Red light in a blue box

Does Google need to update the YouTube TOS?

peter — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 02:21:38 +0000

A while back Google released a JavaScript API for YouTube which allows you to build your own custom players for YouTube content. It lets you do some neat things, such as completely changing the look of the YouTube player, including making a completely “chromeless” player.

I recently (finally) signed up for a YouTube account for use with a future project. I know it makes me a member of a rare breed, but I actually read the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. I’m not a lawyer, but it seems to me that use of the API conflicts with section 4-F of the TOS:

If you use the YouTube Embeddable Player on your website, you must include a prominent link back to the YouTube website on the pages containing the Embeddable Player and you may not modify, build upon, or block any portion of the Embeddable Player in any way.

Maybe it is time to update that part of the TOS?

Conficker: Much ado about nothing?

peter — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 06:25:45 +0000

Until today I had never heard of the Conficker worm. Suddenly today there seems to be a lot of media hysteria about it because tomorrow it is apparently going to cause the world to come to an end. Or at least that’s what the local news would have you think. Just like Y2K, and the other big virus scares we’ve had over the years this will not cause the catastrophe everyone seems to be predicting. Like any other virus it is easily avoidable by letting Windows auto-update itself and having an anti-virus and keeping it up to date. F-Secure makes it clear in their Conficker Q & A that their is nothing uniquely magical about the April 1st date. Conficker could do bad things to your computer before and after as well as on April 1st.

I’m of course not saying that Conficker is harmless, if your computer is infected with it, it could very well do bad things to your computer and your data. It is however being blown out of proportion. If you would like to know more about Conficker, how it works and what it does (short answer: “we don’t know yet”) F-Secure has also posted a couple of videos about it on YouTube: Case Conficker - Part 1
Case Conficker - Part 2

Proof browser sniffing is still a bad idea

peter — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 08:07:17 +0000

From the dawn of dynamic web pages people have been devising ways to feed different content to different browsers. Instead of coding to the standards and using progressive enhancement, they would create different versions of pages that catered to specific browsers, different versions of those browsers and the respective bells, whistles and bugs of each. Having multiple versions of everything inevitably leads to a maintenance nightmare. Even worse some sites will block visitors who do not use a browser the site doesn’t recognize, even though it may be perfectly capable of viewing the site. Most sniffing scripts are also notoriously in accurate and often detect the wrong browser.

For these reasons I’ve always been against using browser sniffing. Some sites still haven’t learned their lesson. Now with the advent of Opera 10 we are seeing another problem with browser sniffing, some scripts assume that a browser’s version number can only be one digit and are detecting Opera 10 as Opera 1.0!

Policy change

peter — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 07:38:54 +0000

Apparently a new spammer has found my blog and decided to hit it hard. It’s not visible on the blog since I have Wordpress set to hide comments until I approve them, but I had more than 700 comment spam messages in my queue. For now I am going to try to mitigate the spam by disabling commenting by non-registered users on my blog. This might change in the future after I get this mess cleaned up, but seeing as I have few readers and even fewer commenters I don’t think this new restriction will bother anyone (aside from the spammers).

YUI 3 looks exciting

peter — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 07:17:32 +0000

I had briefly looked at Yahoo’s third version of the YUI library back when they announced Preview Release 1, but didn’t spend too much time on it since it’s still a bit in the future. After watching Eric Miraglia and Matt Sweeney’s presentation “YUI 3: A Look Ahead”, I’m quite excited about some of the things the YUI team is doing with the new version of YUI and can’t wait to play around with the final release next year.