Multi-lingual Email Address

Multi-lingual email addresses, or Email Address Internationalization (EAI) as it is more commonly known, has been around for a while. Netaka, a Canadian firm, has been providing an email service for the Chinese community that supports the use of Chinese characters in the email address.

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has also assigned a committee to oversee the internationalized email effort and the result has been the RFC4952, which in combination with RFC3490 for Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) defines a standard for supporting email addresses with international character sets.

The effort for internationalizing email addresses has been fairly recent, so it will be a while before email servers start supporting other charactersets.

Yahoo! Geocities Pulling Down Shutters

Yahoo! will stop providing the Geocities free web hosting service later this year. What started off in 1994, providing free web hosting communities, was started off by Beverly Hills Internet. In it's original form, Geocities consisted of several virtual 'cities' that represented a category (Eg. Cape Canaveral was for Science & Silicon Valley was for Technology (?) ).

It was acquired by Yahoo in 1999. After a change in the Terms of Service, indicating that all content would be owned by Yahoo!, Geocities grew fairly unpopular and this caused Yahoo! to reverse it's decision on content ownership. Geocities also sold information about it's users to marketing firms which led to a litigation.

Judge of The Pirate Bay case

A recent blog article reveals that the judge who presided over The Pirate Bay hearing was, in fact, a part of two intellectual property protection organizations. As if that wasn't bad enough, he was also a part of the organization acting as the plaintiff i.e. the guys suing The Pirate Bay. If that isn't a mis-trial, I don't know what is. Get more of the juicy details here.

Torrent Sites Shut down After Pirate Bay Verdict

Following the court verdict against The Pirate Bay, several other torrent search and tracking sites have shut down to avoid becoming the target of legal lawsuits. Among them are: Nordicbits, Powerbits, Piratebits, MP3nerds, and Wolfbits. Nordicbits has a page here indicating the shutdown, while the others simply disappeared into thin air.

Google Torrent Search

In another protest against the court ruling against The Pirate Bay, a supporter used Google's Custom Search to provide a torrent search. This is simply another voice that says, "Is assisting users to find torrents any different from a search engine?"

Bezeq Intl Seeds Torrents Locally

Bezeq International, an Israeli Internet Service Provider, is finding ways to both satisfy customers' torrent needs and improve network performance while proving both aren't necessarily exclusive. Their approach is to seed torrents on their own network by modifying torrent files downloaded by subscribers, adding a tracker containing the seeds to it.

With the recent turn of events in the Pirate Bay case, this could become controversial.

Pirate Bay founders sentenced in copyright case

Earlier this month, in the case of The Pirate Bay versus Universal, MGM, Sony et al, the Stockholm court convicted Peter Sunde, Carl Lundstrom, Frederik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm Ward of acting as an accessory to breaching copyright laws.

The Pirate Bay founders are optimistic and have appealed the decision. In either case, I'd go grab all the torrents off The Pirate Bay while I still can.

Bury The DiggBar

If you've been using Digg for finding websites to visit or bookmarking, you've no doubt come across the DiggBar. It is an annoying bit that takes up screen space. Having to close the DiggBar each time is a pain.

Digg, bury the DiggBar. Make a browser toolbar instead.

Twitter Hands Over Registration Details of "Skype"

Twitter handed over the registration details of the user "Skype" to Skype Inc. It definitely raises privacy concerns, but what makes this extreme is that they do not notify the user when they do reveal private data.

W3C Geolocation API

W3C Geolocation API - Making Websites Location-aware

Tiobe Index For Programming Languages

The Tiobe Programming Community Index, indicative of a programming language's popularity, can be found here .

According to the index, Java, C, C++, PHP and BASIC are the top 5 languages, with Python, C# and JavaScript following closely behind. Over the last year, there's been a sharp decline in the popularity of BASIC and Perl, and a moderate decline in the popularity of Java. On the other hand, C, C++ and JavaScript have been gaining popularity.

You can also look at a long-term trend chart for the top 10 languages here.

Cross-Domain Policy Files

A Cross-domain policy file or crossdomain.xml is used by Adobe Flash in determining whether it is allowed to access resources from a domain other than that of the currently running Flash object.

The master cross domain policy file has to be located at the root of the server Eg. http://api.flickr.com/crossdomain.xml .

The root element of the crossdomain.xml file is the cross-domain-policy tag which can contain one of the following:

allow-access-from
The allow-access-from element allows other domains to access resources. Attributes used with this element are domain (to specify a domain name; wildcards are supported), to-ports (to specify a comma-separated list or hyphenated-range of ports), secure (set to false for an HTTPS policy file to be used for allowing an HTTP request).

site-control
The site-control element is valid only within the master policy file (policy file located at the domain root). It is used to determine if other policy files other than the master policy file are permitted. The permitted-cross-domain-policies attribute is used in this tag with a value of: none, master-only, by-content-type, by-ftp-filename, and all. Using none prevents the user of any cross domain policy files for this domain, master-only specifies that only the policy file located at the root is permitted, by-content-type indicates that any file served via HTTP or HTTPS with a content type of text/x-cross-domain-policy is permitted, by-ftp-filename indicates that any file with the name crossdomain.xml is permitted, and all indicates that any policy file on the domain is allowed.

allow-http-request-headers-from
The allow-http-request-headers-from element allows a request from another domain to include custom headers. Attributes used within this element are domain (to specify a domain name), headers (to specify list of comma-separated headers, an asterisk or a header with a wildcard suffix), and secure (set to false for an HTTPS policy file to be used for allowing an HTTP request).


The following is an example of a cross domain policy file:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE cross-domain-policy SYSTEM "http://www.macromedia.com/xml/dtds/cross-domain-policy.dtd">
<cross-domain-policy>
<allow-access-from domain="www.company.com" />
</cross-domain-policy>

The cross domain policy file should be served with the MIME type of text/*, application/xml, or application/xhtml+xml, but the preferred content type is text/x-cross-domain-policy.

HugeURL

I stumbled across a mock of TinyURL called HugeURL. They take any URL you can throw at them and they turn it into an obnoxiously long URL.

Just for giggles, check it out at http://www.hugeurl.com