Category Archives: Weberies 2.0

Lutte contre le spam

Une nouvelle initiative de lutte contre le spam vient d’être annoncée : Signal-spam (malgré la ressemblance de nom, le site en question n’a strictement rien à voir avec ce blog). En réalité ce n’est pas tant l’initiative qui est nouvelle, que l’ouverture du service associé destiné au signalement de spam.

Le site a été monté par une association 1901 créée par différents partenaires dont la CNIL, l’APRIL et différents syndicats de commerçants de vente à distance, et vise à identifier, avec l’aide des utilisateurs, le spam reçu en France et ses responsables.

Il y a tout de même un petit inconvénient pour les dinosaures : il n’est possible, avec les outils fournis, que d’envoyer des spams depuis Thunderbird ou Microsoft Outlook, mais pas depuis mutt ou d’autres outils Unix classiques.

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A naive look at search engines from a blog newbie

Opening a blog is a good opportunity to discover and rediscover how the main search engines work nowadays to get their information: long gone are the days when Altavista was the only major search engine.

It is also a good way to try and find out some of the reasons why a blog is a bit peculiar compared to a generic web site.

In particular, most blogs or news sites rely on technologies called RSS (for Really Simple Syndication) or Atom to provide a standard format for automated engines to know about available articles or posts; they’re called syndication formats. Most blog-specialized engines are based on the use of syndication formats; that’s the main point that makes them different from generic search engines. However, RSS was invented for news sites years before the word blog came into wide use; hence the difference between a blog and a web site is not as clear-cut as it may seem.

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Firefox extensions, Google Toolbar and FreeBSD

I’ve been a user of Firefox and the Google Toolbar for some time. Everything went fine until, last summer, I upgraded my Firefox. I discovered then that the recent releases of the toolbar refuse to be installed on FreeBSD, which happens to be the operating system I use. And, logically enough, FreeBSD is not listed in Google Toolbar’s FAQ on compatible systems. Yet previous revisions of the Toolbar worked just fine under FreeBSD!

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