Several weeks ago, I changed my default browser from Google-chrome to Firefox. Here's why.

I had been using Google-chrome for over a year and had been a pretty happy user. I liked the Google-chrome user interface and Google had clearly put a lot of thought into how a user interacts with their browser. Neat touches were everywhere.

I did have some niggling privacy concerns, after all Google-chrome is created by the biggest data mining company in the world, but I figured Google had too much to lose by ignoring privacy in a browser. That is especially so for a browser whose source code is available to all.

Then I discovered that Google-chrome forbids the Ghostery add-on from blocking the Doubleclick network. Ghostery is a popular add-on that prevents third-party sites from monitoring your browsing, and Doubleclick is a monitoring and advertising network owned by Google.

Apparently, Google has no problem with bending the privacy rules to advantage itself.¹ Time to give Firefox a go.

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In great news for anyone opposed to the heavy handed actions of the movie industry in attempting to prevent piracy, the High Court has ruled that iiNet has no direct power to prevent its users from downloading pirated content.

The music and movie industry had previously sued iiNet for, in effect, "authorising" illegal downloads by not preventing its users from doing so. They lost that case, appealed, and lost the appeal. They then appealed to the High Court. They have lost that and the matter is closed.

Until the government changes the law. Which they will undoubtedly do, since they are about to sign the TPP without any public discussion. The U.S. has previously bullied trade partners into changing their copyright enforcement laws to favour the U.S. movie industry. There is no doubt in my mind that they will do this again in the latest TPP round. The fact that the government is super quiet on the TPP makes me think they already know that they are going to have to sell out Australia's citizens.

The High Court decision does not mean that an ISP is immune, however. One part of the Federal Court appeal's result was that it provided a set process whereby an ISP could be held liable. The movie industry lost the appeal because the process they followed did not lead to iiNet's liability.

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You probably know that Google turned off the + modifier for searches. A right royal pain in the backside for those of us who know exactly how to search and don't want the search engine to try and second guess us — it inevitably gets it wrong and returns a bunch of results we are not interested in.

The word from Google at the time was that we could use "..." instead and it would work. Well, it didn't and doesn't: Google still corrects words and makes substitutions within the quotes and defeats our attempt to narrow down the search.

It turns out that Google has added a new search parameter: verbatim. Select More search tools −> Verbatim from the menu at the left. It is a two step process instead of just being able to use + in front of a keyword, but it is better than before.

Summary

This is the second post of two about a light weight way to implement a thesaurus. In Part I, I described how to set up a script that provides access to an on-line thesaurus. In this Part, I describe how to write a set of simple syntax rules to provide colour and highlighting for the output.

Here is a screenshot of the finished syntax rules (using dummy data):

Summary

This is the first post of two (second here) about a light weight way to implement a thesaurus. It is great for what I need, which is the occasional use of a thesaurus for writing text such as this article. Once it is set up, you can forget about it and just use K whenever you want to look up a word.

A nice bonus or synergy of using an online source is that the website also returns a definition for the word, so it functions as a simple dictionary as well.

The second post (here) will deal with how to use Vim's built in syntax rule sets to provide highlighting and nice colours.

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I wrote previously about a small script to extract the Google-chrome's version number from its deb file. To recap, Google provides either a deb (a deb file is a Debian package) or an rpm (for Redhat and its kin, such as Ubuntu) file only. Other unixes and Linux distributions need to create their own packages, and Slackware provides a script to pull the deb file apart and repackage it into a Slackware package.

I wrote a small script based on the Slackware script that extracts the google-chrome version number from the deb file so you can see if you have the latest version or not. (None of this would be necessary if Google would name their deb file to include the version number. I don't know why they don't do this.)

I noticed the script is not particularly efficient so I rewrote the section that actually gets the version number. Here it is (first the original, then the update):     [continued...]

Here is a quick script to pull out google-chrome's version number from the deb file that you download from Google's website. I call it getversion.sh. I find it useful when you want to see if the google-chrome version is newer than the one you have installed on your Slackware system without having to go through the whole build process.

The method is pulled from Slackware's build script which itself thanks Fred Richards.

To use it: ./getversion.sh [ -h | filename ] If you don't provide a filename, it will look in the current directory for the default-named stable deb file. It will print this: google-chrome-stable_current_i386.deb file's version is: 15.0.874.106.

Because the output is separated by a ":", in other words into tokens, you can use it in a script to get just the version number. ./getversion.sh | awk -F: '{print $2} will output just the number like this: 15.0.874.106.

You could put that functionality within the script and signal it with a command line flag, but I haven't bothered. I leave it as an exercise for the reader.     [continued...]

I received a spam email yesterday that was phishing for some banking details. It contained the usual "your account has been disabled, you need to reactivate it" spiel, along with a link to click. When I hovered the cursor over the link, it displayed the bank's URL. Or did it?

URL displayed when hovering over the link

A cursory glance shows the link's URL pointing to firstdirect.com. There is some other stuff before the firstdirect.com, but I wonder if many people would query it, especially since it appears to contain the quite-common www1 prefix.

If we look closely, however, we can see that the actual domain part of the URL is 95.11064393, which is followed by a directory of www1.firstdirect.com. There is a "/" almost hidden between the two parts. It is quite easy to overlook, which is     [continued...]

Prey is an application that can help you track your mobile device if it is stolen. It is pretty neat and I have it installed on my laptop.

It does its job by checking in with a central server every so often. If your device is stolen, you mark it on the server (using another computer) and then prey, upon checking in and realising the device is marked as missing, will run its recovery routine. It gathers information about the device's IP address, GPS location if available, MAC address and so on, takes a snapshot of the screen, and takes a photo through the device's camera. It bundles that up and sends it to the central server, or you can tell it to send to you in an email.

Armed with that information, you can set about recovering your device.

Prey is available for all the major platforms: Windows, Mac and Linux. It uses common unix utilities (compiled especially in the case of Windows). For Linux it     [continued...]

Australia is "debating" changes to the law that will force ISPs and telecommunication companies to keep data on their users. I put "debating" in quotes, because the government is forcing the bills through without any sort of meaningful public input.

The bills are a disgrace. As one commentator (see link below) says, we don't accept that the government can open our letters and read them, so why should email or text messages be any different? We also haven't been told whether a history of our day-to-day browsing the Web will be kept, or for how long, or who would have access to that information.

The trouble with broad-reaching legislation is that, despite reassuring comments at first, the legislation inevitably gets used in the widest possible way, much beyond what the original intent was. For this reason alone, we should be concerned about it.

In the interests of fairness, I link to The Age's opinion piece by Robert McLelland, the Federal Attorney-General, who is replying to a previous critical piece. Make sure you read the comments to McLelland for several very good reasons why the legislation should be rejected.