The Blue Ribbon Campaign Sunday 2006-02-26
Today I have decided to join The Blue Ribbon Campaign for free speech online and the EFF. The Electronic Frontier Foundation was founded in July of 1990 in response to emerging threats to the freedom of speech on the Internet and later became an organisation for defending freedom of speech and human rights.
I remember the strong impression The Blue Ribbon Campaign had on the “Black Thursday” in February 1996, when thousands of web pages went black for at least a day, in protest against legislation signed by the American president Clinton, aimed at limiting freedom of expression on the Internet. The campaign was supported by EEF and such leading Internet companies as Netscape.
It may be hard to understand today, the impact of black pages with this blue ribbon made at the time, if you weren’t there. Today there are many black web pages, but only as a matter of design. Back in those early days of the Internet era, most pages were grey with black text, blue links and simple GIF images – nothing fancy. When suddenly lots of pages all over the web turned black, it was a chock, and for many an eye opener for the fact, that freedom of speech could be threatened by governments, but also that efficient campaigns could be launched very fast on this new medium.
Today, more than ever in the history of the web, threats against freedom of speech are raised. In the fear of terrorism, governments are making plans for control of all kinds of electronic communication. Laws are proposed on the right to collect email traffic, tap into mobile phone calls and do all kinds of communication surveillance. Such violation of individual integrity is planned in democratic countries, in the United States and in Europe. In many less democratic countries in the world, the situation is worse, and freedom of speech is just a dream. We have to defend ourselves against crime and terror, but we cannot give in to fear but we have to stand up for human rights and the democratic freedom we have gained.
Here are the simple rules of “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights” set out by the General Assembly of the UN in 1948. They are most relevant today.
Google’s Image Search Under Attack
It’s stormy weather at the top, and the “good guy” Google has reached high enough. Jason Lee Miller of webpronews brings to our attention that …
“Google suffered a setback in court last Friday as US District Judge Howard Matz ruled that thumbnail displays retrieved by the company’s image search feature were a likely violation of copyright law. Links to third party sites and the practice of “framing” the image above those sites, however, were not considered to be in violation.”
This is the result so far of a law suit against Google, brought by Skinmag Perfect Inc, claiming that thumbnails from their images presented by Google image search, be an infringement on their copyright.
I’m not a jurist, but the whole matter seems ridiculous from my common sense view. The company has published its images on the web in such a manner, that they can be viewed by anyone. If some of the pictures are intended to be viewed only after payment, it is the responsibility of the company to hide them from harvesting and indexing by search engines. As any well behaved search robot, the Google bot respects a robots.txt file. There could be no copyright violation by just presenting what’s already in the public eye, and the publication is to no disadvantage to the company
On the contrary, if someone finds one of their images by an image search, it will boast their traffic, as Google presents the thumbnail in a frame above the original page containing the image. If the image itself is of interest, it is likely that you go to their site for more of the same.
It is significant, that the company bringing the suit, has a semi pornographic site, and most probably they have made this move to get out in the lime light. I have the feeling ( again, I’m no jurist ), that many law suits on big companies and rich individuals in the US, are aimed at fame or fortune, and built on fragile ground, but that’s just me.
I don’t care to give you a link to the site, as you will easily fin it by a Google search 
XHTML Aware AdSense Saturday 2006-02-25
I have been pretty preoccupied with the redesign of my WordPress theme lately, but today I decided it was time to check my blog for XHTML compliance. As expected I got a lot of errors, but knowing that error multiply when the W3C service parses a page, I wasn’t that worried. I should have been though, as I came to learn.
The first bunch of errors came from my Google AdSense text links in the header an my skyscraper ads in my left sidebar.
Google delivers these ads using a JavaScript that, you cut and paste into your template. The script contains an array of parameters for size and colors and a function that requests the ads from Google. When called the function delivers an iframe that’s inserted in the page. Nice and simple, but the W3C XHTML evaluator doesn’t like it one bit, but spits out a bunch of complaints. Knowing something about XML, I felt sure that encapsulating the meat of the script in a CDATA section would be a quick and easy solution. CDATA is supposed to tell an XML parser to leave the content alone, and make no interpretations but just move it from the indata stream to the outdata stream, stripping the CDATA envelope.
<script language="JavaScript">
<![CDATA[
<!-- Adsense here -->
}
]]>
</script>
With this markup, whatever goes between the <![CDATA[ here ]]> should be sent to the resulting document untouched, and the document should validate. No it did not! In my eager search for an explanation I came across this article by Stu Nicholls at CSS Play. He gives a workaround using the object inclusion tag to embed an external non XML document of type text/html. This plain HTML document contains the AdSense script and data. With the ads incorporated in this rather dirty way, the document should validate.
Stu also refers to an article “Making AdSense Work with XHTML” at Keystone Websites, where the author also discusses content negotiation and delivery of different markup depending on the target browser.
AS a background the have an article by Ian Hickson, who gives an explanation of why the AdSense code doesn’t work well with XHTML. It turns out that the Javascript function document.write(), responsible for writing the ads to the page, once it is executed on the client side, is not allowed in XHTML. To make thing worse, the JavaScript writes out an iframe containing the ads, and iframes are not allowed in the XHTML. In short, we have to externalize this ads. we could write the external old fashioned HTML file and add the object inclusion tag to our template, or use a ready made plugin.
In my search for explanations and solutions, I found a plugin called “Google AdSense Injector” at lambcutlet.org, that uses the technique discussed above. It uses content negotiation to insert the object tag if the produced document is application/xhtml+xml and just copies the code as is if the type is text/html.
I installed the plugin, and it seems to work. At least I got rid of all validation error for the AdSense inclusion.
I also realised that other widget I have on my blog, are delivered without any thought of standards compliance. My little button plugging for Firefox, has a query string in its callback to Mozilla.org containing parameters. As is usual in queries, the parameters are delimited by an &-character or ampersand. This has special meaning to XML parsers and are interpreted. My attempt to hide the ampersands from the prying eyes of the validator, by encapsulating the whole callback url in a CDATA section was in vain. the only solution was to use the entity & in the url.
Another really hard problem is the Flickr badge in my left sidebar. It is also included using JavaScript, but the same approach as for AdSense didn’t seem to work. The code is fairly involved with a mix of JavaScript code and CSS in-line styling. I tried to take the badge apart and move the style rules to my stylesheet, but that broke the badge.
Integration of services from near and far shows that there is a long way to go before we can easily be standards compliant. As for the Flickr badge it seems impossible, but luckily Flickr has an API, and it should be possible to write code to integrate Flickr objects in a standards compliant way. But that’s another story.
Over and out.
Google Page Creator Friday 2006-02-24
Google continues to launch new services at a roaring pace. Today the company that taught us to “google” rather than to search, presents Google Page Creator, a refinement of the idea many web hosting companies have used for building web sites. Google Page Creator is hopefully more sophisticated and aimed at creating good looking web documents. You log in to your G-mail account and start writing pages. There are some different templates to use – sorry to say, I haven’t been able to test the creation process, as this beta service immediately went overly loaded with requests. They promised to contact me by email, as soon as they get a some bandwidth slot for me.
Says SearchEngineWatch: “Google Stops Page Creator Enrollment“. This happened a few hours after it was opened to eager writers.
Sign up and take test drive if you can.
Copyrights, CC, GNU GPL – Infringements
Copyright and intellectual property are sensitive matters, and so are the interpretations of the different licences used when giving out software for free. You can find a serious and interesting discussion of these matters in this tread on WordPress Support Forum.
The tread was started by Richard Dows in search for advice on how to protect his rights under the CC/GNU GPL terms. He has developed a theme called News Print Theme and felt that his copyright was violated. The thread may disappear, so read it now.
If you find something to add, please do!
Google Desktop Considered Harmful Wednesday 2006-02-22
In an article of 2006-02-10, The Register warns that the last version of Google’s Desktop search engine puts privacy and internal business data at risk. “Configure it carefully, or forget it” is their advice. The problem is the “Search Across Computers” facility, which makes all kinds of documents searchable over many computers. It is possible to exclude certain documents or directories from being indexed, but you should be aware of the risks. They also cite EFF, Electronic Frontier Foundation as saying:
“.. the feature “greatly increases the risk to consumer privacy” and a “one-stop-shop for hackers”
One problem with the functionality, is that user data is stored by Google for at least a shorter period of time. The Register goes on to say:
“… even before the search engine behemoth was subpoenaed for search information by the Department of Justice, Google’s latest desktop revamp would have raised eyebrows. The EFF, for one, is adamant users shouldn’t trust Google with the contents of their personal computers.”
In a related story The Register comes back to the issue 2006-02-21, citing Gartner as saying this version of Google’s desktop search tool represents an “unacceptable security risk”. The reason is that Google stores text based copies of user documents on its own servers up to 30 days.
As the search for more efficient tools for actions against terrorism and organized crime evolves in USA and Europe, authorities seem willing to give up on basic civil rights and sacrifice personal integrity. a crucial decision will be made in the case of the US government demand, that Google presents two months of search terms and the total of web addresses in their index. According to ZDNet Australia:
“A subpoena dated August 2005 requests a complete list of all Internet addresses that can “be located” through Google’s popular search engine, and “all queries that have been entered” over a two-month period beginning on June 1, 2005. Later, prosecutors offered to narrow the request to random samples of indexed sites and search strings. It’s unclear what version of the request AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo complied with.”
In my opinon, no matter what reason i given, the subpoena poses a threat to the freedom of speech and information exchange, that in the long run could seriously harm our democracies. If you want to think about the possible implications, you can read the subpoena and Googles reply in copies of the documents (PDF) at SearchEngineWatch.
WordPress New Upload Monday 2006-02-20
Under WordPress 2.0 there was a problem with uploading images from the Write Post page. The upload script would create a new folder for every month and put the uploaded image there. As the script runs under the web server’s user or possibly the user of the script engine, the directories are owned by that user. The account owner has no permissions on these directories or images, and cannot even open the directories, to change or delete the images.
In WP 2.01 this seems to be more relaxed and you have a choice of upload directory. The uploaded files will still be owned by the user under which the script makes system calls, but you will be able to open the directory owned by you and move images you no longer need to another directory and maybe even delete them.
This is a test to see what happens when uploading an image to a directory owned by me, the rightful owner of the account.
I will try to insert the uploaded image in this post, and then delete the thumbnail created by WordPress.
[Edit] 
Not only is it possible to delete images from within the upload interface, but via FTP or Telnet you can move or delete images, provided you own the upload directory. Good solution indeed.
Nice to have Gravatars
After long hesitation, as I upgraded my theme, I have finally come to the point of installing Skippys Gravatars plugin. This WordPress plugin makes it an easy task to add a more personal touch to the comments of your blog. Every commenter gets his or her personal global avatar next to the comment. It makes the readers feel a little more like a society and make the returning commenter feel welcome and at home. Let’s say it gives the comments area a more life like and less dry area. The images lighten up the place no doubt.
What must be done, except the download and installation of the plugin? It has an easily understood admin panel, where you can set different options for the plugin, such as the size of the image you want to integrate and whether you want to cache the Gravatas on your own site for faster downloading. You have to decide on where to place the image, normally in or beside the comment. This means you have to add some code, readily provided in the accompanying readme file, into your comment template. In your stylesheet you should add styling rules for the gravatar, likewise included in the readme.
But then your commenters have to do some work too! They have to go to gravatar.com and add their email address and upload a carefully selected image, that will be used on any blog where they comment. If one of your commenters doesn’t have a Gravatar, there image box will contain a default image at the bloggers discretion.
The standard default image is a question mark and if most Gravatars look like that on you pages, it may not look all that good.
I may change this to just a plain nice colored square, or not publish any image at all if no
Gravatar is associated with that persons email address.
It may sound careless to throw around email addresses like that, but have no fear it’s encrypted and only acts as an identifier for the image at gravatar.com.
So sign up with gravatar.com, upload your image and if you are a blogger, go get the Gravatars plugin and live happily thereafter.
J2ME MicroEmulator Sunday 2006-02-19
If you have an interest in working with Java for the mobile world, you are used to Midlets and working in the restricted libraries of CLDC and MIDP. Whether you use an IDE like JBuilder or Eclipse, or code in atest editor, you certainly have a mobile phone emulator for your workstation to test your Midlets before you deploy. Most developers use SUNS Java Wireless Toolkit. The mobile device manufacturers like Nokia and Ericsson have their own tool kits often based on SUN’s. In the test and evaluation of your Midlets, it is essential that what you see on your screen mimics the look and feel and behavior of the real device as closely as possible.
But did you know that you may also demonstrate your work on the web using Applet technique? I found an applet based Midlet runner when I was experimenting with J2ME for my now ageing Ericsson T610. Its the MicroEmulator written by Bartek Teodorczyk, a slowly developing Source Forge project.
It is a very useful and expandable CLDC/MIDP 1.0 mobile device emulator. MIDP 2 is here but a lot can still be done with the earlier standard. Not only is there an Applet version for presentation on the web of your Midlet based games, calendars or web servers, but there is also versions of the library using JFC/Swing and SWT mostly used for stand alone emulators for the workstation.
The real beauty of the MicroEmulator is that, while it comes with a default generic look, you can prepare your own skin to adapt to any mobile device featuring a set of basic functions.
Back in 2004, when I was more active in this field, than I’ve been lately, I wrote a fairly complete tutorial for Skinning the MicroEmulator. The example is not surprisingly a skin for the T610, but the technique is applicable for most mobile devices. Go have a look in my lab and feel at home. If you decide to give it shot, all source code is there as well as links to things you may need – a demo even of my results.
If you have an opinion or if you find any errors, you are welcome to drop me a line ( Contact above ).
And, don’t pay to much attention to the rest of Petit Labs, it’s a mess but I’m working on it.
Search Your History on The Web Saturday 2006-02-18
The web is coming of age, at least measured in Internet time ticks. You may wonder where you have been as information gets lost in the void of early cyberspace. Let “The Internet Archive Wayback Machine” come to your rescue! Here you can find your youth and your early struggle to present your soul to the world. and others of course 
Here are some of mine as I worked as webmaster and teacher at the Royal Institute of Technology.
| 1996 My webmaster piece |
| 1997 My personal page |
| 2003 evolved ( they saved the image too ) |
| 2004 ( some images are killed )
| 2006 My now abandoned home page at the Institute still lives it’s quite life |
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