For those of you at the circle at the Torchlight run and want to know what the f*** the Dublin hashers were muttering on about, it's the Viking head song (not actually a song!)

When someone in the circle says "Head", you go....

Head? Who said Head? I'll take some of that! And I did! And it was good, and there was much rejoicing, and then we f*cked, we f*cked for hours uprooting trees, bushes and flowers. Scaring small children and woodland animals. We f*cked like Vikings with horns on our heads. Head who said head...

So now you know;-)

When someone in the circle says "Head", you go....

Head? Who said Head? I'll take some of that! And I did! And it was good, and there was much rejoicing, and then we f*cked, we f*cked for hours uprooting trees, bushes and flowers. Scaring small children and woodland animals. We f*cked like Vikings with horns on our heads. Head who said head...

So now you know;-)

Opera's CTO has a challenge for Microsoft. He wants to create a new version of the Acid test to ensure that when IE7 is released it lives up to Microsoft's hype, and does the Web a favour in the process

Last month, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates made two announcements that are important for the future of the Web.

First, he embraced interoperability between software from Microsoft and that from other vendors. Then he announced that a new version of Microsoft's Web browser — Internet Explorer 7 — is coming.

Does this mean IE 7 will be interoperable with other browsers? Does it mean IE 7 will take Web standards seriously? Don't get your hopes up. Microsoft has a long history of promising interoperability, while failing to deliver. In an email to Gates (reprinted in the press) I listed some of the opportunities Microsoft has had over the last decade to establish interoperability on the Web.

Yet Microsoft failed to deliver on these promises, and the cascading style sheets standard CSS2 is still not supported in IE6. As a result, interoperability on the Web suffers.

In 2002, Microsoft terminated the Web Core Fonts initiative. The fonts offered were professionally designed and served as a common foundation for Web designers. Microsoft deserves credit for making fonts available, but why pull the plug when designers were addicted?

Microsoft's own Web servers are configured to send different versions of Web pages to disparate browsers. For example, the servers sniff out the Opera browser and send it different style sheets from the ones they send to Microsoft's own Internet Explorer. As a result, Opera renders pages differently.

The acid test

To ensure that IE 7 does not become another failed promise, the Web community will issue a challenge to Microsoft. We will produce a test page, code-named Acid2, that will actively use features Web designers crave, such as fixed positioning of elements.

Fixed positioning is described in the W3C's CSS2 Recommendation, to which Microsoft has a "deep commitment". However, fixed positioning has been supported for years by all modern browsers except IE for Windows.

Other features are partially supported in IE, but designers enter a minefield of bugs when trying to use these features. All software has bugs, and a major part of software development is to clear the minefield. Microsoft, however, hasn't fixed bugs in IE for four years, and important features therefore remain unusable.

Microsoft now has the chance to redeem itself with regard to Web interoperability. All it needs to do is make sure IE7 passes the Acid2 test before shipping.

The Acid2 test will be sponsored by the Web Standards Project, which is a grassroots coalition fighting for Web standards. Its integrity is unchallenged in the Web community, and its presence will ensure that Acid2 will be fair for all. It might even smoke out some bugs in other browsers.

As the test name implies, this will be the second acid test put forward for Web browsers. The original acid test, created by Todd Fahrner in 1997, was instrumental in ensuring interoperability between browsers in their CSS1 implementations. The existence of the acid test forced browser vendors to fix their implementations or face embarrassment; the test was created so that testers could easily see which browsers failed the test.
Even Microsoft made sure IE6 passed the acid test. As a result of the acid test, CSS became usable and has changed the way Web sites are authored.

Web designers are now ready for the text phase. Acid2 will test the features they want to use. Will Microsoft support interoperability? Will it deliver on its promises?

To the IE 7 developers, I want to say:
You are smart and talented. You know Web standards as well as anyone. You were capable of fixing IE in the past, but your managers didn't let you. You now have a new chance to get it right — don't waste it. Download Acid2 when it's released and get in touch if you think it's unfair for any reason. Resist pressure from management to ship before you are done — spend the extra time it takes. When they say you can't change how pages are rendered as this may "break" pages, tell them about quirks mode and strict mode.

Show them that other browsers get it right. Explain how embarrassing it will be to release a browser that doesn't live up to community standards and that the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox, Apple's Safari and Opera will increase their user share as a result.

What you do is important. The Web will thank you for your efforts.
To the Web community I want to say: Microsoft has now been challenged. They will respond, if enough people remind them of the challenge. Please remind them. And, when IE 7 is released, make sure this is the first thing you type into it is ' http://Webstandards.org/acid2 '.

Hakon Wium Lie is chief technology officer of Opera Software.

Click here for actual article website

By Charles Arthur
Published Monday 31st January 2005 13:41 GMT

Sam - let's call our interviewee Sam, it's suitably anonymous - lives in a three-bedroom semi-detached house in London, drives a vintage Jaguar and runs his own company. But "it's not not all rock and roll and big money", says Sam. What isn't? Spamming websites and blogs with text to pump up the search engine rankings of sites pushing PPC (pills, porn and casinos), that's what.

So the link spammers - who prefer to call themselves "search engine optimisers", but get upset when search engines do optimise themselves - turned to other free outlets which Google already regarded highly, because their content changes so often: blogs. And especially blogs' comments, where trusting bloggers expected people to put nice agreeable remarks about what they'd written, rather than links to PPC sites. Ah well. Nothing personal.

"Comment spamming to blogs was going on before the Florida update, but it rose after that," says Sam. "All we need is a website that allows some interaction." Photo galleries based around PHPGallery - which allows votes and comments - are easy targets too. So many of them allow anyone to leave a comment.

For even a semi-competent programmer, writing programs that will link-spam vulnerable websites and blogs is pretty easy. All you need is a list of blogs - which again, even a semi-competent programmer will be able to pull together (by searching for sites with keywords such as "Wordpress", "Movable Type" and "Blogger") a huge list of blogs to hit.

More than competent

And people like Sam are much more than competent. "You could be aiming at 20,000 or 100,000 blogs. Any sensible spammer will be looking to spam not for quality [of site] but quantity of links." When a new blog format appears, it can take less than ten minutes to work out how to comment spam it. Write a couple of hundred lines of terminal script, and the spam can begin. But you can't just set your PC to start doing that. It'll get spotted by your ISP, and shut down; or the IP address of your machine will be blocked forver by the targeted blogs.

So Sam, like other link spammers, uses the thousands of 'open proxies' on the net. These are machines which, by accident (read: clueless sysadmins) or design (read: clueless managers) are set up so that anyone, anywhere, can access another website through them. Usually intended for internal use, so a company only needs one machine facing the net, they're actually hard to lock down completely.

Sam's code gets hundreds of open proxies to obediently spam blogs and other sites with the messages he wants posted. They usually target comments to old posts, so they won't show up to people reading the latest ones, though search engine spiders will spot them and index them. And here's the surprising thing: link spamming is not outsourced. These people do it on their own behalf. (Does this mean it's an immature business? Reg readers please advise.)

Here's why. When Sam spams tons of blogs and sites with links to his sites - which are affiliates of bigger PPC sites - people see the links and, seeking some porn, pills or casino action, click through to his site, and from there to the parent site, which pays Sam for each person landing there. The PPC sites can see revenues of £100,000 to £200,000 per month, says Sam. He gets a slice of that - and he wants it to stay that way.

Perhaps the affiliate system could be seen as a form of outsourcing: the top-level site gets lots of people competing to find the best way to get visitors to the site. Darwin would understand. Link spamming, with its abuse of common resources, turns out the most efficient, just as cutting down virgin Indonesian and Amazonian rain forest is the most efficient way for loggers there to get wood. If it raises the global temperature of the blogging community, well, that's life on planet internet, isn't it?
Why not just buy a Google ad, Sam? "You don't get anything like the same click-through ratio. Jakob Nielsen's studies and my own show you get six or seven times more click-throughs from 'organic' search results. And pay-per-click on search engines costs money! It can be £20 per click! We pay nothing to get an organic result." But what about the moral question, that you're using other peoples' bandwidth and blog space and abusing it by putting your commercial message there? "The question of morals is one for the individual. While it's legal, it will continue. It could be argued that a website owner is actually inviting content to their site when they allow comments."

When Sam begins a spam run, he has one target, though he'll accept any of six. Principal one: come top of the search engines for his chosen site's phrase. "But you'll accept coming in at 1,2 or 3, or if you come at 8,9 or 10. Actually, 8, 9 and 10 have better conversion rates. I don't know why. Maybe the eyes fix on it when you scroll down the page." And the cost of doing it? Once the code is written, pretty much zero. "Bandwidth is cheap," he says. "You set it going in the evening and come back in the morning to see how it's gone."

The legal question

But what about the legal question? Here's where Sam distances himself, very definitely, from email spammers - particularly those who use tailored viruses to turn broadband-linked PCs into spam generators. "I'm using badly-configured proxy servers. I believe that's different from those which are hacked. But I speak to the top seven or eight link spammers, and they don't use bot PCs. People who do blog spamming won't be doing email spamming."

Using proxy servers, Sam argues, is legal. (There seems to be some confirmation of this: you're not altering the machine's configuration, which would be illegal under the Computer Misuse Act, you're just using it to do something.) Sending viruses and using bots is not. "As well as being illegal, how much email spam gets through? The big link spammers, and me, we don't want to end up sharing a cell with a 300-pound guy called 'Bubba'. The moral argument, of whether this is the 'right' thing to do, is for the individual," says Sam. "The legal question is another matter."

In fact, the law would probably favour Sam. It's hard to argue the difference between a person using a computer to post a comment, and a person using a computer to use a computer to post a comment. Will the initiative by Google, Yahoo and MSN, to honour "don't follow" links defeat Sam and his ilk? "I don't think it'll have much effect in the short, medium or long term. The search engines caused the problem" - we didn't quite follow this bit of logic, but Sam continued - "and they're doing this to placate the community. It won't work because most blogs and forms are set up with the best intentions, but when people find hard graft has to go into it they're left to rot. To use this, they'll all have to be updated. The majority won't be. And there'll just be trackback spamming."

By this Sam means spammers setting up their own blogs, and referencing posts on zillions of blogs, which will then incestuously point back to the spammer, whose profile is thus raised. So what does put a link spammer off? It's those trusty friends, captchas - test humans are meant to be able to do but computers can't, like reading distorted images of letters. "Even user authentication can be automated." (Unix's curl command is so wonderfully flexible.)

"The hardest form to spam is that which requires manual authentication such as captchas. Or those where you have to reply to an email, click on a link in it; though that can be automated too. Those where you have to register and click on links, they're hard as well. And if you change the folder names where things usually reside, that's a challenge, because you just gather lists of installations' folder names."
For Sam, every day brings more challenges. Not just from the angry bloggers; nor only from the search engines coming up with new algorithms and HTTP tags. There's all the other link spammers too. "It's like a 1500-metre race. You get a little bit ahead but then the others catch up," says Sam. But he's confident he'll stay in what is primarily called the "search engine optimisation" business for a while yet.

Why? Because the demand exists. "The reality is that people purchase Viagra, they require porn, they gamble online. When people do that, there's money being made." And if this sounds suspiciously like an "ends justify means" argument to you - it does to us too. But Sam doesn't mind. He's just adding a few thousand more blogs to his list and readying the next spam run. Nothing personal. ®

By Josh McHugh

For Rob Davis, the final straw came during a beautiful weekend last summer, which he spent holed up in his Minneapolis apartment killing a zombie. The week before, a malicious software program had invaded Davis' PC through his browser, Internet Explorer, using a technique called the DSO exploit. His computer had been repurposed as a "zombie box" - its CPU and bandwidth co-opted to pump reams of spam onto the Internet. Furious, Davis dropped out of a planned Lake Superior camping trip to instead back up his computer and reformat his crippled hard drive. Then he vowed never to open IE again.

Firefox couldn't have arrived at a better time for people like Davis - or at a worse time for Microsoft. Ever since Internet Explorer toppled Netscape in 1998, browser innovation has been more or less limited to pop-up ads, spyware, and viruses. Over the past six years, IE has become a third world bus depot, the gathering point for a crush of hawkers, con artists, and pickpockets. The recent outbreak of malware - from the spyware on Davis' machine to the .ject Trojan, which uses a bug in IE to snatch sensitive data from an infected PC - has prompted early adopters to look for an alternate Web browser. Even in beta, Firefox's clean, intuitive interface, quick page-loading, and ability to elude intruders elicited a thunderous response. In the month following its official November launch, more than 10 million people downloaded Firefox, taking the first noticeable bite out of IE's market share since the browser wars of the mid-'90s.

Like most open source software, Firefox is forever a work in progress, the product of continual tweaking by thousands of programmers all over the world. But two people in particular are most responsible for the browser's success: Blake Ross, an angular, hyperkinetic 19-year-old Stanford sophomore with spiky black hair, and Ben Goodger, a stout, soft-spoken 24-year-old New Zealander. At age 14, Ross, logging on to his family's America Online account, started fixing bugs for the Mozilla Group, a cadre of programmers responsible for maintaining the source code of Netscape's browsers. Ross quickly became disenchanted with Netscape's feature creep and in 2002 brashly decided to splinter off and develop a pared-down, fast, easy-to-use browser. Goodger, who plays the David Filo or Larry Page to Ross' frontman, took the reins when Ross became a full-time college student in 2003. Goodger pulled the project's loose ends together and whipped the browser into shape for the release of Firefox 1.0 late last year.

What makes Firefox different from other open source projects is its consumer appeal. Until now, the open source community has been very good at creating useful software but lousy at finding nontechnical users. By liberating Firefox from the "by geeks, for geeks" ethos, Ross and Goodger have moved open source out of server rooms and onto Microsoft's turf: the desktop. Borrowing from the Net-based grassroots techniques of the recent political season, the Firefox inner circle has turned satisfied users into foot soldiers and missionaries. How's this for a marketer's dream: In the weeks following the debut, Firefox contributors and fans threw their own launch parties in 392 cities around the world.

"People thought the browser wars were over," Ross says, relishing the giant-killer role. "But now there's a widespread perception that IE is not secure - and here we are." What started out as one schoolboy's exercise in minimalism, with a nod to Google's back-to-basics obsession, has tapped into a growing desire for simplicity among ordinary computer users. "The success of this thing has totally surprised us," Goodger adds. "Firefox has really touched a nerve."

Firefox the browser is an impressive piece of software. It's easy to use, easy on the eyes, and safer than IE - partly because it's too new to have amassed a following of evil hackers. Firefox the phenomenon is something much bigger. It's a combination of innovations in engineering, developer politics, and consumer marketing.

Computer users embraced the browser almost immediately. Mark Fletcher, founder of Bloglines, a weblog-aggregation service, reports that Firefox rocketed from 5 percent of Bloglines' server traffic to 20 percent in the month after the beta version was released. Software developers are on board, too - Ross and Goodger made sure that writing Firefox add-ons would be simple. Coders have created more than 175 extensions that perform specific, sometimes delightful functions, like incorporating an iTunes controller in the browser's border or a three-day weather forecast that pulls data from Weather.com and displays sun, cloud, and rain icons in the Firefox status bar. Two popular extensions make it easier to subscribe to RSS feeds through Bloglines. "Anyone can write programs that work with this browser," Fletcher says. "I look at the fanfare and excitement that Firefox is causing - even my parents are using it and loving it." Based on what his server logs are telling him, Fletcher predicts that Firefox will represent close to 50 percent of Bloglines' traffic by the time Longhorn, Microsoft's long-awaited browserless operating system, is ready in 2006. At BoingBoing, nearly half of all visitors are already using Mozilla browsers.

Whatever success Firefox sees, it will come from social engineering as much as software engineering. Firefox has been the product of a massive get-out-the-vote effort. While Goodger was refining Firefox code, Ross started Spread Firefox, a community site that hosts Firefox blogs and gives points to a volunteer army of operatives for converting the masses. SpreadFirefox.com functions as a clearinghouse for marketing and recruiting strategies, a coordination center for coders, banner designers, and evangelists. The site was built on Civic Space, software developed by Carnegie Mellon grad Chris Messina for the Howard Dean online campaign. "Software development is a political process," says Messina.

Spread Firefox has served as the engine of an impressive fundraising campaign put together by zombie victim Rob Davis. In July, Davis, an account director with PR firm Haberman & Associates, contacted Ross and pitched an idea: Raise enough money from Firefox fans to run an ad in The New York Times. Over 10 days in October, more than 10,000 donors visited the Spread Firefox site and kicked in an average of $25 apiece, enough to pay for a two-page spread. The Firefox ad ran in the Times on December 16, featuring the name of every donor in barely readable, 4.5-point type, prompting another deluge of downloads.

OK, time for a reality check. Explorer is still the choice of 90 percent of Internet users. As user-friendly as Firefox may be, most of its current users are early-adopter types, bloggers, people with an ideological aversion to Microsoft. Almost every PC sold since September includes IE and the latest browser security patches. The number of Firefox downloads will surely slow, maybe even plateau, when the supply of easy converts runs dry.

But Firefox doesn't have to overtake IE to cause havoc in Redmond. Microsoft had essentially given up on Internet Explorer development - focusing instead on its next-gen OS, Longhorn. With Longhorn, the company hopes to make the stand-alone browser obsolete by incorporating Web browsing into the desktop. As part of the transition, Microsoft has created the developer language XAML, an heir to HTML. Until a few months ago, it looked like the shift to Longhorn would give Microsoft control of the Web's de facto standards. Now, with Microsoft's share in the browser market slipping - IE has lost 5 percent in the past six months, almost all of it to Firefox - Web designers can't afford to ignore the standards of Tim Berners-Lee's W3C, which Mozilla has hewed to but which Microsoft has regarded as strictly optional. Which means Bill Gates' troops must now turn back to IE and battle the ghost of Netscape.

Officially, Microsoft addresses Firefox with a sharp-toothed smile and open arms. "Any time someone creates a new piece of software for the Windows platform, it's great," says Gary Schare, director of product management for Windows. "Occasionally, a new application competes with one of ours." In recent interviews, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has responded to questions about Firefox evasively, claiming that Microsoft hasn't abandoned browser development and that the XP Service Pack 2, Microsoft's latest security patch, was actually a major browser release. The day that the Firefox ad ran in the Times, Microsoft made a less-splashy announcement of its own - it acquired anti-spyware software maker Giant. Microsoft insists it's not changing its tack because of Firefox, but watch for the company to move more quickly to release browser updates and security patches - and to add a dash of marketing to sweeten the mix.

This browser war is different from the first go-round, when Internet Explorer came from nowhere to crush the dominant Netscape Navigator. Unlike in the past decade, Microsoft can't fight off Firefox by lowballing; both browsers are free. More important, Microsoft isn't battling a startup in round two - it's battling thousands of open source programmers and several non-Microsoft titans that have rallied around Firefox. Sun Microsystems employs a dozen Firefox coders in Beijing. IBM has two dozen coders on the case in Austin, Texas. Google has hosted a Mozilla developer conference, not to mention Firefox's default start page, and rumors of a "gbrowser," a Google-branded browser built on top of Firefox, continue to swirl.

Such teamwork is particularly effective when it comes to addressing pressing concerns, like security. It took months for Redmond to fix the hole in IE exploited by the .ject Trojan last June. A few weeks later, a programmer reported a Firefox bug that allowed a malicious Web site to spy on the information users entered into online forms. In less than 36 hours, teams of open source programmers rallied to create a patch, which was then incorporated into the current release of Firefox and also made available as an easily added extension.

It's launch day for Firefox 1.0 at the Silicon Valley offices of the Mozilla Foundation, and the Web servers are cranking. By nightfall, people around the world will download the open source browser more than a million times - swiftly earning Firefox a greater share of the browser market than anything not called Internet Explorer. Grinning engineers move from desk to desk, reading congratulatory emails aloud, trading high-fives, laughing, and cheering.

A few of the faithful have been working on what has become the Firefox code for nearly a decade. They signed on with Netscape just after Marc Andreessen made his way west from the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications to start the browser company. Netscape, of course, introduced the Web to the masses, took Wall Street by storm, and was then crushed by Microsoft. In 1998, a battered Netscape sold out to AOL for $4.2 billion. The release of IE4 that year made it clear that Netscape had lost. Explorer was faster, slicker, preloaded on every new PC, and, though the anti-Microsoft crowd hated to admit it, just plain better than Netscape Communicator, a slow-moving, unwieldy clump of programs. Even AOL wouldn't touch Communicator, choosing to stay with IE as its default browser. In what Netscape veterans now refer to as "the reset," Netscape released the Communicator source code to the world in March 1998 and renamed it Mozilla.

Around this time, Blake Ross, a Florida ninth grader whose coding experience consisted of piecing together a couple of rudimentary videogames, started hacking away at Mozilla. "It was incredible - just realizing that you can touch something that so many people use," says Ross. "It's a great feeling to make a little change to the code and then actually see the change in the window of a big, famous product. You've caused something to happen in an application that's being used all over the world."

In 2000, as Ross was getting comfortable with the nooks and crannies of Mozilla's million-odd lines of code, AOL released Netscape Navigator 6 to a chorus of raspberries from reviewers and users. Inside Netscape, agonized Mozilla programmers tried to clean up the sprawling mess of a product with version 6.1 and 6.2.

Then Ross, known to the Mozilla Foundation as just another precocious, diligent bug fixer, teamed up with Dave Hyatt, a former Netscape user interface programmer who now works for Apple Computer. In 2002, they announced they had "forked" the Mozilla code base, pulling out Mozilla's layout engine, called Gecko, and using a new user interface language, XUL. They posted a short manifesto proposing a tightly written piece of software called mozilla/browser. The goal was modest: no bloat. Inspired by Google's simple interface, they set out to build a stripped-down, stand-alone browser, a refutation of the feature creep that had grounded Netscape. "Lots of Mozilla people didn't get it," Ross recalls. "They'd say, 'This is just the product we have now, but with less features.' Meanwhile, the Mozilla product at the time had about 10,000 options. You basically needed to know the secret handshake to get anything done. It sounds corny, but it was important to make something that Mom and Dad could use."

"Our aim was a browser that could reach the mainstream and get people away from using IE," Hyatt remembers. "There was tension over the way we were coming in and taking control."

Goodger, who was working for Netscape from New Zealand, loved the idea. Like Ross, Goodger had started tinkering with Mozilla code in the late '90s, fixing bugs and submitting hacks that were impressive enough to earn him a job at Mozilla, paid for by Netscape.

Mozilla/browser became Phoenix, then Firebird, then Firefox, all the while winning converts among the Mozilla crowd. But the two core developers - Ross and Hyatt - got distracted. Hyatt left for Apple in late 2002 to work on the Safari browser. Ross started his freshman year at Stanford the following fall. "The project was bogging down," Hyatt remembers. "Somebody needed to step in and finish the thing." Goodger, a car enthusiast with a blog that goes into exquisite detail about subjects like engine placement and torque, took over. "When I look at cars, I'm looking at how well they are put together, from the panel gaps to the interior fabrics. I suppose I'm very obsessive about detail and style. It helps me make software that looks good and works well."

As the project's lead engineer, Goodger began a frenzied six-month stint of reviewing the code patches and bug fixes forwarded to him by his team and grafting the approved changes onto the growing body of code that made up Firefox. He finished a serviceable beta version just ahead of last summer's rash of IE attacks, setting the stage for Firefox's explosive debut.

Ross vows he has no problem with Microsoft. "If IE worked," he says, sitting at a wobbly café table in Key Biscayne, Florida, during a quick trip to see his family in November, "I wouldn't be against it."

Whatever their motivations, Ross and Goodger have been swept up in anti-Microsoft sentiment. All the attention has been a lot to deal with for a talented but young pair of coders trying to figure out what to do with the rest of their lives.

Goodger has gone from low-profile programmer to internationally beloved code fu master with a crush of job offers. To get his head sorted out, Goodger set off in December for a "mind-clearing" drive from Silicon Valley to Seattle along the Pacific Coast Highway in his beloved Caribbean blue Infiniti G35 coupe. "It's my way of resetting the brain," Goodger says. "I like to go on long drives during the transitions between big projects. If you don't take a good break, you can crash and burn."

When he returned from the open road, Goodger declared he'd stay with the Mozilla Foundation. He has already posted the development roadmap for Firefox 2.0, beginning with version 1.1, codenamed Deer Park and scheduled for release in March.

Ross' career focus is only slightly steadier than the average sophomore's. He's definitely going to do a startup. It could launch in three months and make money by charging for online Firefox support. Or maybe it'll go live in five months and sell Firefox extensions that connect social-networking sites (or render them obsolete). He wants to write screenplays. He'll probably stay involved in Firefox, depending on how much time is left after school and the startup. He might have to drop out of Stanford. He'll definitely retain the role of freelance engineering firebrand.

On November 18, nine days after the Firefox 1.0 release, Netscape announced that it was working on a new browser based on Firefox. On his blog, Ross had some tart words for the company that inspired him to start writing code. "You have a history of making unspeakably inane decisions, of waffling when the iron is hot, and of completely abusing your few remaining customers," Ross wrote. "We went off and created Firefox. In fact, we then offered you Firefox and you made another poor decision - perhaps your worst yet - in rejecting it. By all rights, a company with this record should have been relegated to the Silicon Valley recycle bin years ago. Please don't miss this final chance at redemption; deliver what your users want."

The message in Ross' rant was directed at Netscape, but it's just as relevant to Microsoft. If Gates & Co. continue to ignore both the pain of IE users and the lessons in Firefox's advance, they could find Internet Explorer on the scrap heap - next to Netscape.
Contributing editor Josh McHugh (josh@wiredmag.com) wrote about craigslist founder Craig Newmark in issue 12.09.

Anyway, at the end of the day I was still alive with nothing more than a slightly swollen and painful finger. It seems the snake was not of a venomous variety, or if it was, then maybe I was running so fast that it couldn’t inject. The Kuala Kubu Baru Hospital doesn’t stock any anti-venom, and doctor suggested I hadn’t really being bitten by a snake, since no-one had ever come in before with a snake bite, but said I had probably been watching too much of Anaconda-2.

Many thanks to those who escorted me back out jungle, and back to civilization. A couple of days later, and just 2 small pin pricks remaining.

Next day I did a bit a research on the topic. This web page is good for starters http://www.bikehash.freeservers.com/snakebite.html

So, what sort snake was it? Looking through "Snakes and Other Reptiles of Peninsular Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, Cox, et al, ", I reckon it was one these shown below. The Popes Pit Viper is my best guess, but that’s listed as "venomous and dangerous", so maybe not. Other than that, then maybe it was a Malayan Green Whip Snake.

Some comments I extracted from "Tales and Scales" by Francis Keng, just to let you know what to expect from some of these snakes.

"A bite inflicted by a venomous snake is a serious matter, but fortunately in our zoo situation, such incidents have been very rare. I should add that over the years, my colleagues and I have had quite a few near misses. One particular incident in which I was nearly bitten by a Malayan pit viper, comes to mind. This terrestrial snake is short-tempered and hence responsible for the many snake-bite accidents in areas where it occurs. The viper was in a tank. It had killed a chick which was offered earlier, but would not eat it. After some time, I decided to remove the chick as it appeared that the viper was not interested in feeding after all. Having opened the lid, I found that the grabber-stick was not close at hand, but as the viper was calmly coiled up and the chick was about 30 centimetres away from the snake, I decided to take a chance and reach in with my hand to retrieve the food. The viper sprang forward but fortunately for me, only managed to scratch its fangs on my finger-nails. The reflex action made me pull back my hand so rapidly that my elbow hit the top corner of the tank. I spent the next few minutes writhing on the floor from the excruciating pain in my elbow. As I sat nursing my bruised elbow, I could imagine the horrifying effects of the viper bite - severe localised pain and swelling, blood oozing from the punctures, my hand becoming blue and probably losing several fingers through the tissue-destroying effects of the venom. I was really thankful that I had come out of this incident with only a bruised elbow.

It was fortunate for me that I did not develop any further severe symptoms while being bedded at home for the effects of envenomation to wear off. Nor did my bitten finger manifest signs of tissue damage, save for a tiny pin-head fang puncture. The fact that only one of the fangs managed to penetrate my flesh and little venom was consequently infected were contributory factors. It was three days after the bite incident before my left hand and index finger were nearly back to normal size. The nagging pain persisted for several more days before disappearing altogether."

From: Michael Sanders <msanders (at) kuala-lumpur.oilfield.slb.com>

The following pic is provided so that fellow hashers will know when the coast is clear and it is safe to bring F***awee his beer..

Note: May on his right can also be considered a threat.. likely to grab and finish his beer.

so say goodbye to seeing his genitalia this year.. or maybe not! (And no, Virginia, 'genitalia' is NOT the national airlines of Italy)

ESTES PARK, Co – In what paramedics called a ‘freak accident’, tourist Ben Miller lost his penis in a bear trap at an Estes Park souvenir shop. Miller, a 39 year old draftsman from Orlando, Florida, and his family were visiting the Big Thompson River Gift Shop Thursday afternoon when the mishap occurred.

Shop owner, Ted Larson, explained, “I hung that old bear trap next to the urinal in the men’s restroom. It was kind of a joke. Lord, that thing is at least a hundred years old and the hinges are rusted solid.” Larson said that he was convinced that the trap wouldn’t close. “I sprayed it with WD-40 and stomped on the release, and it still wouldn’t close!” said Larson.

Paramedics were unclear as to how Miller’s penis actually got close enough to the bear trap or what triggered it. “The trap was attached to the wall approximately 18 inches from the urinal, so it seems unlikely that anyone could accidentally injure themselves while urinating,” stated Jared Taylor of Estes Park EMS. “We arrived within minutes of the accident. As with any dismemberment, we attempted to recover the severed member so that it can hopefully be reattached. Unfortunately, it appears that Mr. Miller’s penis fell through a hole in the floorboards.”

One of the paramedics spent almost an hour crawling around under the old building with a flashlight, but could not locate Miller’s member. Police and paramedics speculate that the severed penis was eaten or carried off by an animal.

Miller was taken by ambulance to Whitewater Medical Center where he spent over 2 hours in surgery. Although he is expected to recover, doctors could do little in the way of reconstruction. Doctors suggested that Miller and his wife seek a qualified counselor to help them through this traumatic period upon returning to Orlando.

“It’s too early to tell,” was the response given by Martha Miller when asked if she intended to sue.

Ted Larson, bearing flowers, visited the Miller’s at the hospital and offered his sympathies. “It’s a tragedy,” Ted told reporters. “But what I can’t figure out is how he got his thing way over there in the trap. And what’s more, I can’t figure out how he got the blamed thing to snap shut. I just know they’re going to sue me and take everything I’ve got. People always got to be poking things where they don’t belong.”

Larson offered the bear trap to the Millers to keep as a souvenir. They declined.

From AFP:Saint Petersburg, Russia - In a more innocent age, it was said that Gregory Efimovich Rasputin's legendary power over women was due to his piercing eyes.

But a new museum of erotica here suggests that the mad monk's charm may instead have been, ahem, concealed beneath his cassock.

Measuring 28,5 centimetres (about 11 inches) - allowing, of course, for shrinkage caused by pickling - Rasputin's penis displayed in a tall glass bottle is, to put it delicately, a big attraction at the museum.