The Firefox trunk has recently acquired a thing called the Effective TLD service, which I have blogged about before. It allows the browser to work out where the registry-controlled portion of a domain name ends and the end-entity-controlled portion begins. For example, in "fred.com", "com" is the responsibility of the registry, and "fred" is the responsibility of the registrant. However, in "fred.valer.hedmark.no", "valer.hedmark.no" is the registry's part. The rules for where to make the split differ between the 250+ top-level domains in existence, and so there's no programmatic way of telling. You just need a very big list of all the rules.
Example uses for this data include setting cookies in a safe and privacy-maintaining manner (e.g. no cookies for ".co.uk"), sorting sites by domain in Places, and highlighting the domain name in the URL bar to cut down on spoofing attacks.
Other browsers such as Opera also need this data for the same or similar reasons, so we plan to share it with them. Yngve Pettersen of Opera has come up with several proposed solutions in the past.
Unfortunately Jo Hermans, who has done a lot of the heavy lifting in getting the list off the ground, is currently unable to carry on looking after it due to other commitments. So I'm looking for someone to maintain the list. That would involve:
The more accurate the list is, the better a job things like Places will do.
This might be a good job for someone who is reasonably technical, but not to the level where they feel like diving into the Mozilla code. I certainly fitted that description when I started helping out on the project (I did QA), so I'm sure there must be more of you out there. :-)
Please send a link to this blog post to anyone who you think might be interested.
Searching is, I am often told, the new sorting - witness GMail, which doesn't really have the idea of folders for mail at all, and the popularity of Desktop Search. (My experience with Beagle was not really a pleasant one, but I'll save that for another post.)
I certainly find myself spending mental energy on "in which folder do I file this message?" far too often, and the only thing folders seem to do for me is cause me to look in the wrong one when I want something. Therefore, I am considering taking all my archived mail and dumping it into a single folder per account - sent mail and all.
As this is, after all, a hard-to-reverse process, I need to consider whether my IMAP server and Thunderbird will both be able to cope. Does anyone have any experience of using this approach on a large message base?
For sizing purposes, I appear to have 3595 non-spam messages in total in my personal account, and 8648 in my Mozilla account. The IMAP server concerned is tuschin.blackcatnetworks.co.uk, which runs Courier IMAP.
Recently, the question of the poor morals of the nation has been vexing me greatly. After much thought, I humbly present A Modest Proposal For the Prevention of Social Ills, the Betterment of Society and the Improvement of Public Health and Morals for your consideration.
If you'd like to see a free software 3D driver for your NVidia graphics card, but don't know how to help make it happen, now you do. Sign the pledge, donate $10 or equivalent and help them buy the kit they need or contract the people they need to do the reverse-engineering.
Now this is the most sensible measure of the relative security of two browsers. Ask the question "For how many days was I at risk from a published exploit to a known bug?".
In 2006, the score was Internet Explorer: 286 (78%); Firefox: 9 (2.5%).
First post for 2007... another Times Online article. This one was published last year but I've only just noticed they used it.
"When music gets out of control" is a comment on the music industry's response to the Gowers Report. They aren't just in it for the money...