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Wikipedia is now blacked out

daniel — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 05:11:35 +0000

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

Top spams

daniel — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 09:06:55 +0000

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.

Did Gmail’s certificate expire?

daniel — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 10:41:43 +0000

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.

Bye bye Google Wave

daniel — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 10:31:03 +0000

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.

Ozemail floppy disk

daniel — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 02:05:22 +0000

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.