LiveJournal/our Russian overlords have laid off 13 of 30 staff in the USA.

Valleywag has an "LJ is doomed" story with inaccurate numbers. It looks like no_lj_ads is collating links to other information.

synecdochic (who is involved in the Dreamwidth project, designed as an LJ replacement) reckons nothing dramatic will happen overnight, but engineering staff have apparently been cut, so we might expect maintenance and new features to be neglected. Edited to add: LJ themselves are saying they're just moving their development team to Russia, which would make sense if your aim is to cut costs: Russians are presumably cheaper than Americans.

The preferred LJ backup tool for Windows is apparently ljarchive. Those of you who use operating systems can sort yourselves out.

Slashdot reports on the demise of something called journalspace, which seems to have been one of those free blogging sites, a bit like this here LiveJournal.

From what Slashdot readers say, and according to the message on the site, the owners thought a setup where redundant drives store the same data as it's written (known as RAID) was like having backups. The "as it's written" is the key point. If some program goes wild or someone malicious gains access to the server, you can end up losing the data, because the malicious entity can just write crap, which will be replicated everywhere. RAID's meant to let you carry on if one of your hard drives packs up (because the same data is on others), not to allow you to go back to old data, which is what a backup gets you.

Unfortunately, Journalspace does not have backups, so all the blogs hosted there are lost.

I trust that LiveJournal (not to mention Gmail and Google Reader and so on) are better organised than Journalspace was, but I bet there's something in their Terms of Service which says "if we lose all your data, it's not our problem". All this decentralised web 2.0 stuff is convenient, but it's a good idea to keep copies of your stuff on your hard drive, too. I use a little Python script called ljdump to backup my journal (I'm actually using a hacked up version that spits out data to the stuff that generates my comment feeds, but that's not important right now). There are probably less techie tools that will do the same job (some of the LiveJournal clients will do backups, for example). The important thing is to get one, and use it regularly.

Whenever I post a comment on LiveJournal, I get an email containing the text of it. I've written a Python program which turns these into an Atom feed, so that people could stalk me more easily by subscribing to the feed. I get into some interesting discussions on other people's LJs, so I thought such a feed might be useful.

The program checks that the comment is on a public posting and doesn't publish it if it isn't (you can do this by submitting an HTTP HEAD request for the entry in question and seeing whether LJ redirects you to login or sends you a 4xx response, both of which I take to mean "don't publish"). Edited to add: the program also periodically re-checks for posts changing their privacy settings (there's a cache with an exponential backoff from a couple of hours to a month to avoid annoying LJ: the backoff is restarted if the entry's privacy changes).

I'm not sure whether to do further checks before publishing the comment. On the one hand, all I'm doing is publishing my own words as they appear in someone's public posting. On the other hand, sometimes people are quite surprised to find that people read stuff they've made public, and I don't want to annoy my friends. Since I mostly comment on your journals, what do you think?

Poll #1242038 On the ethics of feeds
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

I should

Some of you customise your journal's appearance using LiveJournal's S2 system. The whole thing looks a bit baroque, with much mentioning of "layers", so I thought I'd just ask questions of people who might know how to do what I want.

I have a thingy which generates an Atom feed from the comments on each of public postings (by "thingy" I mean a couple of Python scripts, one of which is a heavily modified version of ljdump and the other of which is a script which generates the feeds using the dumped information. I might publish them if anyone's interested). Proper blogs have these feeds, so I thought mine should too.

I would like to make people's browsers aware of the feed when viewing an entry, which means sticking some extra <link> elements into the <head> element of the entry view. I'd also like to link to the feed somewhere on the entry page, probably in the little list of stuff you can do with the entry (you know, permalink, write a comment, add to memories, denounce, and so on). The link would reference http://www.noctua.org.uk/paul/lj/feeds/nnnn.xml, where nnnn is the unique number which LJ puts in the permalink to the entry itself (for example, this entry's number is 83644).

At some stage the script is also going to produce a single feed of all comments on my public postings (and maybe all my comments on your public postings, if you don't object). So I'd also like to know how to stick stuff in the <head> of the entire journal view (which already links to the Atom feed of my postings which LJ generates itself).

Any help you can give in telling me where to start with this stuff would be much appreciated.

The recent abolition of free accounts with no ads on LiveJournal provoked some interesting comments on LJ itself, and on the wider question of how social networking sites can make any money.

In a nice turn of phrase, antennapedia speculates that LJ may have "begun the descent through the levels of credible ownership" (which is presumably antennapedia's reason for producing a migration tool to assist in moving your journal to another server which uses LJ code). chipotle has some interesting numbers (although some are probably faulty) and some speculation on where the Russian overlords are heading.

There are the expected "let's all go somewhere else" projects which will set up a page on Sourceforge/Google Code, argue about what to implement and then die (elsejournal, for example). synecdochic knows a thing or two, having worked for LJ in the past, and may have a credible proposal, although I'm curious about some of the technicalities.

After each fresh stupidity from LJ, a bunch of people bugger off to existing LJ clones which are running the Open Source parts of LJ's code. GreatestJournal staggered under the weight. InsaneJournal is holding up, except when their hosting provider accidentally turns them off. synecdochic rightly worries about InsaneJournal in the long term, because scaling up your website when it gets popular is a hard problem, requiring equipment and people who don't come cheap. synecdochic also has some insights into how that worked for LJ itself, if you're interested.

Wired has a brief piece pointing out that nobody's quite worked out how you make money of social sites yet. Perhaps you don't: unoriginal1729 reckons search engines will always have the edge, because they can serve appropriate ads at the point where you're actually looking to buy something rather than speculatively advertising based inferring things from your interests. Maybe the thing which precipitates a working verison of the geeks' dream of Usenet-plus-crypto-magic will be all the centralised sites running out of money.

Things that caught my eye on the web recently:

• marnanel supplies the ultimate version of all those "which local dialect do you speak?" questionnaires that people have been doing lately.
  
  
• Zarf, otherwise known as Andrew Plotkin, gives us LOLGRUES. Makes a change from cats, I suppose.
  
  
• scribb1e thought I'd like The Ongoing Adventures of ASBO Jesus. Some of them are good, some of them are typical "the church is the people, not the building" Christian greeting-card verse (but as cartoons!) The artist shows some signs of creationism, but as I'm no longer a Christian, I don't have to do my "please get off my side, you're making it look stupid" bit.
  
  Inevitably, the cartoon with the most comments is the one about gay marriage. Inamongst the usual godhatesfags stuff (or rather, God hates the faggotry but loves the fags, naturally) there were a couple of links to interesting interviews with N.T. Wright (no relation), the Bishop of Durham. There was also an interesting comment from Tyler on just what Paul did mean by arsenokoites (the word translated by the NIV as homosexual offenders, about which there's considerable debate as it's a novel coinage as far as we know). Tyler points out that the Septuagint puts the two words that Paul has used in his portmanteau word right next to each other in everyone's favourite bit of Leviticus (scroll down a bit for the Greek). So it looks like you practising gays (or even those of you who aren't practising because you've got very good at it) are pretty much out as far as Christianity goes. Have you considered atheism?
  
  
• If your internet connection comes from BT, Virgin Media or Carphone Warehouse's Talktalk service, you should be aware of the evil that is Phorm, a cunning plan to intercept all your web browsing and use the knowledge of what you're interested in (from your web searches) to display targetted advertising on collaborating websites. Richard Clayton has spoken to Phorm and has technical details of how the system works. It's a horrible hack, in all senses of the word.
  
  Talktalk aren't all bad though: they just told the British recording industry to get stuffed in a highly entertaining way. The BPI are now threatening to sue.
  

DEEP THOUGHT:
If I might make an observation…

MAJIKTHISE:
We’ll go on strike!

VROOMFONDEL:
That’s right. You’ll have a national philosopher’s strike on your hands.

DEEP THOUGHT:
Who will that inconvenience?

MAJIKTHISE:
Never you mind who it’ll inconvenience you box of black legging binary bits! It’ll hurt, buster! It’ll hurt!

LiveJournal (who host this blog) will no longer let new users sign up for their advertising-free "Basic" account. Instead, new users can get the "Plus" account, which has adverts (if you're using some quaint non-Firefox browser which still shows you such things), or they can get the "Paid" account, which doesn't.

The announcement of this changed followed LJ's standard practices of bungling and evasion when communicating with their customers, which new-ish owners SUP correctly describe as "the values and legacy of LiveJournal". This has annoyed a few people, but I'm not sure why, because they should be used to it by now.

Anyhoo, livredor and hairyears are hosting some interesting discussions about it, here and here. hairyears makes the point that buying LJ is not just about buying people's writings, you're also getting stewardship of a community (or lots of communities) with their own values. My impression is that this applies more to LJ than to "proper" blogging sites, because of LJ's mix of blogging and what we'd now call social networking. Social networking sites have the feel of places we go with our friends, so it's not very surprising that we can be vociferous in defending them (LJ isn't the only one with epic failures of customer relations: Facebook had the Feed and Beacon debacles).

Servers and bandwidth are not free, as GreatestJournal has been finding out (the hard way). But how do you make money out of such a prickly bunch? danahboyd's commenters have some good suggestions.

Geeks who still use Usenet (you remember, Usenet) have suggested a peer-to-peer system as a way around all this nonsense (see the comments on both livredor and hairyears's postings). This sort of thing is a reflex response from geeks to any outside manipulation of their stuff, until their enthusiasm is curbed by older and wiser geeks. Having been curbed, I realise that you'd need good answers to questions about how you make such a thing work, how you make it usable by non-geeks, and, related to that, how you interest people who don't think the peer-to-peer part is intrinsically cool. Freenet has been around a long time and hasn't become popular. BitTorrent has, because it gets people something they want (warez, pr0n, TV programmes, Linux DVDs) in a way which scales better than the centralised alternative.

I think robhu is right to say that the web browser has to remain as the interface (though that in itself makes security interesting), but it's not clear that HTTP has to be the transport for such a thing. His idea of a federation of LJ-like servers is interesting, but once you centralise, you're back to the question of how the people running the big servers make any money. There might be a place for the Usenet model, where each ISP runs a server for their users, or perhaps for the MSP model (which Usenet is moving to as its popularity declines), where I pay the people running a good Usenet server a yearly fee to access it.

The networking effects are a killer: you need something special to get off the ground and up to the stage where people are joining because other people are there. That, or you bodge your thing on the side of an existing infrastructure: can we do this using XMPP or Usenet or email, I wonder?

A question for those of you who've met me in person: how do I come across online, and do I seem different from how I am in real life?

The site of the book of the sites, The Internet, now in handy book form, is good fun. Crackbook and Poormatch are particularly well observed. It reminded me of TV Go Home, but a little less bitter and scatological (only a little, mind you).

Quotable quotes of the week:

"... any time anyone's said anything comprehensible about the Trinity the Church has declared it a heresy." - gjm11 on a Rilstone post created specifically for him.

"The universe tends toward maximum irony. Don't push it." - jwz on taking reliable backups (which is much harder on a Mac than it ought to be).

"All those fine words about the rule of law safeguarding our liberties, the arbitrary exercise of power and Bunker Hill, Lexington and Normandy went right out the window on 9/11. That was when Henry and the rest of his stalwart defenders of the rule of law promptly wet their pants and then let their president use the constitution to clean up the puddle." - Digby, via a friend of a friend.

There's an option that I might have considered instead of apostasy. Unfortunately, in those conservative days, you couldn't really do that sort of thing. These days, if LiveJournal is anything to go by, it's all the rage. A woman tells us how she's in an open relationship with Jesus.

pw201_links is a LiveJournal feed of my bookmarks on del.ico.us. If you want to see stuff I'm looking at but haven't yet bothered to write a proper post about, you can befriend it (it's not equivalent to adding pw201 as a friend, it's a separate thing which I set up but I don't control directly, see below). It'll be composed of equal parts religion stuff, technical stuff (security is a special interest at the moment, but that'll vary with time), and random internet bollocks. There'll probably a few posts a day at peak times, but usually one per day or less.

Exposition: pw201_links is what LiveJournal calls a syndicated account. There are lots of these on LJ, as paying users can create them from the feeds exported by other websites and then read those feeds on their friends page. I tend to read these feeds in Bloglines and keep my LJ friends list for people and communities who are actually on LJ; if you do that but want to spy on me anyway, add the RSS feed to your feed reader.

You can make comments on the postings on a syndicated account, but I won't get notifications about them so probably won't read them, and they'll be deleted as postings fall off the bottom of the feed.

While we're on the subject of syndicated accounts: sumanah, I tried to respond to your email the other say and got a bounce with the error code "553 5.3.0 sPoOf". I'm not sure what that's about, but it looks like I'm hitting a spam filter of some sort.

Oh my. The feminist bloggers have taken on the Internet Hate Machine known as Anonymous. Encyclopedia Dramatica (very NSFW and extremely offensive, don't blame me if you get fired) has the scoop on the post which might have been from Biting Beaver that started it all, as well as the on-going aftermath.

Some of the commenters on the feminist blogs get it, and actually tell them what's going on and how to weather the raids (ilyka, or Holly in this thread). Luckily for Anonymous, the rest of the commenters either ignore them or jump on them and accuse them of misogyny, while beginning the countdown which will end in them reaching Defcon 1 and launching the e-lawyers against the Patriarchy. Hint: the only winning move is not to play.

It's like the Internet perfect storm. Who brought popcorn?

I have a message between two people who aren't me (and aren't known to me, don't worry!) sat in both my Facebook Inbox and Sent Messages. The message was sent at 3:04 pm today, apparently.

This does not appear to be the problem mentioned in The Register recently, whose symptoms were that people would see whole pages belonging to other users. I can see my Inbox with messages people have sent to me, but I can see a message between these two people in it. I've sent them a message to ask whether they meant to message me, but right now, that looks unlikely.

A while back I wrote about some of the advantages of centralisation for keeping out spam and making new features available quickly. The downside, as livredor pointed out, is that Facebook is a single point of failure.

Could this happen with standard Internet email? Yes: I could mis-address the mail (less likely if I use an address book rather than typing an address by hand), or the recipient's server could mis-deliver it (usually, if my outbound server hands my mail to the wrong remote server, the remote end will reject it). Are popular mail servers more reliable than Facebook? Almost certainly, I'd say. Lots of people are on Facebook, but I reckon the volume of Internet email is still orders of magnitude greater than that of Facebook messages. The email servers handling that volume are so reliable that I've never heard of a case of mis-delivered (as opposed to mis-addressed or lost) email. Google Groups doesn't seem to have done so either, or at least, the evidence is uncertain. The Usenet postings I found talking about mis-delivered mail seemed to be explained by the little-known fact that Internet email is like a letter: there's an envelope destination address used to deliver it, as well as the "Dear Fred" saluation you see in the To: header or Cc: header. I had a friend at university who used to send out party invites which looked as if they been addressed to president@whitehouse.gov and god@heaven.org. Anyway...

Don't send anything sensitive in Facebook messages, will you?

Edited to add: The message has gone again now. I've used the help form to tell Facebook about it, so we'll see what they say.

I look up potential interviewees on Facebook (as well as Google, obviously). Unlike the proctors at Oxfrod, I don't care whether you've been photographed covered in flour or shaving cream, as long as you look like someone who's smart, and gets things done.

livredor recently posted an entry in which she talks about online privacy, linking to Charlie Stross's essay on the subject. I think Stross has this article on teenagers and online privacy in mind when he talks of a generation growing up with the idea that you have no privacy online and it doesn't matter anyway. livredor is coming to the conclusion (which I share, see my replies in the comments) that she "should just make everything open and take care never to post anything that I could be ashamed or embarrassed about".

As the comments on her posting point out, the problem is working out what you could be embarrassed about. The problems mentioned in the Times article are partly the result of a generation gap between people who aren't surprised that some of their peers have put their lives online, warts and all, and the staid elders who are shocked to learn stuff that proctors, employers and parents didn't previously find out about. I suspect that absence of evidence of shaving cream was never really evidence of absence, but it's going to take a while for the elders to work that out. It seems sensible for the younger people to be a little circumspect in the meantime, so it's not surprising that many existing Facebook users are tightening up their privacy options. Relying on privacy settings is another risk, because you're trusting your e-friends and the site you're using, but at least you're keeping your embarrassing university antics out of sight of indexers and archivers, and you're not assuming that the elders cannot join the site you're using.

livredor also mentioned the possible problems which might be caused by people migrating away from email to the messaging systems offered by sites like Facebook. Gervase Markham has some thoughts on the subject. Conventional email is a lot less slick than, say, Facebook's internal messages, and faces a greater spam problem, in part because email is distributed but Facebook has centralised control. These proprietary systems have their downsides too, of course: balkanisation, and a single point of failure when Facebook gets shut down by a law suit.

I think there's some mileage in building an email system which is a bit more like Facebook's walled garden. When I say spam in its current form is a solved problem, what I mean is that you can solve it by only accepting messages from well-behaved parts of the Internet. What I mean by well-behaved is stuff like not being in space given to cable modems and the like (Spamhaus PBL, checks on the presence of reverse DNS and that the hostname does not contain some variant of the IP address), not being a known baddie (Spamhaus SBL and XBL or your own email providers local list of scumbags), and not sending bulk email except by prior arrangement (DCC with whitelisting for mailing lists).

Alas, not all badly-behaved emailers are spammers, some of them are just managed by incompetents. Sometimes these incompetents work for large companies who aren't going to change, so you have to start making holes in your garden wall to keep your users happy. However, an inbound email gateway for a hugely popular site like Facebook could enforce these restrictions by fiat without losing anything, since their users are using the internal system to send each other messages anyway, so anything else is a bonus (you could also make a nice interface for whitelisting legitimate bulk senders by requiring them to produce a Facebook application, say). If Facebook does take over the world, it needn't mean the death of email. It might just bring the incompetents into line, we can but hope.

Shock news tonight, as Livejournal administrators delivered a stairwell noncebashing, leaving many fanfic journals braindead and quadraspazzed on a life-glug (script here). LJ's abuse team don't seem to have realised that such excesses are unacceptable in the modern police service. There are persistent reports that journals for survivors of rape and incest were also deleted, but I've seen no real confirmation of this.

A group of hicks from the USA appear to have provoked this, dealing out street justice in between engaging in car chases with a fat sheriff; driving a car with the doors welded shut, a Confederate flag on the blogrollroof, and a horn that plays Dixieland. Some day the mountain might get 'em, but, alas, it seems the law never will.

This is, perhaps, a timely reminder that sites like LJ are businesses (LJ may have started as a hobbyist site, but has not been one since the 6Apart takeover, at the very latest). They are not your friends. They will defend your free speech exactly as far as it profits them to do so, and they're certainly not prepared to undertake legal battles on your behalf. bubble_blunder has a realistic assessment of the likely outcomes of this latest LJ drama.

There are tools which will back-up your journals and comments, and you can configure LJ to email you your own comments on other people's journals. It seems wise to make use of these facilities if you value your journal's contents at all.

LJ are doing their usual headless-chicken imitation when faced with a crisis. They've made no public statement on this business, perhaps hoping that word of it won't spread outside the Snape/Hermione fan-fiction writers. While I've no interest in slash, and I appreciate LJ's right to avoid legal liability, their handling of their users once again sucks.

Edited to add: The CEO of 6Apart apologised. Best comment thread in the responses.

So, Facebook have opened up their site to allow third parties to do stuff, namely put stuff on consenting users' profiles, stick items in the feed, and embed an interface to a third-party site inside Facebook. I eagerly await:

• The first Facebook group filled with people protesting this change.
• My first goatse on Facebook (q.v. d1rtyf1lthy vs beckyzoole in their new production of Asshat vs Lolcow)

I'm quite faint with excitement.

But srsly, this is an interesting ploy for world domination by Facebook. Why bother starting your new knitting, kitten appreciation or dating site if you can start one within Facebook and make use of (I'm fighting the urge to use the word "leverage" here, Dawkins help me) their existing users? You do need somewhere to host your application, which might mean big hosting bills if it became popular, but if you're not writing something which needs lots of state available on the network, it looks like you could also do interesting things from the user's desktop, or even from their browser with things like Greasemonkey scripts or browser add-ons.

Personally, I'm interested in online CDC Top Trumps. A port of that 100 Million Spiders thing looks like a win, too: it'd be funny, and some I noticed that some members of Facebook are already complaining that they can't put "Alice is in a dom-sub poly pirate-ninja conglomerate with Bob and Eve" on their profile using Facebook's existing relationship options (they're complaining by forming a Facebook group, naturally).

Finally, CNN's in-depth report on the changes solves the mystery of what Facebook's "poke" function is for. Apparently It even still has a feature which enables you to "poke" another member - something most people interpret to mean a sexual come-on. So now you know. Lord knows how you interpret the sort of poke war that lots of Facebook users get into.

For a while now, I've been getting comments on my LiveJournal which apparently aren't spam, but rather are questions which are totally out of context. For instance, I got one the other day which said "Hi. I find forum about work and travel. Where can I to see it?"

I recently got some more comment spam advertising something called XRumer, a clever and nasty program for spamming bulletin boards and other forums (like LJ), which is brought to us by some evil Russians ("No Meester Bond, I expect you to die"). One of the things the authors claim it can do is a crude form of astroturfing. They say you can configure it to post a comment asking about something, and response apparently from another user mentioning the site you actually want to advertise. It looks like this feature doesn't quite work, and that the questions I've been seeing are examples of it misfiring. Mystery solved.

The spammers seem to favour certain entries of mine, so I'm screening anonymous comments on those entries (and on this one too, since I imagine it might attract undesirables). I don't want to do that for my entire journal, as I get comments from people who aren't on LJ but who say worthwhile things. In an ideal world, the way round this would be OpenID, but that's not in widespread use yet, possibly because people who have an OpenID often don't know they do. [Attention LJ users: you have an OpenID. Congrats. You've got a Jabber instant messaging account, too. See how good bradfitz is to you?]

A system which allows easy communication between two people who have no previous connection to each other is susceptible to spam. The trick is to keep this desirable feature while not being buried in junk (you could go the other way and remove this feature, of course, as many some IM users have, or make a virtue of it with social networking sites, but that's not really an option for public blogs). Anything an ordinary user might to do create an identity, a spammer can do too, so cryptographic certificates aren't a magical solution. Legislation doesn't help, because the police don't care and anyhow, spammers are in Wild West states like China or Russia, or at least run front operations there.

Most spam is still sent via email. Email spammers have been subject to an evolutionary arms race. The remaining effective spammers are bright and totally amoral. They'll hijack millions of other people's computers to send their spam or even to host the website they're advertising, making it hard for blacklists to keep up (and they'll use these computers to flood centralised blacklist sites with traffic in an attempt to knock them off the net). They'll vary the text they use, to defeat schemes which detect the same posting lots of times. They'll use images rather than text, or simply links to those images, to defeat textual analysis. You can bet that blog spammers will learn from this (some of them are probably email spammers too).

What's working for email spam, and will similar ideas work for blog spam?

• Banning mail sent directly from consumer ISP connections is the single most effective thing I do (you can do this with the Spamhaus PBL and with a few checks for generic rDNS to catch what the PBL misses). You can't do that with blog comments, as spam or not, they almost all come from consumer ISP connections.
  
  
• Banning mail sent from IPs which are known sources of spam is also effective. You can do that with blog comments, but you either need to be big enough to generate your own list (as LJ might be) or have the resources to run a centralised list like Spamhaus (which will be attacked by spammers). There are currently no IP blacklists devoted to blog spamming, as far as I know, although some spam comments I've seen came from IPs which were in the Spamhaus XBL.
  
  
• Filtering on ways in which spamming programs differ from legitimate SMTP clients (greylisting, greet pause) is currently effective, but only as long as these methods don't become so widespread that it's worth the spammers' while to look more like a legitimate sender. Still, this doesn't seem that likely. Incompetent admins aren't in short supply, and I don't have to outrun the bear, only outrun them. This sounds promising against blog spammers. Apparently simple minded schemes are pretty effective.

What else can we do with a website that we can't do on email?

• CAPTCHAs are popular, but a bit of a bugger if you're blind. The evil Russians claim to have defeated most of the deployed ones which use obscured letters, though that still leaves the "click on the picture of a cat" variant.
  
  
• Proof-of-work or hashcash schemes are currently very effective, suggesting that blog spammers don't yet have the huge amounts of stolen computing resources available to email spammers, or that they don't have the knowledge to implement the hashcash algorithm in their spamming software. By using proof-of-work, we can at least drive the weak blog spammers to the wall.
  
  You can think of proof-of-work as a variant on the tactic of differentiating spam programs from real humans. Spammers can defeat simple-minded checks on how long a user has been reading a page before commenting without slowing their spamming rate up by much (how to do this is left as an exercise to the prospective spammer), but if a web browser has to do a computation which takes a fixed time and send the result along with the comment, the spammers have to slow down or do the work in parallel on many computers. If you can work out a way of doing the calculation in the background as the user looks at your page and writes their comment, so much the better. If you can dynamically generate the code you send to the browser to make it prove it's done some work, you stop the spammers writing something equivalent in a real programming language and force them to run it in Java or Javascript. That'd really show them who's boss.
  
  This hurts people who've turned off Javascript or Java, but it's time for those dinosaurs to join the web 2.0 world, right?

I guess most people on LiveJournal saw their proposal to turn LJ into MySpace (lj_dirtycache is particularly good fun for anyone who's ever looked at bands' sites on MySpace). What's funny about LJ's effort is that LJ clearly understand what is going to provoke their users to apoplectic rage until they realise they've been had. By comparison, Facebook was a bit lame, merely offering to send someone round to physically poke the people you "poked" on Facebook. They should have announced some variant on the Facebook feed to get all the "OMG UR HELPING STALKERS" people up in arms again.

Google announced TISP, their IP-round-the-U-bend service, as well as Gmail Paper, for those who prefer their email on paper. Slashdot had a collection of unconvincing stories. Poor show.

Disappointingly, the IETF don't seem to have done anything very exciting lately, at least nothing to match the seminal Standard for the transmission of IP datagrams on Avian Carriers.

Finally, robhu announced he'd reconverted to Christianity. It initially seemed he'd converted to a fluffy sort of Christianity in which God is a metaphor for the good which, in a very real sense, is in us all. However, in the discussion thread which followed, it soon became clear he'd reverted to his old evangelical habits, informing me that I was blinded by the devil and was "just as much of a fundamentalist as Richard Hawkings". His later post contains the de-brief, in which it is revealed that I was in on it from shortly after he'd posted the entry. robhu used some excellent observational humour to convincingly impersonate evangelical responses to my ultra-atheist straight man.

In summary, burr86 and robhu jointly win the Internet. Tonight, we dine in Hell.

I am currently laid up. I've been trying out Firefox 2.0. It looks quite good. On the Mac, it's faster then 1.5 and doesn't get bogged down when you leave it running for a long time (I tend to put the Powerbook into sleep rather than shutting it down). I've not tried it on Windows yet, as I use Mozex for editing Wiki entries at work, and that's not been updated for 2.0. The essential extensions have been updated, though: AdBlock and Greasemonkey being the two I use the most. It's always a shock to use someone else's machine and find their intarweb has adverts. I mean, how quaint. And you need Greasemonkey for LJ New Comments, which the people on lj_nifty seemed to like, bless 'em.

I like the spelling checker for form entries, and the way that you can now have it save and restore sessions, move tabs around, and put a close tab button in the corner of each tab. The smart completion thingy for Google searches is quite nice, as is the way that sites can offer their own search plugins which Firefox picks up on and can then install automatically (you can tell the site offers a plugin when the little arrow in the search box glows blue: thanks to marnanel for pointing that one out). I like the way that it can be configured to add RSS feeds to Bloglines, too.

While I was enjoying all this web 2.0 excitement, I thought I'd try out del.ico.us. It's a site that lets you store your bookmarks externally, so you can find them on any computer, and also lets you tag them with keywords so you can find them again easily (which is my main reason for using it: my bookmarks were getting out of control). You can see my bookmarks here, and there's also an RSS feed of them if you'd like to stalk me.

mangojellytoast talks about the new feeds feature on Facebook:

Everyone's complaining about it, but I love seeing a list of entries like "Cindy's relationship status went from 'single' to 'in a relationship'" and "Cindy left the group 'True Love Waits'"

It amuses the hell out of me.

Tee hee!