There are many reasons that you may wish to put a third-party javascript reference on your website. Serving ads, making use of tracking and analytics tools such as Google Analytics, and many other features may want to use a remotely referenced third-party javascript. The big issue here is trust. By putting a remotely referenced javascript on your pages you are essentially handing some control of your visitors’ browsers’ over to this third-party. Maliciously crafted javascript can be used to install software, steal form submission data, rewrite elements of pages, send users to fake phishing sites instead of the real site, crash browsers, popup ads or inappropriate content, and much more. The range of possible attacks using javascript is a long discussion in and of itself, and I won’t go into it here. (Google around or ask me if you want more information on this area of things.)

Read about it after the fold....

(more...)

When I launched 10minutemail.com, tons of forum admins decried the idea. They screamed that it would let spammers on to their forums, and that they wouldn't sell e-mail lists to spammers, etc...

A month goes by, and let's see what we have. My server used to get around 200-300 e-mail a day. In the past week it averaged 20,000-30,000 e-mail a day. Virtually all of those were to old (expired) 10minutemail.com accounts. Presumably virtually all spam. 30,000 a day!?

This proves that the average person simply CAN'T trust a random site or forum with their real e-mail address. Are there some forums/sites that are trustworthy? Sure! Does the average net user have any ability to tell with certainty if a given site or forum will sell their e-mail address or spam them direction? Unfortunately not.

For me at least, this reiterates the usefulness of the service.

In order to save my server from the crushing spam, I've swapped out the e-mail domain to fificorp.com, and will continue to swap out the e-mail domain on a regular basis. This will serve two purposes. One, it will save my server from dying under the spam. Two, it will keep admins who block registrations by domain on their toes at least once a month.

Note: Fifi is my pet iguana.

It's filtered down a few pages off the front, but hey, front page of digg.com! Wow! Totally grassroots in about 4 hours. Now it's on all kinds of little blogs and tech forums and other odd places. Over 100k hits in the last 18 hours. It performs very well. There's very little cpu hit at all. Go SEAM!

Anyhow, I'm proud. Check it out and let me know what you think!

Digg.com:
"A disposible email service...You can read them, click on links, and even reply to them. The e-mail address will expire after 10 minutes."

read more | digg story

Let's start with SMTP. Simple Mail Transport Protocol. This is how e-mail gets sent. This is how e-mail makes it from you, to your recipient. When you check your e-mail, you use POP or IMAP to get the e-mail from the server. But when you're sending e-mail, you use SMTP. SMTP is how your mail client communicates with your mail server, and then how your mail server communicates with other mail servers to deliver your precious e-mail to it's destination.

SMTP has been around since 1982 and is used everywhere. It works, but it's lacking in many ways, most of which are out of scope for this posting.

Basically the way it works is:

(more...)

So, if you're using Seam, you usually have xhtml files which represent the pages, and then the Seam servlet takes care of rendering them. When I setup my latest project, I changed the web.xml to switch from using page.seam to page.html, to mask the back-end technology. When I did this, I also deleted the seemly unnecessary index.html that was sitting in my view directory. I then added this into my web.xml, just to be on the safe side:

	<welcome-file-list>
		<welcome-file>index.html</welcome-file>
	</welcome-file-list>

(more...)