You should update to NoScript 1.9.2.6

Quick recap:

1. NoScript is a Firefox extension. Its author makes money from ads on his webpages (from what he says, pretty much his entire income depends on those adsUPDATE: from his bio: "I'm currently teaching Web Programming at the University of Palermo"... yet another blow to his credibility UPDATE: the bio was outdated).
2. AdBlock Plus is a Firefox extension that stops ads. It also allows users to subscribe to third-party lists of sites to block.
3. The maintainer of one of those services, "EasyList", took a very zealous approach and targeted NoScript.net (and other sites from the same author) because he found that it implemented some basic workarounds to avoid AdBlock Plus.
4. Escalation ensued, and after a series of tit-for-tat eventually the NoScript developer went too far. NoScript, when installed in Firefox, would now check if AdBlock Plus was installed, and if so, force it to whitelist its sites... basically "hacking" ABP client-side.
5. The ABP developer (who up to now was not involved who apparently instigated the whole thing) got angry, and denounced the behaviour in various forums, including Slashdot.
6. The NoScript author backtracked, removed the offending code in the latest update (NoScript 1.9.2.6) and apologized

Now, I'm sympathetic to the NoScript author's circumstances -- he has a family to feed, he gives his work away for free, and NoScript really is a piece of extremely useful and complex code that most Firefox users enjoy (including me). It seems fair that he should get some compensation for his effort.

However, clearly NoScript can be (and is) used as an ad-blocker, and the developer even runs AdBlock himself, but then he gets all worked up when these technologies are used against his own sites. There is a bit of hypocrisy there.

In any case, client-side modification of other people's extensions is just unacceptable, no matter how "transparent" it is. There is a line, and the NS author crossed it. Kudos to him for the eventual backtracking, but he shouldn't have put himself in that position in the first place. NoScript is a security-related extension, and in the security world trust is precious currency. His reputation is now tarnished, and it will take time for people to forget.

All this, someone pointed out, highlights the need for a mechanism to reward extension authors. I agree. Mozilla could easily implement a micropayment system on addons.mozilla.org (like the iPhone AppStore), or build some sort of subscription infrastructure in FF (so that people can install extensions, then decide if they are worth paying). My guess is that the world of extension development would literally explode, and that would make FF even more attractive.

zipfile quirk

In Python 2.6.0, a bug in the zipfile module makes the newly-acquired extractall() method basically useless. The function is supposed to extract all members of a zipfile, "no questions asked", like Windows would do with a right-click "Extract All..."; unfortunately, the original implementation makes it fail when the zipfile contains subdirectories. The behaviour was corrected in one of the 2.6.x maintenance releases (and 3.0.x, and 2.7), but if you have the misfortune to be stuck with 2.6.0, here's the banal workaround:

zf = zipfile.ZipFile(zpath)
zlist = zf.namelist()
for filename in zlist:
 if filename.endswith("/"):
  destpath = os.path.join(path_to_extract,filename[:-1])
  if not os.path.exists(destpath): os.makedirs(destpath)
 else:
  zf.extract(filename,path_to_extract)

Braindead policies of Libero.it

I have had a @libero.it email address for more than 10 years. I stopped using it regularly when they disabled POP/IMAP for people connecting through other providers, but still logged in occasionally every once in a while.

Today I went there and my saved emails were all gone. Apparently I didn't log on for three months (which may or may not be), and this "authorized" them to go and delete all I had left there for 10 years.

This policy is braindead and guaranteed to piss off people. Storage is cheap; if they really wanted to "temporarily disable the account" (in their words), they could have simply bounced incoming mail, and compressed the few megabytes (!) of data, ready to be restored the first time I logged in again.

This act of destruction was unnecessary, and carries the risk of being sued by angry people. This is the sort of decisions that made Libero.it (once at the forefront of internet-adoption waves in Italy) a fringe player; while Google and others ate their lunch, they were all busy penny-pinching, pissing off old-time users faster than they were making (very few) new customers.

On Toggl

I started tracking my activities using Toggl. The concept is very simple: the site gives you a timer that you can "toggle" to signal when you are starting a certain task. You define different tasks and group them into projects, and you can mark "billable" hours as such (clearly a feature for consultants / freelancers). It features reports (obviously) and other workgroup-related options, a dotNet-based offline tracker, and premium options for paid subscribers.

The first day I used it, it was enlightening: it turns out that I only spent about 3 hours doing actual "core" work. Most of the remaining time was wasted being sidetracked by other internal projects, plus random chitchat. Ok, it was the day Oracle bought Sun, and we were pretty psyched about it (especially me, as the first thought I had when news emerged about the botched IBM/SUN deal was "well, [Oracle] would be a much better fit than IBM; db appliances would be very sexy, and most of [Oracle]'s stack is Java-based already", and the others were all "yeah, keep dreaming!"... then Larry vindicated me), I expect the numbers to get better. If they don't, it means my routine needs improving and I'll work on that, but I feel that without Toggl I probably wouldn't have the sort of hindsight that gives a sense of achieving, which is necessary to maintain continuous efforts.

All in all, Toggl feels cool. Other project-management sites should take note.

Phorm/Webwise must go down

Phorm / Webwise is a disgusting ex-spyware maker now intent in profiteering from your browsing habits without your consent, as described by this exhaustive explanation of the Phorm system and why it is bad for everyone. They will basically spy on all your network request and then inject their own advertising on somebody else's pages. This is bad for users (spied on without consent, with very low guarantees of anonymity), and extremely bad for any website holder (whose content is modified and exploited, again without consent, and probably infringing copyright laws).

Yesterday the European Union, usually so despised by British citizens, formally accused Britain of infringing the EU directive on data protection by implementing Phorm. Today, Amazon opted out of the system, as previously did Google, Facebook and many others. I personally opted out a few minutes ago, by sending an email to website-exclusion@phorm.com listing all my domains.

For the sake of the net, Phorm/Webwise MUST fail. If the system goes live, I will ask my ISP whether my traffic will go through BT, and if so, I will switch to a provider who can guarantee they will NOT take part in the system (i.e. not Virgin and not TalkTalk).