Most stuff I see about stopping image thieves has to do with stopping hotlinking. But what about stopping people from merely copying the image or making it harder for them to find a URL to hotlink to?

This amazingly simple trick won't stop the dedicated thief, but makes it more work for those who know how to get around it and stymies those who don't. It's just HTML, no JavaScript, mod_rewrite, or plugins required.

PC World reported that Opera's mobile browser (Opera Mini) captured more market share than Apple's Safari browser for Mac last month. But when you look at the numbers and where they come from... It's not so impressive.

After posting in my Slashdot journal about how I'd been screwed out of $99 with an auto-renewing subscription and fine print, one commenter suggested I should dispute the charge with PayPal. Yeah, right.

Last year, after PayPal refused to refund the payment for a product that was falsely advertised and illegally sold, refusing to review evidence of my claim and ruling solely on whether or not I received the product, I realized PayPal is a thief's best Pal.

Seems that EULA's aren't the only places companies try to screw you. A big source of consumer losses are sites that autorenew subscriptions. They get you signed up and then a month or a year later, after you've forgotten about them, the charge shows up on your credit card or PayPal account. This isn't just porn sites, but sites that seem otherwise legitimate. Some understand that the fight over the refund and the angry ex-customer aren't worth the hassle and will process the cancellation of your subscription and a refund if you're quick enough about it. Others obstinately refuse and even lie about being unable to refund your money.

But even finding out a few vendors to avoid doesn't solve the problem. What's the best way to deal with autorenewing subscriptions so you remember to cancel in time?

Being none too enamored with Spotlight for OS X, I decided to give the newly released Google Desktop for Mac a try for searching through my hundreds of thousands of files (clipart, music, word processing, e-mails, etc.). I was none too impressed. While it does have some nice features, some bugs and idiosyncracies make it more of a toy than a tool, especially if you use Thunderbird for mail.

I got a MySpace friend request this morning. When I clicked over to the person's page, I found that clicking just about anywhere on it sent me to a porn site. Looking at the source, I found that this was accomplished through a simple piece of CSS. Wondering how effective it was, I tried it on my Akismet-protected blog and another and was able to hijack the pages. Seems that anywhere that you allow people to put HTML tags in a comment, unless you're filtering for this, they may be able to hijack the page where the comment is displayed.

Energy policy is a big thing for me in the 2008 election. So I went and looked at the web sites of four Democratic frontrunners and four Republican frontrunners to see what their issue statements were on the topic. Of the 8, only 3 laid out their plans in detail, 2 merely paid lip service with appropriate buzz words but no real details on how to get from here to there, and 3 had no energy issue statement at all.

After appearing in a Slashdot story, the word "Zonkdogfology" started getting picked up and used. Then someone submitted it to Wikipedia. But Wikipedia has slated its entry for deletion because it is made up, doesn't really have an authoritative definition, and "there are no reliable sources". So I'm pleading with the Slashdot community. Help authoritatively define "Zonkdogfology". Help this Pinnocchio of words become a real boy.

Fox's latest quiz show, "Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?", brings back to the fore an old question. Is knowledge a measure of intelligence?

I don't believe it is. While knowledge may aid intelligence, what trivia you remember from grade school is not a measure of how smart you are.

Yahoo has picked up the page referenced in my last journal post (Googlebot and Document.write()). While the two HTML words are searchable, to probably no one's surprise, the four JavaScripted words are not.

On a fun side note, it looks like "zonkdogfology" may be trying to grow into a meme. Some people have found it entertaining enough to blog about the word itself. My fellow Seattle resident, Jerry Whiting, has a page about zonkdogfology, in which he equates it to a GooglePig. You'll have to visit his page to find out what a Google Pig is.

With JavaScript/AJAX being used to place dynamic content in pages, I was wondering how Google indexed web page content that was placed in a page using the JavaScript "document.write" method.

I created a page with six unique words in it. Two were in the plain HTML. Two were in a script within the page document. Two were in a script that was externally sourced from a different server. The page appeared in the Google index late last night and I just wrote up the results.

Every once in a while, I go hunting for odd domains that are still available. For example, if you believe that junk e-mail is caused by the spirits of dead aliens, you might want to register spamintology.com. It's available (or was when I wrote this) and it's one of 25 I found while wasting some time today.

Just blogged about how a friend of mine not only got content taken off YouTube, but had his YouTube account completely shut down because of three different completely invalid DMCA complaints from three different complaining corporations. Not only did he get nailed by a bogus Viacom complaint, he got nailed with bogus Comedy Central and Universal Music Publishing group complaints. And after watching the "infringing" video podcasts, the only potential infringement I can find is that in one they say "Manic Monday" (the title of a Bangles song, who happen to be Sony artists, not Universal).

Sheesh.

I recently discovered that The New York Daily News sports columnist, the Mighty Quinn, used one of my online humor columns from 1996 ("Dating Don'ts") as his February 13th, 2007 column, crediting it to some bartender in New Jersey. I didn't register it way back when, so six-figure statutory damages are out, but I can prove it's mine and that it's carried a copyright notice since I first published it, so I am entitled to something.

What would a reasonable something be?

So, the moment I heard Microsoft's YouTube killer, Soapbox had opened to the public, I immediately had to try Soapbox and see how it compared.

I ran tests of Soapbox vs. YouTube and Soapbox vs. Google Video. All in all, Soapbox seemed to have better video quality and a better user interface than GV or YT. Surprising, but true, Microsoft may have gotten something right this time.