Wikipedia is now blacked-out for 24 hours.

Note that at the time of writing, clicking the “Learn more” link takes you to a page that momentarily has more information, but then itself gets blacked-out. D’oh. I’m guessing they’ll fix that soon.

I’m guessing the Google Cache will get a good workout in the next 24 hours. To use it, search Google as normal; look for the Wikipedia link, and click the right button [1] to make the cache preview appear, then click the “Cached” link [2] to look at it in full size.

More about the SOPA protest

The work email server spam filter does not simply reject everything suspicious – this would risk us losing legitimate emails, something made worse by some companies choosing to send invoices and remittances as PDF attachments with no accompanying text whatsoever, something the mail server considers dodgy.

So (until I work out a better, foolproof automated process, or take the time to properly tweak the spam settings on the server) I manually look through some of the doubtful messages to pluck out those that are not actually spam.

The most common types of spam messages caught seem to be…

5. Your credit card is blocked (enter all your details into our dodgy web site)…

4. Work from home and earn $$$…

3. Marry a gorgeous Russian girl…

2. Cheap replica watches (Rolex etc)…

1. Cheap medicine to help gentlemen with, err, size-related personal problems.

…though it appears cheap Canadian pharmacies are also gaining in popularity, despite this being for a .com.au address.

Surely not? Yet I’m getting this error in Chrome…

IE doesn’t appear to have this problem.

Update 21:43. Ah, it’s come good. Momentary blip? Wonder how many others got the scary message.

Google Buzz went west; the lesser-known Google Jaiku is shutting-down in January. No surprise to hear another aborted Google social media product will go belly-up: Google Wave to go read-only from 31/1/2012, and being switched-off on 30/4/2012.

They must really be hoping that Google Plus stays the distance.

Amazing the things you find during a clear out. Here, from 1996, is an Ozemail disk.

Australians would remember they used to turn up in magazines and so on, though they were never quite as ubiquitous as the America Online disks that seemed to show up everywhere in the North American magazines.

I haven’t tried to see if this one will still install on Windows 7… in fact for now it’s still sealed in its plastic.

The Ozemail web site www.ozemail.com.au forwards to iiNet, so I guess they got bought out by them somewhere along the line — in 2005 according to Wikipedia.

This seems to happen constantly; it’s out by one. It says UserX and Y others, and shows Y+2 avatars, rather than Y+1.

Tweet

Usually the GMail spam filter is very good. I wonder what happened this morning.

No, I don’t recognise the sender, nor do I recognise any of the other people on the To list. Odd.

(Okay, not an actual filter outage, but certainly the most obvious spam I’ve seen the filter miss recently.)

A fascinating rant about why Google Plus isn’t working (as well as some interesting stuff about Amazon), from a Google insider.

Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product. But that’s not why they are successful. Facebook is successful because they built an entire constellation of products by allowing other people to do the work. So Facebook is different for everyone. Some people spend all their time on Mafia Wars. Some spend all their time on Farmville. There are hundreds or maybe thousands of different high-quality time sinks available, so there’s something there for everyone.

The full rant.

Analysis from Ed Bott:

And there’s the problem with Google+ in a nutshell. It’s a clone of Facebook, built by engineers for people who think like engineers. I now realize what it was I couldn’t put my finger on: this service started out as a list of features. But it didn’t start out with a vision. In fact, I’ve never heard anyone articulate, from a customer’s point of view, why Google+ came into existence in the first place.

I think they’re both probably right… and it’s why I suspect Google Plus won’t get the critical mass to become the replacement for Facebook or Twitter anytime soon.

The Google blog has detailed a number of Google products being discontinued. Most of them I’ve never heard of (Aardvark?) or considered of doubtful use (Google Pack).

But the really disappointing one for me is the end of Google Desktop.

In the last few years, there’s been a huge shift from local to cloud-based storage and computing, as well as the integration of search and gadget functionality into most modern operating systems. People now have instant access to their data, whether online or offline. As this was the goal of Google Desktop, the product will be discontinued on September 14, including all the associated APIs, services, plugins, gadgets and support.

I really like the way Google Desktop can simultaneously search my local documents, emails in Thunderbird, and in GMail as well. I suppose I’d better learn more about Windows 7 Search — does it even offer the same capabilities?

Nofollow attributes were added to the web in 2005, with major search engines and blog/CMS vendors providing support.

I find it interesting that it clearly hasn’t stopped comment spammers, who continue to bombard blogs. I can only assume they don’t care about Pagerank etc, but just want their links to be seen by humans, though I would have assumed most blog owners use spam detection of some kind, and most spam comments which do make it through are unlikely to get clicked on.

But that’s always been the issue with automated spam. Only a tiny number have to be acted upon to make them profitable.

What the…?

Justin Bieber out-Googles the Wikipedia entry on Twitter, the iPod Twitter client, and Twitter Australia?!

Seeing weird behaviour on Marita and Justine’s PCs: trying to access Hotmail, and most other Microsoft web sites, the browser will divert to login.live.com, but not be able to render the page. It appears to load much or all of the data, but never completes.

It’s apparently been doing this for about a week, on both PCs, using a variety of browsers installed on them, including IE9, Firefox 3 and 5 and Chrome — so presumably not a cache problem.

It’s affecting hotmail, microsoft.com, msn.com (which in Australia redirects to iat.ninemsn.com.au/tickler ), even support.microsoft.com. It seems the common ground is they all use live.com/Passport for authentication.

However if you use IE’s Help / Online Support option, it does get to the relevant page. I wonder if that bypasses the authentication stage.

Using View Source, it appears the pages partially load, but do not complete, so do not render completely (eg ninemsn.com.au), or at all in some cases (hotmail.com). Or on some sites (including this blog) it loads the page, but chokes on other content (such as the addthis.com sharing widget).

One PC is running Vista, one XP. Both have the latest patches. One has MS Security Essentials, the other AVG.

They both use the same connection via a router and modem, but other devices (such as a phone browsing via wifi and the same router/modem) don’t have the issue.

Tried turning off the firewall. No luck. Tried removing all of last week’s Windows patches. No luck.

The net connection is okay. A speed test says line speed is 4.75 Mbps.

The affected web sites are fine at my place.

Anybody seeing the same? Any ideas of things to try?

Update 9:05pm. Tried bypassing the wireless router in favour of the modem. It now all works. So it’s some weird-arse setting on the router. Investigations continue.

Update 9:30pm. Would you believe rebooting the modem fixed it? Blargh! This is why they always suggest to turn things off then on again.