Posts Tagged ‘spam’

The failures of the interwebs

There’s quite a bit of failure on the net today. Here are 4 of those:

1. Facebook Jabber/XMPP chat

They anounced it over a year ago. “Right now we’re building a Jabber/XMPP interface for Facebook Chat“. Facebook had the chance to reach out into the world in a way that no social networking site or community had never done before. And then it went quiet. Facebook; you FAIL.

Link

2. Digg without OpenID

Considering how long Digg has been around, it’s amazing that they haven’t got OpenID support yet. And seriously, once you get used to OpenID you never look back. Google has pitched in. Yahoo. AIM. They all provide federated login using OpenID together with loads of other websites such as MyOpenID.com, and they all allow you to log in to Wordpress, SourceForge, Laconi.ca. Heck, even LadyGaga’s website supports it. But not Digg. And the “Ooops, wrong password” prompt is getting annoying. Digg, you FAIL as well.

UPDATE: You can demand that Digg gets OpenID at http://demand.openid.net/site/digg.com – and just for the heck of it, make sure to Digg your demand about Digg getting OpenID.

3. Internet Explorer

Do I really need to comment on this one? It does to drive-by malware attacks what leaving the doors of your car wide open in the parking lot does to prevent theft. It doesn’t render webpages properly, and a web developer that wants their page to work with all version of Internet Explorer also has to write several versions of the website styles for the different browsers. Not to mention scripting. And Browser Helper Objects (BHO). And ActiveX. And now .Net One-click install.

Internet Explorer is the crackwhore of the Internet. And it won’t stop until it has handed over your credit card details to the bad guys and made sure your computer is stuffed with malware and viruses.

4. SPAM

There should be a law aga… wait a minute, there is! Quite a bit of the spam is sent through hacked servers, or even through hacked computers (see “Internet Explorer” above). And there’s also a pretty high probability that the reason you get all those fancy messages about penis enlargment, replica watches, and online casinos because your MSN Messenger buddy thought that he could win a big screen TV if he let a website log on to his account.

Don’t spam me… I KILL JO!

Jesus christ. MSN has gone nuts these last few days. Got bombarded with spam about random crap, and actually about 50 messages in a row telling me to go to a page to view pictures. Got curious, and used wget (it’s like a web browser, without the browsing part. you just download stuff) and apparently that page did nothing but send the user a program file.

So apparently people click a page for pictures, instead of getting a page they get a program, so they go ahead and download and run it. Amazing.

Don’t know what’s worse. People actually clicking (and running) that stuff, or MSN being so easily exploited. Thank god for jabber :p