Tag: <span>Web</span>

Published May 23, 2024 by

udm=14 is everything

AI is everywhere, sadly. It’s really an indictment of the computer technology space that as soon as cryptocurrency was effectively exposed for the fraud and ridiculous concept that it is, the capital overlords decided to pivot to generative AI. Which is equally ridiculous in the sense that nobody asked for it, it’s not something that solves any widespread problem we as a society have, and it has numerous shortcomings (and it’s not even remotely close to intelligence). Yet it’s causing corporations to throw billions of dollars as fast as humanly possible into developing the technology for mass use.

Things came to a head for me personally in recent days, when Google rolled out their AI Overview feature in search. And it’s lame. And it’s not something you can turn off! But they did do a nice thing and gave us… udm=14.

I’ve been using the web for a really long time, and I remember when Google search first appeared and how magical (no joke) it was to use. Over time that experience has changed and not always for the better. So when Google decided it was search’s time to get the AI injection, it made me very sad, especially since there was no way to disable it. Thankfully they allowed users to go back to a simpler time when search was for finding web sites and not for trying to answer complex questions using data of dubious accuracy. Just by adding a query parameter to any search URL. And it’s amazing. It has been so long since search results looked like this that I had forgotten how nice it was.

Nothing but links! No cruft, no nonsense, no AI garbage in sight. It’s glorious. Hopefully that query parameter will be around for a long, long time. It’s so popular that searching for ‘udm=14’ brings up a ton of articles about it. The best place to learn how to use it is the appropriately-named udm14.com

Google Web

Published December 13, 2022 by

The lifeblood of the Internet

I recently came across this interesting article from Cloudflare about how its DNSSEC public keys are signed by its private key, and the ceremony that is undertaken to do that every few months to secure its root DNS zone. It’s fascinating to me because few people know what DNS is and how it is vital to the Internet as we know it.

The process is straight out of the first Mission Impossible movie. But it’s heartening to know that so much effort goes into something that computers all over the globe trust every day for their operation.

Web

Published April 22, 2012 by

Web site passwords

Over the last couple of years there’s been a lot of debate over how web authentication should work. On the one hand you have traditional web sites where you have to register before you can use them, which involve selecting a user name and password, and then you have recent open standards for authentication like OpenID that allow you to authenticate using a common, predefined set of credentials.

The OpenID approach never really excited me like some others. I have never had a problem with multiple web site accounts, since I have a scheme for selecting user names and passwords that seems to work fairly well. The problem is for some sites it’s not feasible to outsource the authentication to a third party provider. Things like the site for managing your retirement account, or your bank’s web site. Unfortunately the biggest issue I keep seeing with these types of sites is most of them have very strange, very bad password requirements.

Case in point: forcing you to select a password that is no more than 8 characters, or cannot contain non-alphanumerics. That’s just insane. The best way to create a strong password is to make it long and include a variety of characters types (letters, numbers, symbols, etc). I find it hard to believe these institutions are so strapped for space on their database server/mainframe that they can’t afford a few more characters per password. Likewise, what modern RDBMS doesn’t support the standard non-alphas that people tend to use?

It boggles the mind.

Web

Published November 25, 2010 by

Google instant preview = epic fail

I’ve been a fan of Google since 1999 or so, back when nobody knew who they were. I loved the simplicity of their site and how well their search techniques worked. And while they are still my go-to search engine, they recently added a feature that can only be described as horrible. I’m talking ‘I completely hate this, do I need to switch to Blekko now?’ kind of horrible.

I’m talking about instant preview, the snapshot of a given search result that pops up when you hover the mouse over it, or click the magnifying glass next to it. I didn’t mind the instant search feature they rolled out earlier this year. I used it for a couple of weeks until the constant screen updates as I edited the search box got annoying. And then I simply turned it off. For instant preview it’s not so simple. Oh you can sort of turn it off by closing the popup box, but as soon as you (inadvertently) click the screen near a search result, the popup returns.

I did some cursory searching and lots of people don’t like this feature, and they all wanted to know how to turn it off permanently. Google apparently hasn’t given users a clear way to do that, which makes me wonder what the heck is going on over there.

But there is hope if you are a Firefox user and have AdBlock Plus installed. You can add these three filters to stop instant preview for good:

google.com##.vspi
google.com##.vspib
google.com###vspb

They are working well so far. I shudder to think what new stuff is in the works.

Google Web

Published February 28, 2009 by

IE 7

I’ve never been a fan of Internet Explorer. I used Netscape starting with version 2.0 and only switched when Firefox came around. So I’ve never bothered to upgrade my XP development machine to IE 7. Then I read this post from Scott Hanselman about how a sizable chunk of his visitors are still running IE 6. He linked to a web site that’s actually devoted to getting people to upgrade. I’ve heard all the stories about IE 6’s particular horribleness, such as poor CSS support and a generous helping of security holes. But I didn’t care.

Except Scott somehow made me care. So I upgraded my machine and I must say, IE 7 loads pretty fast, way faster than Firefox 3. I suppose it’s good to stay current, but when Microsoft feels it has to change practically everything with each new release of software, it makes it hard to really want to upgrade. I dread the day I’ll have to move to an OS beyond XP. Maybe Windows 7 won’t be as bad as Vista, but I’m not going to hold my breath.

Web