Sunday, May 31, 2009

Always better with windows?

Asus and Microsoft think so, after launching a campaign "It's Better With Windows". Link here.

I feel so glad I didn't buy Asus laptops.

Wednesday, May 06, 2009

Farewell To Fravia

I doubt many people will know who Fravia is, he is one of the finest hackers I am aware of. Note the term 'hacker' here carries no derogatory meaning, in fact it's a compliment.

He wrote a pile of essays in 90's on reverse-engineering. To some idiots he was a cracker who did nothing but wanted to steal software, but his essays convey much more than just cracking and getting software free. His thoughts on freedom of information, how people are zombie-lized by TV, and the view on information have influenced me fundamentally. I have to agree it was his prowess that I really look up to and eventually driven me to engineering

I learned that he passed away on May 3, 2009 and he left a final page on his webpage here.

Saturday, May 02, 2009

The No No-Script Saga

I was a user of the firefox add-on No-Script for sometime, until I found it updated itself too frequently (about once per week), was too intrusive for web surfing, and was not very useful (i.e. blocks everything blindly). I removed this add-on about 3 months ago.

Then I came across this news about its frequency of updating is tied to ad-revenue (after every update it will open a 'change log' fully loaded with ads), and its numerous attempts to cripple another ad-blocking add-on, Adblock Plus.

For ad-blocking purpose, my firefox has the following add-ons, which I am quite happy with:

AdBlock Plus
Better Privacy
FlashBlock

I do sympathize the author of No-Script, he has put in tremendous amount of time and resources in the add-on and it is understandable he tries to get some money back from the user base he has had. However he used the wrong approach, which breaks the trust and very well will kill No-Script.