Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

I just started watching ABS’s hit show Lost, the old season 1, because of all the hype about the new season. The premise is a bunch of people–say 40–survive an airline crash on a mysterious island. They are way off course, and can’t communicate to be rescued, so now they have to fight the island and their own human nature to survive. It’s like watered down Battle Royal. So, here’s a couple screens to keep your interest:

So far the story is quite intriguing, and the cinematography decent enough to keep me watching.

So slashdot.org is now running a CSS / HTML 4.01 solution that generates nice, snappy pages with quick load time. It uses less bandwidth than before, and is mostly standards compliant. Except, there’s a catch. Using the free load time analysis tool I found online, I found the following breakdown:

HTML: 11792
HTML Images: 1859
CSS Images: 0
Total Images: 1859
Javascript: 23469
CSS: 507
Multimedia: 0
Other: 0

Wow… 23kb of javascript! Where does slashdot use javascript? Well, they use it to serve all their ads, of course. Let’s look at a graph:

Now, ask yourself the following question:

Do I want to visit a website that is composed of 63% advertising?

For more information on the Slashdot CSS story from different perspectives, please see:

• weblogs.macromedia.com/jd/archives/2005/09/slashdot_css.cfm
• www.gabrielserafini.com/archives/2005/09/22/sure-sign-that-the-apocolypse-is-near-slashdot-goes-to-clean-html-401-css
• www.raphil.org/archives/2005/09/slashdot_is_sta.html
• www.downloadsquad.com/2005/09/06/slashdot-finally-going-css-needs-beta-testers/

Quote of the day, from Will Smith’s new Lost & Found album:

I wish I would have told the girls to “drop it like it’s hot.”
Seems like “Summer, Summertime” is all I got

It’s so true.

So you’ve all heard about WP Gatekeeper, Eric Meyers inane “What colour is an orange” challenge/response authorization system for user comments. Now let me introduce WP Spam Quiz, a more customizable, user-friendly implementation of the same idea.

As a computer science major, though, I have to point out that these products are *still* vulnerable. However, it is my opinion that most of these attacks are far beyond the level of sophistication of the average spammer. Or in other words, we are still vulnerable, but in practice this will serve well until some time in the future!