Lillesvin Networks

First of all when I boot, I get an message telling me that “No Updatable Devices Found”. I guess it happened after a system update, where the firmware for the device was to be updated, accurding to the Software Update program. I don’t use the drive that often, and I wouldn’t know if it did update it or not anyway. But this almost meaning less message annoys me, since it kind of shouts to my facethat the Playmoile OS doesn’t work as “Boom” as it says in the glitter adds.

While the first problem properly is a minor issue easy to solve, did I know how. This one is really odd. It concerns Firefox (Ff) and the OS X window manager, and is here parted in two issues. First; the Ff window reaches into top menu bar area. Either on top or underneath. In the picture it’s underneath. It was dragged into that area, but afterwards I can’t drag or click the bits of the Ff window that is in the menu bar area. Say it was on top and in a similar position as in this picture, then clicking the green radio-button to max the Ff window would instead unfold the Edit menu.

The other odd part is that Ff occupies the dashboard area. So when I enter the dashboard, it’s like Ff didn’t care and stay on top. Both of these two odd issues don’t happen all the time, I have to add, which makes it even more odd.

In a recent article on Slashdot is given yet another reason — actually two reasons — to not use MSN (not even just the Microsoft client, but the entire protocol). Apparently Microsoft is aware that malicious URLs can be sent through MSN, so they figured they’d better block some of them. Actually, they’re blocking the sub-strings, which means that .scr will catch not only http://example.com/file.scr but also http://example.com/my.screenshot.png and everything else containing the string .scr. The blocking is done server-side, so it doesn’t matter if you use the official Microsoft MSN client or Pidgin (The IM Client Formerly Known as Gaim), Adium or whatever’s available out there.

Now, what’s really retarded is that each and every TinyURL still gets through just fine (but probably not for long now) and now Microsoft has to play catch-up to maintain that list of blocked sub-strings. This is really, really stupid, because the poor end-user will never know why their link to http://cutesie.example.com/pics.php isn’t sent — just that it’s not. And most people will probably never see the list and know which words they can’t use, hence confusion. Besides, the fact that Microsoft choose to “solve” problems in this way instead of fixing the vulnerabilities in their software, just makes me wonder how common this practice is to them and how many other problems they’ve “fixed” in a similar manner.