The Hypocrisy Weblog

cnet’s web 2.0 blog, “Webware” has announced it’s Webware 100 winners-list. The question is now; how is this list relevant to anyone in the Internet-business? Each and every category, 10 of them, has 10 winners each – and each and every site on the top 100-list anyone who’s involved in working with the Internet (in any way) have heard of.

The categories are; Browsing, Communications, Community, Data, Entertainment, Media, Mobile, Productivity and Commerce, Publishing, Reference.

Surely, it is a good ego boost for the people behind the services to get recognition, but does it serve any journalistic purpose? I am not so sure about that; Rafe Needleman and the Webware crew are preaching for the already saved. There is no internal ranking of the sites in the individual categories – so how do I as a visitor know which site got more votes than the other? (Yes, alright – they do have a list of the over-all top 10 and the sites that got over 1000 votes, though it doesn’t show the internal ranking in between the sites within each category. Perhaps the over-all statistic material wasn’t enough?! I don’t know…)

From my own perspective I am glad that the swizz army-knife-like site Netvibes, which deserves more media coverage – as it is a really nice service to keep track on all your communication needs ranging from rss-feeds (sites, forums, email, blogs etc), to email, to skype, to.. yeah – you get the idea.

Google was the company with most services in the top 100-list, yet this is not surprising as they are the biggest site on the Internet.

To the Webware authors; Please make the list more detailed the next time and get a broader statistic foundation (aka get more people to vote on the list), then we’re talking about a relevant list.

After the Mac-hack contest announced by CanSecWest in April, Apple has been a popular target to find security flaws in. I should think that the more a brand sell, the more popular it is to hack…

However, the Safari-hack must’ve broken some kind of record as 3 minutes after the public beta of Apple’s Safari-browser for Microsoft Windows was released, self-proclaimed security-expert Aviv Raff found a serious bug in Safari which will make the browser crash and much possibly open up the browser for exploits.

Raff was clearly unhappy with Apple’s claim that Safari was designed to be “secure from day one” (he called this claim “pathetic”) but he said he wasn’t particularly going after Apple. “I don’t pick just on Apple,” he said. “I’ve posted about Microsoft and Mozilla issues too.”

It is not clear if this flaw exists on the Mac OS-version of Safari.

In other words; Do not think that you’ll be secure just because you opt-in for Apple OS X (or Ubuntu, or… yes, you get it). Apple, in this case, has been having security-issues with their products. An example of that is their multimedia player Quicktime, where serious vulnerabilities went for weeks without being patched.

Via PC World

“Pop-up” company 180solutions fires almost 1/4 of their employees according to swedish alternative news-site What.se.

1/4 fired is equivalent to 50 people out of 210 employed at 180solutions, and this is a result of the popup-blockers being more effective, at least if you quote What.se and Martin Edenström.

I am happy to say that spyware does not pay off in the long run and that the increased usage of Mozilla Firefox, as well as Microsoft finally incorporating a popup-blocker in their web-browser Internet Explorer !

“Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 is now available for download. This is the first Beta release of our next generation Firefox browser, to be released later this year, and it is being made available to our developer and testing community for compatibility testing and to solicit feedback.

Note: This is not the final release of our Web browser, it has been made available for testing purposes only, with no end-user support. If that sounds scary, you’d probably be better off with the latest version of Firefox 1.0.”