For more info about fire safety in Victoria visit the Victoria Online fire safety page.

The point of this post however is the interesting social sidebar (pictured left) which now appears on some of the articles on the fairfax newspaper articles, such as this one. It tells you how many people are currently viewing the article, which other articles these people have read, and allows you to post a comment about the page on twitter. It’s creating a unique ascii string for people to include in their twitter post which ties it back to the relevant article. For the travel article I linked above the string is #fd-drcd, where I presume the fd is for fairfax digital.

I’m curious to know whether they are getting any feedback on the articles via this system (although the posts I checked didn’t have any), and also why it only appears on some articles and not all of them. If anybody has any additional info I’d be keen to hear it.

Google have updated their webmaster interface since the last chart but you can see there has been a huge improvement in response time since I moved the server. Some of the other charts show that the rate of URLs fetched per day has also improved.

The move has gone very smoothly, largely due to Wordpress having a simple interface for exporting the DB from the old server and uploading it to the new one. Hooray for Wordpress!

“You won $123,000 USD,send your email address by sms text message to(+856207349489)so we shall send you an email with more information on how to claim your money”

Obviously this is some sort of scam, and a quick web search reveals quite a few people have received exactly the same message. Usually these sort of scams are sent via email because it cost the sender practically nothing and is very difficult to trace back to the individual responsible. SMS on the other hand almost always costs has a financial cost to the sender and is far easier to trace. The sender in this case has likely hacked or socially engineered they way into another party’s phone account in order to send out these messages. There is probably a fairly small window of time in which you could reply to the message before the SMS service is cut off by the telco who provides it.

I don’t think we’ll be seeing much SMS spam in the future.

Edit: The Age have published an article on this type of activity which they are calling Smishing (SMS phishing).

I’m still in the process of clearing out the link rot but I have cut down the number of broken links to around half as many as when I started.

That’s all for now.

The article I am linking to (well, until it link-rots away) actually raises some of the advantages the proposed NBN could bring to the country. I think once the network is built people will come up with all sorts of amazing high-bandwidth applications to use on it. Many of these will reduce the need to travel, bringing convenience and environmental benefits for most of us, but could be of huge importance for people with mobility challenges.

Recently the print media have been complaining that Google is stealing their content (one example if many such articles), however they are never able to cite any specific examples of this behavior by Google. Personally I think they are just scared and confused about new technologies like RSS and Google News. It seems to me the print media are missing a huge opportunity to place their archives online and collect advertising revenue. Some of these newspapers have archives that go back hundreds of years. Imagine how much of a valuable resources these would be to people conducting research of our recent history? This open approach to use of the newspaper archives would certainly earn the publishers more revenue than they get from serving up 404 errors.

Recently my provider had an outage that dragged on for well over 24 hours and resulted in me churning my DSL service to a new ISP. It took a while to update the routing following the move so this site was down for the better part of a week. I think it is finally time to move this site over to dedicated hosting where it is less prone to these sorts of problems.

I have some issues with most my current hosting provider not allowing me to have SRV records in my zonefile (needed for jabberd) but moving the web side of things over shouldn’t be much of an issue. I’m also going to take the opportunity to go back through the old posts and clean out ones with link rot.

Here are my current response time stats from the Google webmaster console:

Let’s see how they look after the move.

Looks like I have accidentally fallen into an annual update schedule. It might be time to tidy up some of the old content and return to more frequent updates.

More info in the ICANN IPv6 announcement.