Filed under: Internet

The folks at BaseKit think that the process of website creation is due for an overhaul -- and boy do I agree! The time for writing code in an editor, creating artwork in another app and uploading it all bit-by-bit is OVER. The folks at BaseKit pose a good question: why don't we make websites online, in the browser?

There are some nascent attempts, like the cheap-and-cheerful approach of Google Sites, but nothing that comes close to the simple, graceful beauty of BaseKit. For a start, you can import Photoshop PSD files! I can't begin to describe the pains I've been through, as a web designer, trying to implement PSDs in valid HTML and CSS -- but now BaseKit can do it for me, and the code it generates works in all modern browsers. It takes a little getting used to -- you need to name one of your layers 'Header', for example -- but overall, the process is very quick and very smooth. Check out the video on their homepage, if you want to see the PSD import in action.

Even if you don't want to import PSDs, there's lots of other shiny bits to lure you in. The interface is beautiful, like a marriage of everything good about Web 2.0. There is dragging and dropping, resizing, AJAX and widgets up the yin yang -- forms, date pickers, star ratings, imported Flickr and Twitter feeds -- it's all there. If you want to see what's possible, check out their showcase. You'll also notice there's no Flash (but they're working on including it... damn).

If I haven't won you over yet, I've saved the best, beardy-pleasing morsel for last: it generates W3C-compliant code!

Right now you have to sign up for a beta key -- and there are certainly some beta bugs that need ironing out -- but I will try to get some keys to hand out in the next few days over on our Facebook page!

Of all the sites a major mobile ISP could block, Verizon has probably picked the worst. Verizon mobile customers have found themselves unable to access 4Chan's infamous prank-filled, NSFW image board, /b/, and the ISP won't say why. 4Chan's founder, Moot, has even been unable to get a straight answer about the block. However, it's been confirmed that this was an intentional move by Verizon. At this point, it's only affecting Verizon's mobile customers, so you should still be able to see 4Chan using your home Internet connection.

This seems to be an utterly dumb move on Verizon's part. First, it opens them up to accusations of censorship. Why ban one specific site? There might be a reason, but Verizon's not giving it. Granted, 4Chan is known for occasional child pornography threads, but it tends to do a good job of self-policing those and deleting the offending materials ASAP. If that's the reason, Verizon isn't saying so.

The second reason an ISP might not want to mess with 4Chan is because bad (and sometimes hilarious) things tend to happen to those who do. There's an entire section of the 4Chan Wikipedia entry dedicated to 4Chan's various "Internet attacks." They might not be "hackers on steroids," despite one laughable TV news report to the contrary, but they're very good at posting porn in places you really don't expect to find it. It'll be interesting to see if there's any retaliation against Verizon, or if the block is peaceably lifted.

Update: Verizon will reportedly be unblocking 4Chan soon, if it hasn't happened already.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Today is Safer Internet Day, an annual event coordinated by the folks at InSafe -- who are all about promoting responsible Internet use. We've covered a number of great tools in the past that have the same aim, so what better day to take another look at them?

Web Of Trust (WOT, Pictured)
WOT is a community-powered trust and ratings system. With nearly 26 million sites rated to date, it's one of the most popular safe browsing tools you can find. Their browser add-on is available for Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Google Chrome. Once installed, you'll start seeing WOT's color coded ratings rings next to links to let you know if they're safe.

I have WOT installed in my browsers, and I recommend it wholeheartedly.

In what must surely be a sign that schools and universities are under-funded, a network security dude at the University of Georgia has just been arrested for shaking down multiple file-downloading students.

Two weeks ago he approached a female student and said he could make the "situation go away in exchange for money" -- he was promising to keep the data private, rather than forward it to the university administrators. In this case, the student didn't have any money and went straight to a university official to report the nefarious network nerd. He was promptly arrested by the police -- job done! (If anyone's wondering, this is the best way to get out of blackmail situations... don't give in to their demands! Don't deal with terrorists! Never eat yellow snow!)

There's no hint of how much money the guy was trying to extract from the girl, nor any hint of whether he tried to obtain other forms of 'payment' instead. But still... maybe it's not the RIAA or MPAA that you should be most worried about, students!

[via CNET]

Boom! 178 million US Internet users watched online videos in December. That's 87% of the total potential audience -- very nearly total penetration. I wonder what percentage of Internet users write email -- less than 87%? Anyway, of those 33 billion videos, 40% (13 billion) of them were watched at YouTube. But guess who's next? Hulu -- 3%! You TV-horny Americans watched 1 billion videos on Hulu in just one month!

There's more though -- here's some breakdown: those 13 billion YouTube videos were watched by 136 million viewers, or 97 videos per user. By comparison, Hulu viewers only watched 23 videos each in December. It goes steeply downhill from there -- next are Yahoo and Fox, pulling only 9 video views per user.

If you were as surprised as I am about Hulu, get this: Hulu only has 44 million unique users, but still broadcasts twice as many videos as the next site.

I think Europe's ready for a similar TV-on-demand service... y'hear me, American media outlets?

(Can you tell that I'm trying to spice things up around here?)

We've actually been discussing how to 'sass-up' Firefox Friday Five. Interviews with Mozilla developers? Add-on creators? Perhaps we could even get a perspective from competitors -- how does Microsoft intend to combat Firefox? With Chrome and Firefox both being open source and effectively having a shared code base, can either one of them ever be dominant?

Anyway, another quiet week from Mozilla itself, but there's been plenty of news about Firefox -- so let's get going!

1. Firefox for Mobile is coming to Android, thank God

I think we all knew Firefox would come to Android eventually, we were just getting a little nervous -- what with the Nokia/Maemo version being released, and no news of any other version except a stillborn Windows Mobile alpha.

It's still early days for the Android version (it's just a full port of the desktop version at the moment), but one has to assume, with Android taking off and the Google Tablet possibly on its way, that Firefox for Android is now a priority for Mozilla.

If you hate the Facebook inbox as much as I do, this will come as welcome news; according to TechCrunch, Facebook will soon be launching a full webmail client.

Dubbed Project Titan it will be a full blown mail client similar to Gmail with full POP and IMAP support. According to Michael Arrington your address will be your current Vanity URL @facebook.com.

With 350 million active Facebook users automatically getting a new email address all other webmail services are about to get a monsterous new competitor.

Up until today I've been using a dark Firefox theme. It looked quite pretty, but eventually I got tired of not being able to read the black text on some of the dialogs (yes, I've tried tweaking userchrome.css -- multiple times).

So I've set out in search of a lighter theme which would still be nice and minimalistic. Operetta Advance seems to fit the bill perfectly. It's called "Advance" because the same developer also put out a version called just "Operetta," but I couldn't find what makes them different. Naturally, I went for Advance. That's marketing for you.

It's quite elegant, and manages to make even my cluttered Firefox seem a bit more unified. My only gripe with it so far is that the gripper right under the tab bar does nothing. Firefox doesn't have those cool expanding thumbnail-tabs Opera has, so I think it just shouldn't be there.

Operetta Advance is currently experimental, but I warmly recommend it.

Feel free to post your favorite themes below, especially if they're light and minimalistic.

Your world is about to be rocked.

If you're not a hardened, tinfoil hat-wearing the-apocalypse-is-nigh conspiracy theorist, you soon will be. Wired has just published a stunning article detailing a really scary report from computer forensic firm Mandiant. The story brings to light some disturbing truths about the always-connected, always-on world we live in.

As an Internet nerd, I actually found the details numbly humbling. It made me think about a silent war, a cold war that is warming the ground we walk and air we breath -- but has not yet bubbled forth to be joined in the field of war. Reading Wired's story and thinking about the depth and detail and concerted effort required to pull off such a hack scares me.

You should read the full article for complete details, but here's a quick breakdown of the attacks employed against targets such as Google, U.S. oil companies, defense contractors and counter-terrorism departments:

• A new form of attack is being leveraged by hackers, called Advanced Persistent Threats (APT) -- think of APT as a 'ticking bomb', an apparently-benign piece of software that can be turned on at any time. These APTs can avoid detection and remain dormant for months or years, only turning on when the 'coast is clear'. In this most recent case, an unpatched zero-day attack on Internet Explorer 6 was the entry point.
• These attacks are theft-oriented -- the sole purpose behind these APT attacks are to get at sensitive data: email, Word documents, Powerpoint presentations, spreadsheets, etc. Corporate secrets, counter-intelligence, you name it.

Yup, through the wonders of copyright law, the doppelgänger meme currently sweeping across Facebook is actually illegal and breaks the Facebook terms of service.

If you don't use Facebook (??), or you haven't logged in during the past week, the 'doppelganger' thing is all about replacing your profile photo with your celebrity look-alike. Harmless, you might think, but the Facebook TOS strictly forbids the uploading of copyrighted images and artwork that you don't have permission to use.

Speaking to CNET, a spokeswoman from Facebook said: "Users are responsible for the content they post, but as always, Facebook will respond to requests for removal that it receives from copyright holders. In this case, we have received no such requests." Curious -- publishers and media outlets are usually all too zealous to stamp down on copyright infringement.

The copyright lords gave, and the copyright lords hath taken away...

The chicken and the egg -- you can't have one without the other -- but which one comes first? The same dilemma plagues every industry, but none as much as the tech sector.

Build it and they will come -- but what if they don't come?! You've just wasted millions of dollars -- or billions, in the case of IPv6 infrastructure. But such is life! Someone has to break the ice. Someone has to be the penguin that jumps in first to be eaten by the killer whales -- and in this case, it looks like it's Google with its YouTube service.

YouTube is the third most popular website on the Internet -- and no doubt the largest bandwidth hog in the world -- so it's refreshing and more than a little shocking to see IPv6 enabled with nary a whisper from Google.

The only report we have so far is from a director at Hurricane Electric, an ISP that runs one of the largest IPv6 backbones in the world. Speaking to PC World he said that 30 times more IPv6 traffic is originating from YouTube than before.

But why the big furore? Why is this even news? Well, IPv4 is due to run out of available addresses between now and 2012. With China and India joining the world wide web and connectivity continuing to rise in the EU and US, there simply aren't enough IP addresses to go around. IPv6 will solve that -- and provide enough addresses for any galactic-wide networks we ultimately create -- but it involves a significant investment to get it off the ground.

Go Google!

For the last few days Amazon and Macmillan have been waging a tiny little war over the future of eBook pricing. You may have missed it, because unlike most wars, the stakes in this battle aren't all that visible. Digital book sales still make up a relatively small portion of the digital media world and pale in comparison to the growing markets for digital music and movie downloads. But as eBook readers including the Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and the upcoming iPad make it easier and easier to find, purchase, and read eBooks, sales are likely to pick up.

You'd think that would be a good thing for book publishers. But here's the thing: Amazon, one of the driving forces behind physical and digital book sales, has been refusing to charge more than $9.99 per eBook for new release titles. That price is significantly lower than the price of most new hardcover books. And that makes sense. There's no printing, binding, paper, or distribution cost involved. Sure, someone still needs to pay for the writing, editing, marketing, and other costs. But it's hard to make a case that it costs just as much to produce and distribute another copy of a digital book as it does a physical one.

But Macmillan, which is one of the 6 largest publishers in the US, is rather unhappy with the $9.99 pricing. The company wants to be able to charge as much as $14.99 for eBooks sold through Amazon. In protest, Amazon pulled all of Macmillan's titles from its store this weekend. And when I say all, I mean it. Not just the eBooks, but the paper copies as well.

Of course, that hurts the customers at least as much as it hurts the publisher. Nobody wants to login to an online bookstore and find that 1/6th of the titles from major publishers are suddenly gone -- especially since most readers probably have no idea who publishes the books from their favorite authors. They just know that suddenly the selection has become much more limited.

Today, Amazon admitted that it can't keep up this fight. Because Macmillan has a "monopoly over their own titles," if Amazon wants to be able to sell those titles, the company will have to allow the publisher to set its pricing. But Amazon management makes it clear that it strongly disagrees with Macmillan's proposed pricing.

Adobe has always been pretty miffed over the lack of Flash on the iPhone and iPod Touch. You can understand Apple's point of view though: Flash would remove their control over the user experience. It would also make the App Store irrelevant and the flow of software onto the Apple devices almost impossible to govern.

Couple the lack of iPhone support with the keynote presentation of the iPad, where Steve Jobs proudly displays the lack of Flash, and you can see why Adobe has just launched an anti-iPad smear campaign.

Not ones to tread lightly, or even scale up their assault, they've waded right in and played the porn card. As you can see, they've already removed the offensive part of the screenshot, but not before generating a lot of angry comments and even some commentary from Wired.

Adobe's poster ends with the slogan "Millions of websites use Flash. Get used to the blue legos." Maybe, as Jay said yesterday, Apple's customers don't want Flash. It performs poorly, it steals vital CPU cycles, it flattens your battery faster than an American stocking up at an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Hopefully this is the kick in the butt Adobe needs to make Flash a little more efficient and less impotence-inducing. Watching --and feeling! -- my 2.2GHz laptop sit at 100% CPU usage while viewing Flash videos is truly a sad sight to behold.

Competitive? Run a website? Curious to see how your favorite sites rank? I have just the thing.

WooRank is a new service that summarizes your entire website in one decidedly useful shot. Highlights include:

• Traffic estimation numbers using Google data, Alexa & Compete rankings
• An internal site SEO analysis with a Text/HTML ratio
• Off-site SEO with link counts from Delicious, Digg, Twitter & Wikipedia as well as a back link count total -- Nice
• It even does a Whois lookup and shows if the site is using compression

Good stuff. It summarizes all this using some behind the curtains wizardry to create a single score they call the woorank. Without knowing more about the algorithm it's hard to say if this number is meaningful but from their About page I would assume it's based heavily on search criteria Google finds relevant.

They appear to be adding features rapidly; in the last 24 hours a PDF feature appeared that will send the summary to an email address. The current services are free with unspecified premium features coming soon.

Happy Friday everyone!

I suppose it's to be expected, after a flurry of activity from the Mozilla HQ over the last few weeks, that things would calm down a little. There wasn't much Firefox news this week I'm afraid, but I've done my best to scrape together five fairly-interesting tidbits.

Let's start with a neat tip:

1. Overriding the add-on compatibility/version check

Most of you have probably updated to Firefox 3.6 in the past week -- except those of you that are hanging on to old add-ons that haven't had updated versions released!

Fortunately, most add-ons that work in 3.5 also work in 3.6 -- you just have to override the function that checks. You run the risk of having less stability, but in most cases you'll be fine. Follow these simple steps:

• Type about:config into your address bar
• Create a New Boolean Value by right-clicking in any empty space (New>Boolean)
• Type in extensions.checkCompatibility.3.6 (copy and paste it if necessary). Click OK.
• Select false on the next dialog box. Click OK.

Voila!