Devious domain typo hijacking
I just tried to visit Facebook but typed the URL wrong and typed “faceobook.com” (note the extra ‘o’). Here’s where I ended up: Devious, eh? Needless to say, I did not participate in the “anonymous survey.”
Category Archives: Computers
Comics aggregator now supports short links
For those of you who use my comics aggregator, there’s now a “get short link” button at the bottom you can use to get a Bitly link for the comics page you’re currently viewing. So you can build up exactly the configuration you want in terms of which comics you want to see, and then… Read More »
The wrong way to be a good samaritan
You’ve probably heard by now (the party line from Gawker, an a much more comprehensive analysis from Forbes) that a huge database of Gawker Media usernames and (poorly) encrypted passwords was recently stolen, and that the thieves published the stolen data for anyone in the world to download, and that the thieves managed to crack… Read More »
National Grid gets 66.666% confused with 99.999%
You’ve probably heard the expression “five nine reliability,” which is shorthand for saying that a product, Web site, service, application, or whatever is fully functional 99.999% of the time, the equivalent of less than six minutes of downtime per year. Most Web sites don’t need to achieve that level of reliability. However, when you’re in… Read More »
Now it’s National Grid’s turn to be incapable of running a Web site
Apparently it’s “big companies that can’t keep their Web sites up in the middle of the day” week. Yesterday, Citizens Bank online banking was down for over two hours. Today, National Grid’s main US Web site and online account management site are both down:
“Not Invented Here” added to comics aggregator
I’ve added Not Invented Here to my comics aggregator. Enjoy!
Citizens Bank FAIL
At 9:45am on a weekday:
GoComics fixed in comics aggregator
For those of you who use my comics aggregator, please note that the charming folks at GoComics.com mucked with their site again, possibly to make aggregators like mine more difficult to implement (they want your eyeballs and your clicks on their ads!), and I’ve just fixed the aggregator to compensate for their changes, so their… Read More »
Terrible UI Design of the Day
The Citizens Bank Web site recently added a new feature: bill payees can be put into groups. When you first visit the “Add/Manage Groups” page, it looks like this: The first stupid UI decision should be obvious after a moment’s thought. Once you’ve set up your groups, you will rarely if ever create new ones,… Read More »
When “Constant Contact” Isn’t
Yesterday, my wife forwarded to me an email message she had received from our children’s school to ask me a question about it. I should have received the same message, but I hadn’t. A little research in the mail server logs revealed that she has received seven messages from the school in the past three… Read More »