe that StumbleUpon could do something about it though.

For example, today I have spent more time stumbling than I have eating, cleaning, even sleeping. Yes, I’m on leave. I have seen the news story about the Providence Cat on at least twenty different sites. Yes, I know I could (and do) just press the Stumble button and move on. When I see the same story on four sites four times in a row that’s taking it a bit too far.

Most of the twenty entries I’ve seen today have been a straight copy and paste of the text and photo from the original site. Surely Stumble Upon could introduce some sort of content filter that reacts to keywords on a site and flag it as a duplicate?

It could work for photos too. Most of the thieving bastards that steal photos and put them on their own site don’t even bother changing the file name. So, create a filter that checks the filename, file size and the date (to the time too) and voila.

Problem solved and I (and no doubt many others) am a happy Stumbler!

The Evil Of The Dot Doc Format

Everyone’s heard of Microsoft. Everyone’s heard of MS Word. Some people think that MS Word is the most evil piece of software ever created. I suspect this was written by a Linux geek:

* Proprietary format which can only be read if you’ve got specific software
* Are helping Microsoft take over the world
* Unnecessary
* BLOATWARE

As most people that use Microsoft Word (not corporate users) tend to use a ripped off version, it’s only helping MS take over the world as “everybody” uses it.

Unneccessary? Bullshit. The computer generation needed a decent wordprocessor. Microsoft provided that. Did you ever try using Word Perfect?

Proprietary format? Maybe. But there are many many other applications that can read the .doc format this argument is pretty much moot.

Bloatware? Yes. This fact I can’t disagree with. Write something in MS Word and then copy and paste the full text into a WordPress blog bost “write” window. You won’t see the bloat, but the extra code that gets put in can really screw with the post.

These recommendations are from the original post for freeing yourself of MS Word:

1. For any file that’s plain text with no fancy formatting (italics, bold etc), send as .TXT

2. For text files with fancy bits in, send as HTML (.htm), or as an early form of rich text format which you have reason to expect the other person has something generic to read it with.

3. For photographs, use .JPG (which is surprisingly compact)

4. For images which are solid graphics, use .GIF or .PNG (.PNG is better and is free of the patent/copyright problems associated with .GIF)

All reasonable suggestions with a couple of major problems. Most of it is utter shit. While I agree with all the points given these recommendations do absolutely NOTHING for the person that wants to write a letter and then print it.

1. Plain text will not support the layout formatting that most require for letters.
2. Most people do not know how to write HTML. Who the hell wants to spend a couple of hours writing HTML to format a letter, print it and then delete it. I’m sorry, but Word is just so much better at it.

As for recommendations for 3 and 4, who uses Word for photos in the first place? Nobody with any ounce of sense. If the user is taking photos from their camera then the camera usually comes with some sort of imaging software that does the job. Solid graphics? Not usually created with Word anyway!

My recommendations?

If you want to avoid MS Word altogether (and it’s no bad thing if you do!) use OpenOffice. It’s free and it does 99% of what MS Office does anyway.

Image manipulation? The GIMP. Again, it’s open source and allows you to do most of the things you need to your photos and graphics.

The Highly Inaccurate “Which OS Are You” Quiz

Which OS are You?

OS X? Pah! I’ve never even seen the damned OS! You’re wrong BB Spot! Wrong I tell you!

Yes, Ok, I’m clever. Most of the time. Fashionable? Another BB Spot quiz suggested I was 56% nerdy! Nerdy people are not fashionable. Transparent? hmm…

Encrypted Footer Links in WP Themes

Mark Ghosh over at Weblog Tools Collection recently announced that he would refuse to promote themes with sponsorship links in the footer (or elsewhere). He runs a daily “WordPress Theme Releases” post which promotes new themes for non wordpress.com bloggers.

Matt also implemented an idea for the removal of sponsored themes from the “official” WordPress Theme Repository over at themes.wordpress.net.

Sponsored links are links that are put (normally) into the footer of a blog. Whenever an unsuspecting reader clicks the link the registered owner of the link (usually the theme designer through an affiliate program) gets paid a small amount. If a theme is popular (say 10,000 sites use it) and each one of those sites gets the link clicked once per day, well you do the maths for your currency. The other benefit to the sponsor (the person that owns the site the link directs to) is that when the search engines spider the site they will see the link and (in simple terms) bump the sponsor site up another notch.

Personally I think this is fantastic. Many thousands of designers and programmers spend many thousands of hours every year coding to improve WordPress. And WordPress is Open Source. Open Source means that you should never have to pay for the software. Some people see that as a great opportunity to make a free buck or three (it’s never likely to be more than that!) and I, among others don’t see why they should.

I stumbled across a blog post this afternoon that gives methods for encrypting the code for links within the WP footer. Rather than put the link in clear type in the footer (the usual method) it’s encrypted into a different file which makes it MUCH harder to find and remove.

What does this mean for Mark and Matt? Well, nothing really. If anyone tried to upload their theme to the repository it would be refused. That said, Matt and Mark are not the only ones offering themes. There are (again) thousands of sites offering “free” themes with much less scruples than the “official” sites.

Bloggers are simple folks, they like things easy. Making a link difficult to remove is just going to piss them off, create yet more work for the folks in the wordpress.org forums and generally get a bad reputation for the theme designer. Please, if you’re designing a theme, don’t put in the sponsored links (I just remove them straight away anyway) and really don’t encrypt the damned things!

Encouraging Illegal Activities?

Okay, I found a slightly strange website this morning. It’s called Hack My Friend and they offer a “different” service.

* Hack My Friend is the ultimate resource for getting the password you always wanted.

* Whether you are a suspecting wife, husband, girlfriend, boyfriend or if you are a worried parent, then you have come to the correct place.

* Our servers are working 24/7 to get the password you are after FREE of charge

Yes, that really is what they are offering. You press the button to submit the details to the site and then it happens. Try it for yourself.

Then see if you can work out the minor flaw in their service. I’m not going to tell you!

Block IE? Don’t Be Stupid!

This is a direct copy of the post over at my main blog. This is intentional.

Pressing that damned Stumble! button for yet another evening’s inane entertainment brought me to a forum thread for a Linux community called Open Addict. The first post in the thread says:

I’ve blocked Internet Explorer from viewing our front page and will implement that code on the rest of our site as we roll out the new format.

I’m sorry, you’ve done what??? You’ve blocked IE? Ooookay…

The reason, which you can read for yourself if you fire up IE and browse the front page, is that the dynamic menu code and other formatting issues looked like pure crap or didn’t work at all with Internet Explorer. Everything looks and works fine with Firefox, Opera, Konquerer, etc… but not IE and I’m sick and tired of hacking and tweaking things because IE has rendering bugs and doesn’t adhere to web standards like better browsers.

So, rather than make your website cross-browser compatible you’re just going to block one of the major browsers? Actually, your website doesn’t display properly with Firefox. I am running FF 2.0.0.5 (updated automatically today) and your front page has a horizontal scroll bar. Okay, it’s just 20 pixels or so, but it really is a sign of crap design. No website should have a horizontal scroll bar.

What’s the big deal? Well, believe it or not, most people coming to our site are using Windows and IE. This could hurt out traffic potentially, but I’m just fed up with IE rendering issues. So if you’re an IE user, I hope you’re not offended by any of this – it’s nothing against you as a user. Just please install and use Firefox or Opera if you use Windows. Better yet, use Linux and all of your dreams will come true.

The Big Deal? You freely admit that “most people coming to our site are using Windows and IE”. Does that not tell you something? Most Linux people are the advocates of the OS. They believe they “have seen the light” and are bent on converting the unwashed masses away from the evil of Microsoft and IE. And then you block IE visitors from seeing the “Linux Goodness”? That’s the big deal.

I have ranted about this before as it really gets up my nose. I agree that Internet Explorer is the root of browser evil, however, it’s the most used browser. Let’s do some stats:

Since 02 July (when I started running Google Analytics) I have had 2,992 visitors. 2,992 is 100% of my visitors. 2,064 or 68.98% of those visitors are using, yep, Internet Explorer. 771 or 25.77% use Firefox. The other 157 or just 5.25% visits are made up of 7 different browsers. Guess what’s on the bottom. Yep, Konquerer. Just 1 visit.

With almost 70% of my visitors using IE, If I would to block the browser then 70% of my measly 150ish visits per day would disappear. Do I want to risk that? No.

So, want my recommendations? Heres’s two:

1. Put a bloody big banner at the top of the page that simply states “Internet Explorer Sucks” and recommend alternative browsers.

Or (and this is much better)

2. Simply allow “Most People” to visit by fixing the sodding scripts, and menus.

There are millions of websites out there that don’t need funky scripts and shit to make their websites work with IE. All you are doing is re-enforcing the opinion (Wrong I know, but still it’s the consensus) that Linux users are all geeks, nerds, fanboys. or all three. Linux should not be elitist, yet you seem to think it is.

Folks – If you’re here because you got blocked by the Open Addict website, try this Linux Operating System instead.

My Geek Stuff

I have decided that I am going to start putting my geek type posts on here rather than at my main blog. It’s getting a little lost with its direction over there and as this is sitting doing nothing I will use this blog instead.

I don’t yet know how often this will be updated, but we’ll see…