I’ve made a quick note before about Dozier law firm. What I thought to be just some ridiculous claim by some random attention-seeker seems to be far worse. tdaxp reports on the adventures of this colourful bunch of morons regularly, so I won’t reiterate here all of that. But in terms of the complete and utter lack of sense their ‘view source’ claim is, we have a quick and dirty ‘source mirror‘ script on Freesome, showing just how easy it is to legally circumvent. To this, I would add the following short points:

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The government is running a campaign of fear. From the low level of job security and financial dependence to the higher ground of terrorism, every day the media reminds us of all the reasons for which we are so eagerly throwing away our freedoms.

But I must confess that I, as well, employ a similar tactic. Without necessarily adding myself to their ranks, I feel that all revolutionaries do. ‘We’ remind you of what you may be giving up in the long run, in the hope that the fear it triggers is of persuative enough to generate a reaction. Nobody’s to say either side is right. But as I have said before, it is a matter of balance. Let yourself pulled a bit to either side. Certainly you are able to see danger for yourself - and think which arguments make more sense. But it is easy to miss the consequences of some actions - or, worse, to downplay them. Comfort is better than struggle, but the bread and the circus will run out eventually.

I’m sorry to sometimes use ‘their’ methods. But I, too, am afraid.

Leak or just a very well hidden feature? Well, after poking around with one of my GMail accounts on my iPhone last night, I noticed in the morning it seemed to be behaving as IMAP would. Last I checked - about a month ago - GMail did not support IMAP. But a quick search got me to this page.

I will try these settings on some more clients once I get home and see if they work as advertised. Finally, GMail over IMAP will rule the world of e-mail once and for all :)¹

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1. If only they were not keeping backups of our mails [↩]

This is more of a “what-if” post, because the technology is not yet fully available. ooVoo is a video conferencing platform. It boasts the usual multi-person chats, video mail etc and advertises a way to dynamically adjust video quality depending on network congestion. It would be interesting to test and play around with, but unfortunately, a Mac client is still in the works. Considering the blog hasn’t been updated in ages and the Windows client was out sometime in July, one has to wonder if anything is still happening behind the scenes or not. For now, this goes into the vapourware bin.

If that first item is something Yahoo considers Tech News, no wonder so many people are still technology-illiterate nowadays. Don’t even get me started on the hacker vs. cracker debacle, then.

A recent acquisition of mine was an ADC Student Membership. For US$99 a year you get things shipped to your door¹, free OS updates and a one-time massive hardware discount. I mean massive. The kind that makes all other discounts pale by comparison. Over $500 for a fully-loaded Pro device, for example.

The membership price is sufficient to cover the price of Mac OS X Leopard, however, so everything else is just a very, very sweet bonus on top of that. Can’t wait for my copy to ship, sometime not soon enough.

Thanks to Monospaced for the info.

1. Developer Kit updates mostly [↩]

The iPhone SDK is a clever ploy. We’ve been crying and wanting one for all this time, and now Steve finally gave it to us. And we must all rejoice, though a few caveats are worth remembering.
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A few of the new and old, coming right up:

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It seems today’s the day: Microsoft in Richmond, B.C. opened up with somewhere around 200 employees. They moved fast and they’ll still be growing, seeing as how only about a quarter of the space is available for use. Since it was originally touted as an R&D centre, I’m very curious to see what they’ll be coming up with.

For the rest of us in the free world, we’re waiting on Apple and/or Google to come to Downtown Vancouver and open up shop. Then, once a month, I suggest paintball wars between the various companies. I see unholy alliances forming every time :)

There seems to be a new trend going around on the greedier of websites out there to block Firefox users based on the fact that many of them could be running AdBlock and cutting down the revenue stream of said websites’ masters. Ignoring the rather obvious matter that someone using AdBlock would not, were they forced or unable to use it, click said ads, it seems more of a ploy to grab clicks through deceit or, quite possibly, prevent users of decent browsers see how crappy some people have coded their websites - so as to work only in IE, preferably with the most arcane of browser extensions available.

Well, if you think enough is enough, here’s a couple of quick tips on how to go around some of these blocks while still maintaining an ad-free browsing experience¹.

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1. Note that I am not going to engage in any kind of debate on whether blocking ads does, really, impact negatively those websites that depend on them [↩]