To a lot of people, snobbery has negative connotations, but there are some places on the web that could use a bit more of it. The best example? YouTube comments. A lot of the commentary on YouTube videos lacks substance, proper grammar, and semblance of constructive criticism. That's where YouTube Comment Snob comes in.

YouTube Comment Snob is a Firefox extension that gets rid of a good majority of the spam and drivel by applying some simple grammatical rules. You can customize it to filter out comments by using your favorite combination of the following: too many spelling mistakes (using Firefox's spellchecker), too much capitalization, no capitalization, swearing, profanity or excessive punctuation (!!!???!). The only problem with YouTube Comment Snob is that it hasn't yet been applied to the whole Internet.

[via Daring Fireball]

While China has a history of blocking computer users' access to many sites on the world wide interwebs, many clever Chinese citizens have figured out that RSS feeds provided a way around the Chinese firewall. Until now.

Ars Technica reports that China has started blocking any URL that starts with "feeds," "rss," and "blog." That makes it pretty difficult to access the feeds for an awful lot of websites, including pretty much any site syndicated by FeedBurner.

It looks like some Chinese users are having success with online feed-readers like Newsgator. We'll see how long it takes before China bans Newsgator. In the meantime, there's always proxies and anonymous web browsers like Tor.

If you want to find out if your website is blocked in China, Website Pulse has a Great FireWall of China testing tool.

[via TechCrunch]

Your open Gmail account could be in severe jeopardy, thanks to a malicious script that initiates itself when a website is viewed,

The tables have turned from hacking your computer, to hacking your virtually stored information. Supposedly hackers are not seeing the benefits of attacking your protected and firewalled computer these days, and are much happier to go after hacking Web 2.0 API's. Such is the case in a recent exposure of a critical process that executes a filter looking for specific incoming emails, sending them to another email address for snooping and prying. The filter would be in place until the Gmail account owner deletes it from the Settings>Filter menu.

Gnucitizen broke the news on this, and it has been verified by a few sources. He is not planning on demonstrating this process, or releasing more details on findings until Google has fixed this concern. He is also urging that others do not expose anything until they have notified Google and a fix is implemented. But does say that the hacks are out in the open for anyone searching Yahoo or Google.

The Filter boasts quite a lot. Its tagline is "creates perfect playlists from your iTunes library," and its web site says it's "better than your shuffle button!" What The Filter is is a plugin for iTunes (Windows version only for now, Mac coming soon) that generates playlists when you select a few songs and click on the big black "F" button. Like many programs, The Filter claims to excel at building playlists based on your mood. I gave The Filter a try and found that it's actually not too shabby. I selected a few songs that I thought would go well together in a playlist and it filled out the rest of the playlist with songs that fit in pretty well. While not every one was one that I would have picked myself, none of them seemed out of place, and after all, The Filter touts its ability to help you rediscover music that you'd all but forgotten you had. Like Pandora and other services, The Filter learns from your listening habits and tweaks your playlist based on which tracks you skip and which ones you listen to all the way through. I've tried a number of products that claim to do what The Filter does, but most of them either didn't work very well or were far too complex. The Filter is the first one that really seems both smart enough and simple enough to really give a shot.

Some new features are rumored to be on their way into Google's Gmail web mail application.

Garett Rogers checked out the source, only to find that the code for them is present, but the variables are set to false.

The new features in question are:

Deleting all spam messages - no need to select>all, then delete.
Apply filter to - creating and applying filters to messages, helping to keep mail organized

There is no news as to the release date of these new features, but there have been rumored sightings of individuals who have been getting the "delete all spam" button.

Generally speaking I am leery of any software designed to "protect" people from "harmful" sites, but Scandoo I like. Scandoo is a search engine that tells you, or at least tries to tell you, whether each site in the results is safe (i.e. free from porn, fascism, or illegal content) or not. I like it because it doesn't hide those "bad" sites from you, it just puts an icon next to each result that says whether it's safe, has "bad" content, or if there's a web risk (e.g. spyware). I also like it because it lets you choose what kind of sites you want to be warned about. If you're cool with sites classified as Sex/Nudity but want to be warned about Fashion and Beauty sites, you can configure it that way. When you hover over one of the classification icons, a little box pops up to give you more information about the site's content and, if you disagree with its classification, let you offer your own opinion. Another nice touch is that Scandoo lets you choose whether you want results from Google, Yahoo!, MSN Search, or Ask.com. Of course, one sticking point that will always haunt this sort of service is that you're trusting someone else to set your standards. For example, Scandoo gives BMEzine.com a nice green checkmark (and files it under Fashion and Beauty), and while I'm a big fan of that site, I can easily see other users disagreeing.

Like Download Squad but sick of hearing about Vista? Or maybe those Time Wasters are really wasting too much of your time? Try Feed Rinse. It's a service that looks at your RSS feeds (OPML import included) and filters out posts based on keywords, author, tags, URLs, or even profanity. Feed Rinse scrubs the feeds and then republishes them so you can still read them in your feed reader of choice.

Unfortunately, Feed Rinse's free service is.. limited. You can only filter three feeds in the Free version and there's no profanity filter. The next step up is "Plus," which isn't even available yet but will cost $5 a month for 20 feeds, and Premium, which supports up to 300 feeds, will cost $8/mo. That pricing structure seems a little wacky to me, but it looks like a useful service so hopefully they'll find their niche.

[Via Lifehacker]