The place where I work as a contractor has recently migrated to policy based web filter service from Blue Coat. After the migration the filters have started filtering legitimate community websites and some weblogs. Most notable is the current hot community website Orkut. I have been a very recent user of Orkut and liked its concept a lot and was using it a lot from home. But sometimes I have to access it from my office as well. Surprising is that Blue coat is categorising Orkut as "Adult/Mature Content". I am subscribed to various communities like my school, college, geeks, mathematics, puzzles etc. Granted that many of the communities may be mature, but it is not appropriate to do a blanket categorisation of a website as such.

There may be other annoyances with this as well which will deny people working here access to legitimate sites like travel or something. I remember it happening once. If the service is going to create additional work and pain to users, then I am not sure if it is going to be very popular. Although, Orkut is not strictly related to my work, I just check up on there while taking a small break from work. Instead of going out for a smoke (which I don't) or coffee, I try to surf the net.

I would rather want to see a filtering service which would rate pages rather than websites. Similar to what Google does for search. It indexes individual pages and not entire website ensuring that the visitors get the most relevant results for their search query. Similarly a filtering service should read through the page and block a particular page if it contains inappropriate content based on meta-tags on that page.

Just to give an example: We all know and have experienced our share of spamming on IM. There are some people who would message you and want to do some cyber fun with you. They will give a link to their Yahoo! profile (I only use Yahoo IM) and it will contain their explicit pictures. Yahoo! asks you to click a button which confirms that you are over legal age before allowing you to see the page and the page itself is tagged to be for people over 18 years of age. I am still able to view that page containing explicit picture, because it was on Yahoo. What if the filtering service blocked access to entire Yahoo because of these pages. I am sure the service provider will have plenty of irate customers.

That in my opinion should change and access should be granted or denied based on the content on page and not the site.

I was never a fan of AOL. No reason. But I never liked that company. I just happened to download and install its internet browser. Just like that. And I was pleasantly surprised. It has some great features and experience. Firstly it is not radically different or built from scratch like Mozilla based browsers. It based on Microsoft Internet Explorer. More likely it is a skin (with a lot of features) on the plain vanilla IE.

It has tabbed browsing in-built in it, it has some cool skins to go with it, though I felt the default look is the best. It uses the same settings as that of IE so there is one less thing to worry about. Additionally it comes with the AOL spy ware and virus scanner which scans your computer as you start the browser and also does it periodically for free. It also has the search window in the tool bar which it defaults (naturally) to AOL search (which incidentally is powered by Google.

One of the coolest feature included, according to me, is the "Power Browsing". I initially thought of describing each and every menu item there, but I figured it would be more fun to explore it on your own. Go ahead and do it.

One important addition that I think is a first among web browsers is the "Security" menu item. It lets you configure the security and run a spy ware scan among other things. I think Mozilla and Microsoft alike can take a leaf out of this book and add it to their browsers.

The rest are just usual but interestingly placed tools like Favourites, History, Links, Feeds etc.

The only annoyance I found in this is that it defaults to AOL home page as the browser home page in addition to your IE home page which it opens in a new tab. I could get rid of the IE home page, but I was not able to get rid of the AOL home page, yet. If I can get rid of that, it would be great.

Even with that small annoyance, I find AOL Explorer browser a great browser. With such a great browser, who needs IE 7.0!

In one my previous posts, I had pointed out that blue coat is blocking legitimate websites like Orkut and classified it as Adult/Mature content. Well yes, mostly the members of the website are adult. But that does not mean the website should be classified as Adult/Mature content. Jokes apart, as I had noted earlier also that there are certain categories / communities which are adult / mature in nature, but then again Orkut has specifically mentioned in its acceptable use policies that there should be no profanity, nudity and otherwise offensive or inappropriate content. I believe a policy statement by the website owners should be a good way to determine the nature of the website.

Having said that, if Orkut has to be classified as adult / mature content, then I am sure most of the websites like Yahoo!, Google would have to be classified likewise as they contain explicit adult content groups with nudity, erotic, dirty language and is explicitly mentioned as that it contains adult content and the visitor has to be over the age of 18 to visit. If that is not adult / mature content, then I am not sure I understand fully what it means. And the irony of it all is, I can visit those pages, groups very easily with the same Blue Coat web filtering service.

I had contacted Blue Coat support with this issue and I got a reply back essentially acknowledging that their service is blocking the website and implied meaning (which I understood) was that it was incorrect. The actual content is below:

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Hi Mukul,

I have tested site in question (www.orkut.com) and does seem to be blocked as ‘Adult/Mature Content; Newsgroups’

ProxySG42#(config content-filter)test-url www.orkut.com

Testing URL 'www.orkut.com/'

categories: Adult/Mature Content; Newsgroups

Please visit our site review site to submit re-categroization for URL / URLs

http://sitereview.bluecoat.com/sitereview.jsp

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I had submitted multiple site review requests to Blue Coat to no avail and now when I tried to do it again, the website informs me that it has been submitted multiple times and they feel that it is correct. Essentially meaning that they won't change it. The actual message is:

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The page you want reviewed is http://www.orkut.com/   (Check another site)
This page is currently categorized as Adult/Mature Content, and Social Networking

This web page has already been submitted many times, and has been verified as rated correctly.

NOTE: Blue Coat manages the web site ratings system used by many different software and hardware vendors. Blue Coat does not control whether a web page is "Blocked" or "Allowed" — your Internet Use Policy controls this. For more information on how to change your Internet Use Policy, click here

===============================================================================

I was very disappointing to get a response like this from Blue Coat. Such episodes make me a little nervous about the company and I don't think I would recommend Blue Coat to any of my clients if this persists.

Although this post does not really fit into any categories, I could not help myself but to write about it. I have worked for Phiilps for four years. In fact Philips was my first employer and it holds a special place in my heart. True to that, I generally make it a point to buy Philips products whenever I can and it makes sense. So we bought a Philips 27" TV last year and within 15 days, POOF!!! It blew up. I don't know what happened, but it just stopped working. I took it back to the store and replaced it with, well another Philips TV.

It was working well till now. I guess it was waiting till the labour warranty got over. As soon as it sensed that 6 months are over, it just died again one night. I called Philips service and they directed me to an Authorised service center. They charged $59 for a house call and told me that they will give labour estimate sometime later. I was scared and I called Philips arguing that since my TV had gone bad twice in 6 months, they ought to waive the labour charges as well. Graciously they agreed.

But it has been 3 weeks since my TV is out and there is no outlook as to when it will be repaired and returned to me. I am following up regularly. After so much of follow-up and waiting, I decided to call and ask for a replacement. I was not prepared for the kind of treatment I got and nothing could have prepared me for that. Without going in to specifics, I was told to wait indefinitely till the TV is repaired or the service center declared it irreparable after which Philips will decide what to do. I tried to argue that they cannot go on researching my problem forever on my time (The service center has not yet found the fault) when I am ending up paying the cable bill for nothing. In effect I was told that I was a sucker to buy Philips product and I am stuck with me. We thought of forgetting about the TV and buying a new one. But shelling out another $200 is something I cannot afford at my situation.

I wrote a letter (without keeping any hopes of any response) to CEO of Philips Electronics USA. That was two days back. I have not even got an acknowledgement of the email. The email I wrote is as below:

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Dear Mr. Zeven,

I regret intruding in your mailbox for such reason, but I had a totally harrowing experience with one of your customer service centers today while following up and requesting support on my outstanding repair request for my TV.

Brief background: My TV broke down suddenly and I requested the authorised service center to take a look & repair it. It was for the second time in about six months that my TV had broken down (I purchased the TV sometime in November 2005). I requested that since the TV has broken down twice in such a short period of time, that the labour charge should be waived and I was happy to know that Philips graciously accepted my request.

It has been more than 3 weeks now that my TV is out for repair. The authorised service center tried to fix it once, but it did not was correct totally and then he took it back. In his words, "The meters are showing that something is wrong, but we can't figure it out." Today I called the Service center and requested them, what seems reasonable to me, to replace the TV as it is taking way too long to repair it. Not only was I met with resistance and reluctance, I was quoted a string of policies which they said prevented them from complying to my request. Their demeanour was just short of hostile. I was told to wait till the time somebody decides that the TV is irreparable, even if it takes forever. They did not say it explicitly, but that's what they meant.

Without taking any names (I am sure they were just doing their jobs), I would like to request you to see what you can do in my case. My reference number with Philips service center is 3387C. The model number of my TV is 27PT5445/37 and the serial number is YA1A0535037349

Just to add a piece of trivia, I have worked for Philips for the first 4 years of my professional life and have seen how things work from the inside.

Although not really hopeful that this email will elicit any favourable response, I am writing to you just to let you know that such practices do not inspire consumer confidence, and at times when the market is open to competition and better quality of products and service.

Best regards,
Mukul Dharwadkar

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I am still waiting for response from Philips. But one thing is guaranteed. I am never buying a Philips product again and will tell my friends and families as well.

Since morning today I have been having trouble in getting to my Yahoo! email. Not that there is anything critical I am expecting or have to send (I have other email addresses which I can use to send), but not being able to check email is one of the most frustrating things in modern life. Even though I get mostly junk emails (nobody writes to me!!! ^_--) but still...

At this point I am not sure whether Yahoo! is a victim of a DoS attack or simply their servers have gone down big time. I first tried it before I left for work at around 7:45 am and it was not working as it is still down even as I write. Yahoo! home page is working, so I suppose that it is just the email and IM servers are experiencing problems. I tried other services, like maps and they are working. Apparently anything that needs login is not working (though Yahoo! photos loaded fine albeit slowly).

In today's time when freebies are everywhere I am not sure that Yahoo! can really afford to keep their servers and services down for so long. Or maybe they have not noticed it yet. Then that would be even more dangerous.

Every so often there goes around a rumour that because of high activity or inactivity the service provider will delete accounts or stop the service from remaining free and urges the recipients to forward the message the everyone in their address books to ensure that their profile is not deleted or to ensure that the service remains free.

I have seen this happen on Yahoo! messenger and now I am seeing this happen on Orkut. This is so naive that I almost end up smiling sardonically at the naivete' of the people forwarding these messages. No service provider will delete profiles just like that or stop the service from remaining free. This is a very harmless prank at best or a way to harvest email addresses at its worst to sell to spammers.

The Orkut rumour started sometime in March / April and Orkut acknowledged the prank and issued a statement to that effect in their news section. Still the message are making rounds and I wonder how many more messages I will get...

Firefox was known to use up more memory than IE, especially if you opened a lot of tabs at the same time. But suddenly it now acting as a memory hog (at least on my computer) with the memory utilization going as high as 260MB with just 4 tabs open and funny thing is it does not go down if I close all but one tab. It acts like a runaway process and keeps on eating up memory and CPU till the time it becomes unusable. I then have to close the window and open a new session for my PC to be usable again.

Is this a vulnerability in Firefox that could be exploited I know not. I am not an expert in reading code and finding out bugs, but I know enough to identify a problem when I see one. I intend to submit this to the maintainers of Firefox after I do a little bit more research to ascertain that it is not a problem with my computer.

I was browsing the internet over the weekend and logged on to Yahoo! mail site to check my email. Instead of getting the regular website I was redirected to another Yahoo website (https://protect.login.yahoo.com/login/set_pref/) which prompted me to create my own digital seal for my computer to discourage / prevent phishing attacks.

You have an option to create a text based seal or you can upload your favorite image to create the seal. Another interesting fact is that this seal is computer and browser specific. So if you use multiple computers and multiple browsers like I do, you will have to create it for each one of them.

I think this is an excellent step that Yahoo! has taken in addition to their new look Outlookish mail client beta which I will write about in a later post. At this point Yahoo! does not guarantee that their service is fool-proof and is still in testing phase. All the same it is a very good starting point.

Having said that, I would rather have that the financial services organisations (both banking and non-banking) should do a similar kind of initiative on their websites. This idea has not been validated yet, but it seems to me that this is a very good and cost effective way to thwart phishing and identity theft scams as compared to some of the schemes like two factor authentication using a hardware token.