I figued that out last night and removed the code. gah. I'm trying out Google Analytics now. I'm not sure about it so if anyone has any suggestions for a replacement?
Thanks TMB 
I meant "I figured"... arrrrgh.
Once again, I thank the gods I use a Mac. 
Nice one, Minstrel Boy. That's a clearer explanation than anywhere else I've seen on the net.
Thank goodness I use Firefox (on Linux at home).
As for the conspiracy theory, I call bullshit. Spooks who can crack the latest encryption are going to be stymied by ill formed HTML that can be read by IE??? And that the open sourced platform is the Trojan to implement their evil plans. I didn't know that enough crack existed to foster such a world view!
i always find it hard to imagine an intricate and vast conspiracy when plain old sloppy and dumbass will explain things nicely.
i call that one "mortimer snurd's razor."
I don't know where this guy gets what he smokes, but I'm not sure I want some.
I know that guy.. The Dark One.
I shall follow the link.
Good evening, Minstrel Boy, and thank you for the acknowledgment.
I am glad I didn't flog out the details about scripts in "child" parts of the "body" of the code, or I would have gotten a lot more D-HUH? types of comments.
As it is, I am pleasantly surprised that only a few of the FireFox fans took umbrage. That's good news. Although I shan't make a big conspiracy theory-sounding issue of W3C, some background materials might help:
From Forbes.com, a little mention of how W3C makes data aggregation easier: Privacy Initiative May Work — In Reverse
From TRIBE.ca, a mention of mass data harvesting, social networking, and the "semantic web championed by... W3C": Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites
And finally, one more little conspiracy theory tidbit from WorldNetDaily: Pentagon's NSA sets sights on social-network websites
— Feds funding research into mass harvesting
If I'm not mistaken, this last one mentions the folks reading papers at W3C symposiums who are on the NSA payroll.
Sweet.
Get yourself some of that good ol' FireFox, and be sure to demand that every Website is Strict 1.0 so Mozilla-based browsers will give 'em all a big hug.
Remember: Compliance is the first step to obedience; and obedience is what the New American Century is all about.
So much for the conspiracy theory stuff tonight. That should be enough to get the reality-based folks to form a conga line to the pillory festival. We have a few here who even go so far as to attribute drug abuse to those they think are their lessers. That's pretty cool, considering that, if they really are, themselves, users, they can stagger around here in the 21st Century while those at whom they sneer keep their wits about them and their heads down.
The Dark Wraith was just passing through and thought this looked like a fun place to stop for a burger and fries.
Seems to be okay now. I just reinstalled the same code and no more problems. yay.
well if i was organising a consipiracy to collect data on every web user, i would totally start with a browser used by 20% of web users that lets people see its code.
i certainly wouldn't go with a browser used by nearly 80% of people that's built by a company which holds numerous govt. contracts, has cozy links with the same govt. and hides what it does with an obsessive secrecy only on a level with its penchant for leaving back doors in its products.
this IE fix worked for me:
Click on the menu Tools -> Internet Options.
Click on the tab Security.
Click on the icon Restricted Sites.
Click on the button Sites.
Under Add this website to the zone:
Type the text ‘*.sitemeter.com’ (without quotes).
Click the Add button. Click Close. Click OK.
But then I don't have a website and just want the damn pages to open.
Next time I waste hours of my life hacking HTML and CSS because IE has piss-poor implementation of standards that the rest of the world has no trouble figuring out, I guess I'll be glad that it is fighting the power.
When the government has its own secret office in the telecom building, worrying and spreading FUD about browser standards is missing the point about as far as possible.
At least e-mail clients are still like the good old days, where every one of them is poorly documented with widely varying support of well-established protocols. Mobile phones are a crapshoot as well. But hey, they are confusing spiders with their mangled code.
Dark Knight:
Ok, I call bullshit, and blatant stupidity.
While I am terrified of total information awareness as much as anybody, the concept that trivial obfuscation of HTML is going to thwart the guys at the NSA is blatantly ludicrous. This is on par with stating that if you speak in pig latin (or bad grammar) wiretappers won't be able to intercept your conversations, or that if you use the Dewey Decimal system instead of the Library of Congress the feds will be hopelessly confused on tracking library loans.
If google can crack poorly formed HTML so can the NSA. As for the concept that using Microsoft products to evade government surveillance, that doesn't even pass the laugh test. Between the amount of money Microsoft gets from the government and the number of back doors in MS products, the likelihood that MS code protects privacy is nil.
There are plenty of internet technologies that probably give the NSA fits, darknets, backchannel signaling etc. Poorly formed but still readable plaintext implementation of a protocol meant to communicate and index openly available information isn't one of them.
Good evening, SteveK.
Spare me your pseudo-intellectual "analysis." Personally, I don't care what you call, and I suppose I really shouldn't be concerned about this, "Yer either for FireFox, or yer ag'in all of us here enlightened types." I swear, you and a couple others here have taken your "logic" straight out of the George W. Bush Guide to Post-Lobotomy Reactionism.
I want you to pinpoint exactly where I made any statement whatsoever that was favorable to Microsoft. If you would bother to read my articles before spouting off, you would find that I have referred to Bill Gates and Microsoft in terms that would qualify as defamation and injurious falsehoods (see, for example, Bill Gates and 'Creative Capitalism'") were I not referencing documented findings of fact from evidence in United States v. Microsoft.
Yes, I teach Business Law, as well as economics, managerial finance, and even computer software skills classes, among other things. (Care to swing yours at me like you have something to swing, or would you like to play nice and lay off the butch talk in your opening statements?)
Embracing a lousy browser, some of whose "developers" are documented NSA consultants, is nothing more than proof of the endurance of adolescent rebelliousness. Alternative browsers are just another siren song for the disaffected. So-called "progressives" are suckers for this sales pitch in precisely the same way that far too many people who have no excuse to be dense embrace Democrats because "they ain't Republicans."
Yes, "Get FireFox!"
Yes, "Obama for America!"
Yes, "Pelosi for House Speaker!"
Yes, "Go Fitzy!"
The list goes on and on. Stand up for the alternative to Brand X; instead, "Buy Brand X, Service Pack 1! You'll be a real radical, then!"
We live in a time much like a house of mirrors. Everywhere we turn, we hope to see something other than another distortion, but each time, we are disappointed to find that we are seeing, at best, nothing but a tormented shadow of ourselves and, at worst, a passing shade of something much worse.
Is there a way out? Probably not. In that grim prospect, then, is the solution, though: simply be wise in choosing which mirror is the truth. It will be a lie, but it will be the lie you have chosen of free will.
The Dark Wraith has given enough time to this subject, now.
How do you feel about people who refer to themselves in the third person? Jes wonderin' ...
Sigh.
Just before the drivebys, I had added Dark Wraith's blog to my list of reads.
He had a rant about lies earlier in the main page which stuck some chords. Not too many people have got to the point of asking why it's wrong. Same as with nearly every other "moral" or "ethical" issue; you either believe your personal authorities or you don't.
Not good enough. Never good enough.
But when I add en-passant sneering to conspiracy theory, the resulting sum tells me enough. Not anything complete and conclusive, but enough to work with.
Time to correct the initial bad judgment and snip that tab. Firefox on this machine is sucking up too much memory and CPU as it is.
I just went to his site.
Hoo boy. The Dark Wraith needs to up his meds - consider them a bug fix for the human tendency to see patterns where ther are none.
Dark Wraith:
Facts, Mr. Hart, I want facts!
I teach Business Law, as well as economics, managerial finance, and even computer software skills classes...Care to swing yours at me like you have something to swing, or would you like to play nice and lay off the butch talk in your opening statements?
How's a Ph.D in Physics (My dissertation was in the use of single photon optical computers for quantum computing. Basically a practical implementation of Caulfield and Shamir's Wave Particle Duality concept. Oh, and it made heavy use of Galois Field Arithmetic. 'nuff said) and a bachelor's in Computer Science. Combine that with Principal Investigator on 34 federal contracts related to optics and computation over my career including wireless security via spatial diversity, quantum encryption, and high compression transcontinental video links. I've been known to write arbitrary precision Maximal Length Shift Register implementations off the top of my head in Postscript (imagesetting service bureaus fear me). Suffice it to say I'm reasonably conversant with some pretty spooky shit. I'm not Bruce Schneier. but I could have a reasonably intelligent conversation with him.
As a result I can understand the potential NSA backdoors shot though Microsoft products. I also have my doubts as to whether the Debian SSH bug was an error.
(Continued)
(Continued)
But I don't need to refer to anything higher than high school logic classes to make my argument.
HTML is a machine readable protocol for the plaintext transmission and indexing of information. It's sole purpose is to present information to be searched and indexed and consolidated by computers. If you put information on the web in plaintext HTML the automatic assumption is that it will be scraped and searched by everybody NSA, Google, Script Kiddies, botnets, Chinese Intelligence. Most web sites specifically endeavor to make their information more searchable via SEO so as to catch Googles eye. If it can't be parsed by a reasonably simple browser it's a broken web page.
The IE dialect is an annoying variant of the W3C standard, it's not even obfuscated, It's just deliberately nonstandard in the same fashion as most MS products. It is readily parsed by both IE and a variety of open source code. It can literally be read by any n00b with a copy of Windows. Since 73% of users still use IE most websites are reasonably compliant with this dialect. Google has no problem scraping such sites.
Now the dudes at Fort Meade can crack most codes without breaking a sweat, they probably can do reasonably good natural language recognition in Chinese and Arabic dialects in slang (better than google translate). They do massive data mining and network analysis on encrypted traffic. They not only have the source to IE but have known backdoors installed.
Now how on earth could the IE dialect of HTML constitute more of an annoyance to the spooks than a speed bump would to an M-1 tank? And if it did, would they leave any fingerprints much less have a public acknowledged presence?
Also keep in mind that one of the primary acknowledged missions of the intelligence community is to go through publicly available information to develop baseline intelligence on topics as well as infer sensitive content based on correlations of such information and gaps thereof.
Dark Wraith,
maybe you should come in and get to know people first when you enter their living room, rather than come in swinging.
And generally starting off a relationship with a bunch of progressive blogosphere types by comparing them to george bush is not the best policy.
Might be nicer to hang out for a while, see what is going on, get to know a few folks before you spaz out.
Good afternoon, the littlest hussein gator.
First, at the very least, you didn't spit venom at me to begin your comment. Second, however, if you will go back and review the history of this thread, you will see that I was attacked before I even commented, and the attack came because I dared to mention in a series of possibilities one that just didn't sit well with a few commenters.
I've been in the Blogosphere and its message board predecessors longer than most people here have, and I was writing code quite literally before most of the people here were even born. I watched one of the most remarkable, exciting expressions of freedom since the printing press become a profoundly effective instrument whereby vicious people became frightening monsters and mobs, and now I am watching the marvels of this technology become the point of phenomenally pervasive control by a government that always was, at its heart, repressive but never had anything other than blunt, face-to-face power to do its dirty work of control.
Now, that same Internet that once promised to open the world to its peoples has become something that offers more perils as an invitation to a degraded future (to use writer Jonathan Schell's term) than a gateway to personal freedom.
Suffer me another point before I quit this place. Most blogs attract a variety of readers, and more than a few of those sites have a character in their clientèle that expresses itself in the most vociferous of members. That does not mean everyone who attends a given blog is of the nature of the dominant commenters, but it does indicate the tendency of the Webmaster to allow—indeed, to encourage—a certain mindset. SteveK starts his first communication to me by using an ad hominem distortion of the name under which for years I have written and published. Another commenter accuses me of drug abuse. Yet another implies that I am mentally ill, this last one being the degrading epithet inventory of choice for some so-called "progressives" who want to be cruel but must use invective other than the ugliness from my day wherein hate was communicated through filthy racial epithets and accusations of homosexuality. Now, it is okay for "progressives" to spew hate as long as they do it with accusations of drug abuse, mental illness, or some other in-style message.
That some "progressives," here, including you, imagine that this is somehow different from and better than the hate speech that flows from the Right is indicative: the Left has every bit as much of a problem with Right-wing Authoritarian Followers and Social Dominance-Oriented individuals, as those terms are set forth and elucidated by Dr. Robert Altemeyer in his ground-breaking book, The Authoritarians. Trivial evidence comes from this place; much more compelling evidence comes in the utter blindness with which Barack Obama's followers decline the mounting evidence that this aspirant to the throne of failed Empire is every bit a chameleon who has already sold us out:
• He voted to continue the wreckage of our Fourth Amendment rights by voting for the revised FISA;
• he pandered to the Religious Right by promising more "faith-based initiatives" contrary to express prohibition in the First Amendment;
• he groveled to the warhawks in Israel by supporting the IDF's provocative military exercises in preparation for an attack against Iran while, just days later, he condemned Iran for testing one of its miserable Shahab 3 missiles that couldn't hit the broad side of a barn;
• he has made an economic adviser of a leading "globalist" from the Clinton Administration, thereby signaling his utter ignorance of just how profoundly that free trade mentality has wrecked our nation by wiping out tens of millions of American jobs and hundreds of billions of dollars in American industrial capital;
• and, as if all of that weren't enough, he has even gone so far as to give some degree of praise and support to Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, who has turned the Federal Reserve into the Republicans' personal money printing machine and thereby ensured a coming inflation of debilitating proportions.
Is this the best the Democrats can offer?
Is Nancy Pelosi the Democrats' best, the individual who has blocked impeachment of George W. Bush in the House in part because she, herself, was briefed on and encouraged U.S. torture of "enemy combatants in 2002?
Is Harry Reid the Democrats' best, the person who cannot find within himself the guts to use parliamentary power to crush the bleating, obstructionist Republicans?
Dear God. This isn't "progressivism"; it's more of the same, and all I find here willing to respond are those who decline the shining invitation to call out the lies that have become the core modus operandi of our entire government in both its ruling and oppositional forms.
All I find here are reactionaries ready to hurl nastiness at anyone who dares to even so much as suggest that the world isn't as clear-cut as the so-called "intelligentsia" of the Left thinks. That elitism is disgraceful, whether is comes from the Religious Right, the globalist-corporatists, the mainstream media, or the Leftist intelligentsia.
I have my own Websites and my own clientèle. Many of those readers have been with me long enough to understand exactly what I am doing and how my work is the very expression of radical thought provocation. This place, on the other hand, is being run by commenting bullies who think they can attack people with impunity, brag about their degrees (in response to my citation of my experience), and claim great insight when they spend less than five minutes at my blog (in the case of one commenter here) and think they know enough to smear years of my work product.
More power to them: they are, of course, the future, degraded as it will be in the thrall of the Right and the Left trying their respective bests to sweep away anything they don't want on their lousy battlefield of ideologues.
The Dark Wraith needs to get back to work, now.
I like this Dark Wraith guy.
One interaction, one thread. and yet you make broad sweeping comments about all of us and this blog.
Both you and steveK were too quick to judgement. But you were new, so I thought perhaps you should give some time and some reasoned argument. Before dismissing us all as beneath you in some way.
I find the best way to interact and get your point across is through reasoned, non-name calling discussion. Not name calling and poison keyboard flailing.
but maybe that's just me.
PS. no one here thinks that Nancy, Harry, Or Barack are the progressives that we need. But improvement comes in steps- and I for one will not throw out the possible for the sake of the perfect which does not exist.
DR - You forgot to include how many wars Barack Hussein Obama has started and how many of our troops have died in them. Oh, and you can tot up how many innocent civilians he's killed as well.
There is but ONE thing to do right now and that is get the people in power OUT of power, including the lie teller MSM media.
And if you think I'm going to let that man who took a shotgun blast to his chest to protect other human beings in the face of the righty created hatred die in vain, then think on that some more. As far as I'm concerned, there's not enough playing of the bullshit card going on and there hasn't been for awhile. Get used to it.
So, with that, I'll let The Dark Wraith get back to your Darkness and the "staying of the course".
The Myrtle Hussein June will continue to stand in the Light with no fear of the purveyors of pissy petulance. Deal with it.
Dark Wraith:
Frankly the Dark Knight bit simply was a brain fart, given the endless Batman promos.
Coding since before I was born? Hardly, I was coding Waterloo Fortran IV (WATFOR) on 370s in the mid-late 70's. While I never got to work on an Altair, I logged huge amounts of time on Sol-80s, Northstars, PDP-11s, Apple ][s, Trash-80s you name it. I've done batch programming w/ Hollerith cards or punch tape on ASR-34's. I've programmed in Linux since Kernel 0.98.1. And I met Grace Murray Hopper in person back when she was still a Captain and got a nano-second from her. I'm proficient with everything from Fortran IV, APL, LISP all the way to Cg, and Python. What's your first system and language? If it wasn't Fortran II on something with tubes you don't predate me although quite a few folks on this site do.
I notice that you didn't manage to "swing yours at me like you have something to swing" Can't raise me a J.D. to counter my Ph.D. in physics? Can't muster a CS degree? an EE degree? Any publications (conference proceedings will do)? Any Patents (2 in my name so far). Hell, my beard is even cooler than yours. Come on, you were going to swing something to bring me down a notch. I don't see much angular momentum, or moment arm for that manner.
By the way, what's all this "swinging it" and "butch" talk from someone claiming that he's receiving homophobic slurs. Frankly, I'm not at all "Butch" and will be heading home shortly to watch "Maria Watches over Us" a nice shojo yuri anime, just because I'm out of Strawberry Panic to watch.
You still haven't managed to answer a single question (much less a technical question) I or the rest of the thread have posed. Specifically, how is the presence of a readily parsed variant of an explicitly machine readable, plain text "Document description and processing language" as the ISO/IEC 15445:2000(E) standard defines HTML constitutes a hindrance to the NSA much less Google or even a script kiddie n00b.
All your responses have alternated between decrying the terrible wrongs you have faced at our hands, and laughable attempts at intimidating us w/ your 1337 H4X0R skills, which are quite laughable by the standards of many posters here.
So why not use a scintilla of that mighty dispassionate intellect and answer the questions (I bolded them for you) in specific technical terms w/ references. Shame and humilliate this stupid old Ph.D.
(Apologies in advance to littest hussein gator and Minstrel Boy for feeding the n00b troll, but even wraiths should learn not to meddle in the affairs of wizards for the are subtle and quick to anger. And I'm putting on my robe and wizard hat...[NSFWraiths])
I shouldn't have come back here, but I was kind of hoping SteveK had a more civil side.
I was right... I think. Almost. For a moment. Until he got wound up.
That's okay. Passionate people speak passionately. Maybe there's even a conspiracy theoriest somewhere in there just dying to get out and scream, "9-11 was an inside job! Aliens are visiting the Earth! The Bilderberg Group is taking over the world! FEMA is building huge concentration camps all over the country! Barack Obama is the Anti-Christ! Dennis Kucinich is the only person in Congress who isn't a clone!"
Okay, strike that last one. I'm sure there are other people in Congress who aren't clones, too.
Where was I? Oh, yes, you started in about computer languages.
My first computer "language"? Machine. That's how we started; and, no, machine language isn't a computer "language" in the modern sense. Getting to assembly level was hard-core stuff, and writing decks was cool, although I never got the hang of JCL the way some of my fellow code jockeys did: I suspect they not only prioritized their own stuff while I was standing around waiting hours for my print-outs, but they probably could have redirected their output to the office of the President of the United States.
Decks were fun, though. Re-arranging someone's cards while he wasn't looking got all kinds of excitement started.
First high-level language? FORTRAN 77 (okay, 66), which was how we numerically iterated for solutions to systems of stochastic partial differential equations back in the early days of using the Black-Scholes Options Pricing Model to treat stocks, bonds, insurance, and other securities as call and put options, which was a deep revolution in understanding the price dynamics of financial instruments as nothing more than variations on principles of physics.
First "internet" language? SGML. That's what the original EDGAR filing system of the Securities and Exchange Commission used, back when I made money as a business consultant and EDGAR filing agent. I'm sure it still works like that, now, but once the system went from DOS-based to some Windows contraption, I'd had enough.
Yes, SteveK, you sound like you come from about my era, although it sounds like you hit the scene just a little later, and you appear to have taken a somewhat higher road than I did.
I got dispirited by the way Microsoft started destroying the Wild West environment that had been deterring the common folk from overrunning the world of all things computer-related; but, at the same time, I saw some of the hard-core, really alienated quant jocks who started hacking and cracking and writing viruses, bombs, trojans, and assorted other bad stuff just to wreck things, and that wasn't particularly cool, either, although I'll admit that breaking into companies' computers must have been a real rush (not that I, myself, ever got into that).
That's all over, now, SteveK. Way too many people have computers if you ask me; and I've even noticed that they've made ARPANET into something called the "Internet" that people can get right on those home computers of theirs. Next thing you know, someone's going to tell me that Digital Research DOS 6.0 (or its successor, Novell DOS 7.0) is no longer being sold in stores.
(Lord, please let some humorless dolt here have a witless comment about that last paragraph.)
Anyway, SteveK, you are showing signs of starting out conversations a bit less aggressively (although you needn't use the <b>bold-face</b> type: I might be getting old, but I can still hear, fer cryin' out loud... and, yes, that exposed mark-up trick back there was deliberate); however, I really have to get back to work at my own Websites.
One of my specialties is graphics, and I'm working on one right now. I am most certain the small core of party animals here who have made this place such a lovely visit for me will get every bit as upset by it as the Republicans will. Unfortunately, the old GOP crowd is so demoralized these days that it's almost no fun to poke their carcass anymore. Fortunately, now I've got the Obamabots.
The Lord provides.
The Dark Wraith honestly and earnestly wishes you a good journey, SteveK.
Dark Wraith:
Melowing out on some wine and anime. Frankly I always thing the I'm putting on my robe and wizard hat line was good for a laugh. If I bump into you at Siggraph, lets have a beer.
But I still never got an answer to my question...
But I still never got an answer to my question...
You won't.
But then, I doubt that you were really expecting any.
a political/computer security discuession and i missed it...damm me and my instance on computer free weekends.
Dark Wraith: while i like tin foil hats as much as the next guy...and on occasion have been know to spout off erisian crap, not every thign has a dark conspericy bent.
espicaly when dealign with microsoft never atribute to malice what can be explained by incompitance.
this one is easy either
A) Microsofts source controll is questionable and an old bug snuck in on this patch(likly)
or
B) MS "fixed" the bug by fixing a spacific symptom instead of the underlying issue, this is jsut a vector they didnt' think of when applyign the baindaid.(the most likly IMHO, as they have pulled that type of sunt before...code red fix anyone?)
oh and I still use links.
emachs or VI? (ya jsut tryign to start a diffrent hoy lwar im a pico guy myself...never much of a *nix guy though)
EMACS!!!!! VI sucks
Damn.
Another devotee of the Cult of Emacs. LOL.
I thought I was just about the last one left.
But seriously, emacs has been a "must install" in every Windows box I've used for the last 6 years.
You don't need fracking Visual Basic to do your one-off scripting. The macro capabilities are literally right under your fingertips.
For those of you who are interested, look in ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/windows/. There will be several zip files there. The one you want is the largest one, emacs-22.2-bin-i386.zip. It weighs in at somewhere around 37 MB.
For those of you who are grappling with introductory Linux, copious use of "Esc-x shell" in emacs, together with keystroke macros, can smooth out the Unix scripting learning curve quite a bit. I know this because it did so for me, more than 20 years ago.
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